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EVE Evolved: Making ISK from the Crius release
EVE Online's economy has been studied over the years for its resemblance to the real world, and it is often cited as an example of a hyper-capitalist society with no laws or regulation. But underneath the emergent interplay of supply and demand that has fueled everything from freighter businesses to virtual investment banks, EVE is ultimately a game. The biggest influence on the markets by far has always been CCP Games and the changes it deploys in expansions, which shake the universe up and force players to adapt to new circumstances. There's always money to be made from major gameplay changes, and accurately predicting how an expansion will impact on the market can put you on the head of a short-lived but very lucrative gold rush. Though EVE's updates now come in the form of ten smaller releases per year, the upcoming Crius release scheduled for July 22nd has practically a whole expansion's worth of changes to industry and research. That gives you just over two weeks to prepare for the change, train any skills you might need, and figure out how to cash in on EVE's industrial revolution. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I run down some tips for how to prepare for the upcoming industry revamp in Crius and make some ISK.
Gamescom 2013: In-depth looks at EverQuest Next and EQ Next: Landmark
SOE's David Georgeson walked Gamescom attendees through some of the finer points of both EverQuest Next and EverQuest Next: Landmark today, focusing on the emergent gameplay, destructible environments, and vast flexibility you'll potentially find in both halves of the game. Most of the information provided on EverQuest Next falls into the "things we already knew" category: The world is procedurally generated, destructible, tiered, and made of voxels. AI responds to your actions in lieu of sticking to specific spawn points; for example, Orcs will naturally search for areas with low guard patrols and high traffic so they can make the most of their thievery and will leave for greener pastures should you start making their work difficult by killing them or alerting guards. There were new details on Landmark, however (check out this great post from MJ to see what we knew before). You can choose between male and female heroes and will begin as an Adventurer class at one of the world's great landmarks. From there, you can adventure freely into the world, find a spot you like, and claim it as your own. Once your spot is claimed, you can build on it however you see fit or move on to claim other areas and link them all together.
Syndicate Wars successor Satellite Reign heads to Kickstarter
As expected, real-time strategy game Satellite Reign recently began its Kickstarter project, and will need £350,000 ($532,455) by July 28 to become a reality. Satellite Reign is a real-time strategy game that draws inspiration from Syndicate Wars, another tactical game developed in 1996 for PlayStation and DOS by 5 Lives lead Mike Diskett. The project boasts emergent gameplay within a "living metropolis," along with tactical combat driven by different character classes, weapons and augmentations. Satellite Reign's crowdfunding campaign is already off to a great start, as it has raised £95,474 ($145,244) thanks to 3,355 backers so far. The developer is looking to bring the game to Steam and GOG for PC, Mac and Linux, with DRM-free options being made available to all backers.
EVE Online smashes PCU record during anniversary celebrations
Sci-fi MMO EVE Online has seen phenomenal success recently, from breaking through the 500,000 subscriber boundary to successfully relaunching in China. The game officially turned ten years old today, and CCP celebrated the occasion with events and gifts for all current subcribers. The part-jovian Gnosis battlecruiser was given to every subscribed account at midnight last night and can be claimed before the end of the month, and players logging in yesterday or today will have found a whole slew of bonus gifts. EVE smashed its previous Peak Concurrent User total during the festivities by a clear margin, replacing 2011's record of 63,170 with a new figure of 65,303 players logged in simultaneously. Part of the reason for the record was the huge number of player-run events taking place that evening, such as the ever-popular Flight of a Thousand Rifters. The event saw almost 2,500 players join together to take down player Marlona Sky's expensive supercarrier. Most of the participants were in small frigates like Rifters and ended up being easy prey when a nullsec sniper Loki fleet turned up. The event was nevertheless a massive success and huge fun for those involved. Continue reading for a gallery of screenshots from the event and video footage from player Scott Manley.
Tattered Notebook: EQ Next and Storybricks, sitting in a tree...
OMG! It's EverQuest Next news! No, really. I'm not pulling your chain. It's all official and everything. Namaste Entertainment, the creator of Storybricks, made the announcement that it is collaborating with SOE on EQ Next. So go ahead and do your finally-some-news celebratory dance, I'll wait a moment. Just don't go all out and strain something; you'll want to be able to spring into celebration again when more is revealed, right? Sadly, the news is pretty much summed up right there in that one sentence; we don't have any more details to revel in and no time frame for getting more (well, other than SOE Live, of course!). But when has a lack of specifics derailed fan excitement about an upcoming game? Well we may not have definitive details, but using what we know about Storybricks, we can certainly speculate on what the relationship between the two means for Norrath's next incarnation. And if there was ever a relationship I was happy to see, it's Storybricks and EverQuest Next's.
