Unrepresentative Space Battles: EVE's Fanfest 2014 Trailer

EVE Online rewards a strong imagination, spinning daring operations, epic wars, and great empires out of spreadsheets, virtual land deeds, and battles slowed to 10% of real-time to save server resources. To stoke these dreams, each year at the EVE Fanfest CCP show a cinematic trailer with a vision of things to come. They're pretty, exciting, and nothing like EVE will ever be.

This year's trailer brings the three EVE games together into one giant battle, with intergalactic scheming and capital ships from EVE Online, the dogfighting of EVE: Valkyrie, and shooty soldier action from Project: Legion. Watching several minutes of spaceships is certainly pleasant, but no, nothing like the game. Though it does hint at a potential big change coming: player-built stargates.

EVE Online's world is built of solar systems connected by stargates, see, with the routes all well-mapped and highly militarised. CCP hint that these new player-built gates could jump into new and unseen areas of space, though as this is all only teasing, who knows--perhaps they'll even reshape the galaxy as we know it. It'd reflect EVE's current theme of players wrestling power away from the old empires and factions, continuing the work of the Rubicon expansion with its player-run customs offices and temporary structures. Either way, it'd doubtless fuel EVE's chief export: cool stories for the enjoyment of people who adore the concept of EVE but never want to play it ever.

CCP have spoken before about dreams of letting players build their own gates, and presumably this tease means they're getting closer, but what'll actually come of this and when is still a mystery. Which means we're stuck watching a pretty space battle for now. That's okay too, I guess.