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EVE Evolved: Ten years of EVE Online
Tomorrow marks a huge milestone in MMO history as sci-fi sandbox EVE Online officially turns ten years old. Released by a tiny icelandic development studio whose only previous release was a board game featuring Reykjavik's favourite cross-dressing mayor, EVE has slowly grown over the past decade to become one of the industry's biggest and most stable subscription titles. Following 2011's monoclegate scandal that led to around 8% of players quitting and CCP Games shedding 20% of its employees, this year saw EVE Online climb to new heights as it regained the playerbase's confidence and smashed the 500,000 subscriber barrier. As a special side-note, the EVE Evolved column also turned five years old last week; it has now officially been running for over half of EVE's lifetime. The past year has been remarkably successful for CCP, with both of the year's EVE expansions being extremely well received and console MMOFPS DUST 514 finally starting to take shape. The Inferno and Retribution expansions fixed a staggering number of small issues that were broken in the game while also making big changes to bounty-hunting, piracy, and PvP across the board. We also saw huge emergent events like the Battle of Asakai, a $6,000 ship kill, and the five trillion ISK faction warfare exploit this year. With DUST 514 officially launching in just over a week on May 14th and players fired up about the upcoming Odyssey expansion, the future's looking bright for EVE Online as it heads into its second decade. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look back at some of year's top EVE stories, stories that touched real life, and what the future holds for EVE's second decade.
True stories of EVE Online to become comic book and TV series
The CCP Presents Keynote at the annual EVE Online Fanfest is usually a fairly tame retrospective on how CCP has a company has done the past year and where it's going in the future, but for EVE's tenth anniversary, CCP broke out the big guns. In addition to announcing a massive new collector's edition, the studio has also revealed plans to turn real stories of events inside the sandbox into professional comic books and even a TV series. Industry giant Dark Horse Comics, the company responsible for comics like Hellboy and Sin City, will be publishing the 54-page graphic novel this winter in both a paid-for print form and a free digital download. For the lore buffs among us, Dark Horse will also be producing a colossal 184-page glossy colour hardback book covering all of the NPC backstory and lore behind EVE Online and DUST 514. Titled EVE Source, the book will be an in-character almanac of everything in the EVE setting that isn't player-created and will even include previously unreleased concept art.