The Tattered Notebook: Can EQ Next's housing measure up to EverQuest II's?
With last Wednesday's release of EverQuest II's latest prestige home, the totally awesome Hua Mein Retreat, I couldn't help but be focused on one of my favorite gaming features. I toured the new home, got to check out the break-out spots, and marveled at how pro SOE is with housing. Sure, there have been some misses when it comes to the prestige options, but things just keep getting better. Before long, my thoughts turned to the idea of housing in EverQuest Next. Obviously, I am excited to play EverQuest Next. How could I not be? This studio has cornered the market on the most fun classes I have ever played (Dancer, Disciple, Fury, and Shaman) and the best housing systems I've personally had the pleasure to delve into (Star Wars Galaxies, Vanguard, and EverQuest II). And now it's making another sandbox. But will EQN pull me permanently away from EQII, a game where I've earned my seven-year vet rewards? That, my friends, will depend in large part on the housing.
EVE Evolved: How would you build a sandbox?
Themepark MMOs and single-player games have long dominated the gaming landscape, a trend that currently seems to be giving way to a resurgence of sandbox titles. Though games like Fallout and the Elder Scrolls series have always championed sandbox gameplay, very few publishers seem willing to throw their weight behind open-world sci-fi games. Space simulator Elite was arguably the first open-world game in 1984, and EVE Online is currently closing in on a decade of runaway success, yet the gaming public's obsession with space exploration has remained relatively unsatisfied for years. Crowdsourced funding now allows gamers to cut the publishers out of the picture and fund game development directly. Space sandbox game Star Citizen is due to close up its crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter tomorrow night, adding over $1.6 million US to its privately crowdfunded $2.7 million. The creator of Elite has also launched his own campaign to fund a sequel, and even the practically vapourware sandbox MMO Infinity has announced plans to launch a campaign. While not all of these games will be MMOs, it may not be long before EVE Online has some serious competition. EVE can't really change much of its fundamental gameplay, but these new games are being built from scratch and can change all the rules. If you were making a new sandbox MMO from the ground up and could change anything at all, what would you do? In this week's EVE Evolved, I consider how I'd build a sandbox MMO from the ground up, what I'd take from EVE Online, and what I would change.
EVE Evolved: Top ten ganks, scams, heists and events
It's been called "boring," "confusing," and "the world's biggest spreadsheet," but every now and then a story emerges from sci-fi MMO EVE Online and grabs the gaming world's attention. Tales of massive thefts, colossal battles, high-value kills, record-breaking scams, political dirty deals, and controversial player-run events never fail to grip us. Perhaps it's the fact that these events have such huge impacts in the EVE sandbox that captures our imaginations, or maybe we just want to watch with morbid curiosity as a virtual society self-destructs. Whether it's innocent interest in quirky stories or a secret sense of schadenfreude that keeps us glued to EVE's most illicit events, the game continues to deliver them with startling regularity. Most scams, thefts, and high-profile battles will never make the news, instead becoming another forgotten part of EVE's history or just a story for a few friends to reminisce about. But those stories that do reach the news always draw in a huge audience that wouldn't play EVE in a million years but can't get enough of its engrossing stories. In this week's EVE Evolved, I run down a list of ten incredible EVE kills, scams, heists, and sandbox events that have made it into the news over the years.
Chaos Theory: Emergent futures for The Secret World
So the big news in the MMO industry this week is Sony Online Entertainment's philosophy shift toward emergent gameplay. It's kind of a crazy turn of events from my point of view. Sure, the company was responsible for the genre's premier sandbox (the dearly departed Star Wars Galaxies), but prior to that it was responsible for EverQuest, otherwise known as the granddaddy of the themepark. What does this have to do with The Secret World? Well, Funcom has also been making noises about emergent gameplay and paradigm shifts, and I'd like to speculate, prognosticate, and otherwise pontificate about that after the cut.
