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EVE Evolved: Odyssey 1.1 and PvP balance
It's been just under three months since EVE Online's exploration-focused Odyssey expansion went live, bringing in a new hacking minigame and significantly buffing the underused tier 1 and tier 2 battleships. With a complete rebalancing all of the tech 1 sub-capital ships now complete, CCP has turned its attention to some of the oldest tech 2 ships in the game: Heavy Assault Ships and Command Ships. Developers have been testing out changes to these ships on the test server and hitting up players for feedback since Odyssey went live, and the results are finally ready to deploy. Odyssey 1.1 will go live in two days time on September 3rd and contains some pretty big changes that are sure to shake up the PvP landscape. Medium-sized long-range weapons have been buffed beyond all recognition, and a buff to active tanking may soon make it viable in PvP. Heavy Assault Ships and Command Ships have been beefed up, the Dominix is getting a small nerf following its absolute dominance in the Alliance Tournament, and the Nosferatu energy vampire module may be about to make a return to PvP setups. In this week's EVE Evolved, I analyse the upcoming Odyssey 1.1 patch and what the new ship balance changes mean for the average player.
EVE Evolved: Making EVE beautiful
When it was released back in 2003, EVE Online was one of the most visually impressive games on the market. Over the coming years, the graphics aged gracefully next to competitors on the market and all seemed well. Nonetheless, CCP were not content to let their flagship game's graphics eventually go out of date. In true CCP style, they developed a long-term staged delivery plan for the complete overhaul of the game's graphics. The first stage of delivery came with the Trinity expansion, in which a premium client was launched with incredible high resolution ship models. This was just the first stage in a plan to keep EVE graphically ahead of any competitors. In this technical article, I look at the science of making EVE beautiful and examine CCP's plans for the future.
Old horror films and books: They won't stay dead!
Lest you forget the upcoming All Hallows' Eve holiday, The Moon Books Project has been posting horror-themed content almost every day, stacking its shelves with DS-compatible novels and movies. They're downloadable for free and completely legal, so you won't have to fear any threatening "I Know What You Downloaded Last Night" letters from the MPAA bogeymen. Already, the site has put up over a dozen classics like Nosferatu and Fall of the House of Usher. Even if you don't have the homebrew hardware and software (Moonshell) needed to view the files on your DS, you can still scare yourselves silly with iPod/PSP-formatted and streaming versions of Night of the Living Dead.