SOE Live 2012: John Smedley on EQ Next and SOE's future
There's been a never-ending news stream this weekend at SOE Live, and underlying all the announcements has been a single theme: a fundamental shift towards emergent gameplay. We had the chance to talk to SOE President John Smedley about that philosophical change and how it fits in to current and upcoming titles. He spoke about the growing popularity of MMOs as viewing entertainment and how it's caught on in PlanetSide 2. And while he wouldn't go into details about EQ Next, he did give some exciting hints about what players will get to experience with this third EverQuest title. Read on for a look at the future of SOE!
Morrison on system-driven MMOs and Funcom's future
Is the MMO genre poised to go back to its emergent future? It's very possible, particularly given recent big-budget disappointments. Funcom producer Craig Morrison tackles the subject head-on in a new interview at Gamasutra. Morrison cites system-driven games as the way forward, though he bristles at any mention of the terms "themepark" and "sandbox." "You need to build an ecosystem. You need to build a collaborative set of systems which give the players the ability to tell their own stories alongside yours," he says. Morrison also hints at the shape of potential Funcom projects. "We could make a great systems-driven MMO for 10 or 15 million dollars. Which by the standards of Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, The Old Republic, is a very small budget, but we could bring it to market in three years with that kind of budget and hopefully have a chance of them growing organically from there. And we haven't got the huge expectation of, 'Oh my God, you spent 50, 100, 200 million dollars on this game, and it has to succeed,'" he explains.
GDC Online 2012: John Smedley's keynote on MMO trends and the future of gaming
At GDC Online this week, SOE President John Smedley gave a keynote address titled Free-to-play: Driving the Future of MMOs. In it, he explains SOE's (and other studios') shift toward a free-to-play model lets MMOs keep up with an ever-changing industry. But the talk actually went beyond the notion of free-to-play and into the larger picture of how SOE is reinventing its games to include more emergent gameplay and take advantage of new trends in media. Read on for a broad look at the past decade of trends in the industry and a glimpse of what the future holds for SOE titles.
GDC Online 2012: CCP on keeping players cheaply
Sandboxes get a lot of flak in today's themepark-dominated MMO industry. That said, sandbox developers who do it right will be laughing all the way to bank, according to CCP senior designer Matthew Woodward. Woodward recently gave a talk at GDC Online titled The Other White Meat: Design Architecture for Sandbox Games. The presentation focused on the three pillars used by the firm to power its long-running EVE Online MMORPG. Woodward stressed social aspects, goals and goal-driven players, and most importantly, emergent gameplay. "The big win is that emergence is cheap. A lot of emergent gameplay discussion is about the One Big Moment. In EVE, the big heist that happened six years ago, in Ultima Online, the assassination of Lord British," Woodward explained. "If you do this well, people will play your game forever. People will pay for it forever." Massively sent two plucky game journalists -- Beau Hindman and Karen Bryan -- to Austin, Texas, for this year's GDC Online, where they'll be reporting back on MMO trends, community theory, old favorites, and new classics. Stay tuned for even more highlights from the show!
Why I Play: EVE Online
Sci-fi MMO EVE Online is possibly the most polarising online game in existence. It has some of the genre's most loyal fans and spawns some of its biggest news stories, but most people just can't stand the user interface and gameplay. It's been called boring, overcomplicated, and a griefer's paradise, but even those who don't play it often still watch from the sidelines as each insane story of theft or corruption emerges from the sandbox. Most games can only keep my attention for a few months at a time, but somehow I've played EVE for over eight and a half years. I've heard it said that EVE is a long-term commitment, a statement I find hard to argue with as at only 26 years old I've been playing EVE almost continuously for a third of my life. It's not just been a game to me; at times it's been a way of life, a refuge from stress, a way to stay in touch with friends, and even a place to learn skills that can apply to the real world. Thanks to Massively, my attachment to EVE has even grown from a hobby to a career in writing and games journalism. I've had numerous periods of low activity in EVE and even quit for months at a time, but something always brings me back to the world's biggest sci-fi sandbox. In this article, I look back at what drew me to EVE initially, some of the unusual factors that have kept me playing EVE over the past eight years, and the reason I'm still motivated to subscribe to this day.
Flameseeker Chronicles: Professions are like onions
We've previously talked about the fun results of interaction between Guild Wars 2's relatively simple elements. Emergent complexity is a driving force behind a lot of the depth in Guild Wars 2, as we examined in both the skill and dynamic event systems. This layered complexity also works to benefit professions: There are enough options and tools for fine-tuning your character that incredibly divergent uses of the same profession are possible. Professions have layers. The farther you progress with a given character, the more layers get added and the more you can do to specialize and fine-tune your style of play.
World of Darkness creative director talks design and the MMO mainstream
A new interview at Gamasutra posits that CCP is gunning for mainstream success with its upcoming World of Darkness MMO. The EVE Online developer has cornered what's left of the hardcore sandbox market, so now it's looking to marry EVE's emergent gameplay with more familiar MMO staples. "The way to drag people in will be traditional themepark-style PvE play. Once players get into the setting, they'll see the appeal of the sandbox play," says WoD creative director Reynir Hardarson. Despite the concessions to mainstream accessibility, EVE's influence on World of Darkness will be more than superficial. "The live-action roleplayers of the Vampire the Masquerade tabletop game play this way," Hardarson explains. "It's really about politics and power plays." Why don't more MMO developers try their hand at sandbox mechanics? Hardarson says designing for emergent play is difficult because you can't test it. It's worth it, though, because MMOs that hand-hold and limit players to a linear path miss the point. "I'm not a five-year-old. If I want to go in the cave and I want to die, that's my problem," Hardarson says.
Flameseeker Chronicles: Simplicity itself
ArenaNet is designing Guild Wars 2 to appeal to bucketloads of people. The studio's got the PvP and competition, the high-end dungeon challenge, the super-cooperative and dynamic PvE content, the compelling and branching storyline, the flashy (and occasionally sensibly flashy) armors -- there's a lot going on. Part of what makes that possible is the use of very approachable systems. These simple systems pop up all over the place: the straight-forward lists of boons and conditions that affect players, the common capture point mechanic over which more intricate PvP objectives can be layered, and the relatively small pool of skills from which to assemble a build. The beauty of their simplicity is that the simplicity itself isn't a limiting factor -- you can't do only simple things with them. In this way, simple systems have a low entry barrier and a high complexity capacity. That means that more people can enjoy the game with relatively little skill and that there's a lot of room for time, dedication, and finesse to lead to outstanding results. Anyone can play, but not everyone can (or will) master elements of the game.
Some Assembly Required: Salem dev talks permadeath, griefing, and skill-based gameplay
Hello, sandbox faithful, and welcome to a special interview edition of Some Assembly Required. We recently had a chance to pitch some questions to the team behind Seatribe's upcoming Salem title, and creative director Björn Johannessen was kind enough to answer them. Salem is being advertised by publisher Paradox as "the crafting MMO," but it's also rife with throw-back mechanics including a huge amount of player freedom and a permadeath/punishment system similar to the one in Johannessen's Haven & Hearth.
Some Assembly Required: Is the sandbox dead?
Let's face it, folks, 2011 has been a fairly bad year for sandbox MMORPGs. Whether we're talking about the premature (and, ahem, forced) demise of Star Wars Galaxies, EVE Online's public relations disasters and its capitulation to the cash-shop-in-a-sub-based game fad, or Earthrise's rough launch, there hasn't been a lot to celebrate for fans of non-linear MMO gameplay in quite a while. I've even had several friends ask me point blank: Is the sandbox dead? The short answer is not just no, but hell no. Join me after the cut for a few bright spots as we look to the future, take stock of the present, and try to forget about the past.
EVE Evolved: Emergence in the sandbox
We often hear about the amazing things players get up to in EVE Online, from full-scale political wars and massive heists to collaborative business ventures and high-profile kills. While we can all enjoy these tales of high-powered exploits from afar, they can be difficult to relate to the actual game experience. Most of us will never be the puppet master pulling the strings of alliance warfare or the mastermind of some great theft, but we don't have to be. Smaller examples of emergent and opportunistic gameplay exist all over EVE in the daily play of thousands of individuals. I've always thought of EVE less as a game and more as a giant social sandbox with spaceships -- a story about what people do when left alone in each other's company. Players naturally take on roles for which they have a strong aptitude, crafting completely new gameplay styles for themselves in the process. The entrepreneurs among us spy opportunities never imagined by the game's developers, tech-savvy individuals sell web-services, and artists craft propaganda for recruitment or a war on their enemy's morale. Countless players carve their own game out of the EVE universe, and there's no reason you can't be one of them. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at some of the unique gameplay experiences players have engineered for themselves over the years and the community that makes EVE what it is.
