ship-spinning
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Ship-spinning perfected: Hands-on with World of Warplanes' launch
On paper, World of Warplanes is a game I should love. I've been obsessed with World War II-era aviation since learning to walk, and Wargaming.net's free-to-play followup to World of Tanks oozes piston-powered familiarity like a radial engine oozes oil and sweet-smelling (per)fumes. Logging into a WoWP hangar is a nostalgic exercise in mid-20th century iconography, and for that reason alone it's hard to dislike it. I manage, though, because of the title's grindy progression and a design mandate that eschews traditional flight sim mechanics for arcade tropes aimed at gamers who wouldn't know an accelerated stall from a bathroom stall.
EVE Evolved: Everything there is to know about Crucible
This summer's lackluster Incarna expansion and the ensuing microtransaction drama took a massive toll on EVE Online's player community and development staff. Players were quitting in droves, and CCP eventually had to lay off 20% of its staff worldwide. Two years of half-implemented expansions, broken features, and "first steps" that were never iterated on left players begging for a content-heavy expansion like Apocrypha or those released in EVE's early years. EVE is known for being practically a new game every six months, but since the blockbuster Apocrypha expansion, daily life in New Eden hasn't changed much at all. To pull things back from the brink, CCP refocused development on EVE Online and gave developers a free pass to work on hundreds of small features and improvements. The company began flooding us with details on new ships, graphical updates, new gameplay mechanics, and desperately needed balance tweaks, and we loved every bit of it. Although it's mostly small features and gameplay tweaks, the Crucible expansion feels like a genuine rebirth for EVE Online. The types of changes made show that CCP knows exactly what players want from EVE and that the company is now willing to deliver it. With CCP's renewed focus on internet spaceships, the Crucible expansion feels like the start of a new era in the sandbox. In this week's EVE Evolved, I pull together everything there is to know about the Crucible expansion that went live this week, from its turbulent origins to the awesome features and PvP updates it contains.
Ship spinning returns to EVE Online
Everyone knows that internet spaceships are serious business. Relatively few, however, recognize the grave importance of EVE Online's late great ship spinning mechanic. Happily for the hardcore, those few include CCP developers, and as we mentioned a few weeks ago, one of New Eden's favorite pastimes is coming back from the dead. A new CCP dev blog spills the beans on the release date, and EVE vets will probably be thrilled to hear that ship-spinning is coming to the Singularity test shard today. The feature is tentatively scheduled to return to the Tranquility live server on October 18th during an extended downtime beginning at 11:00 UTC. CCP has also added the old hangar interface functionality back into the EVE client, and users with sub-optimal Incarna computer specs (or those who simply hate walking in stations) can opt to turn off the game's captain's quarters and party like it's 2010. A weekend discount on PLEX has also been announced.
EVE Evolved: Looking forward to the winter expansion
Since EVE Online's release in 2003, CCP Games has been the center of one of the most interesting success stories in the games industry. Produced by a tiny indie development studio on a frozen volcanic rock, EVE was the perfect example of how to do things right. The game's publishing deal with Simon & Schuster allowed CCP to buy back the rights to the game several months after its initial release. With no publisher taking a cut of the profits, CCP ploughed subscriptions back into the game's development and grew the development team organically. As a one-game company, CCP worked closely with players to make EVE the best game possible for its loyal playerbase. In a recent letter to the players, CCP CEO Hilmar laments that somewhere along the line, things changed for the worse. The CCP of today bears little resemblance to the "little indie studio that could" of 2003, not just housing over 600 employees in offices around the world but also developing upcoming MMOs DUST 514 and World of Darkness. Resources are spread thin, and EVE Online has suffered for it. Last month I looked back at the blockbuster Apocrypha expansion and asked why every expansion since then has cut down on the in-space development players want. Hilmar's letter and its accompanying devblog answered that question this week with a solid plan for iteration on flying in space features during the winter development period. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look forward to the winter expansion and explain why each of the issues being tackled in the coming expansion is a big deal to players.
EVE Evolved: Ship spinning and Incarna
Last week, EVE Online developer CCP Games released a devblog about an upcoming patch designed to re-introduce the ship hangar removed as part of the recent Incarna expansion. The old system involved docking into a ship hangar in which players can spin their ships around to look at them from any angle. With Incarna, the hangar was replaced by a new captain's quarters interface in which the player gets out of his ship and walks about his quarters in a full-body avatar of his character. Amidst a flood of complaints from players whose computers couldn't handle the Incarna environments, CCP reluctantly built a temporary disable switch into the system. Developers repeatedly stated that they had no intention of letting players opt out of Incarna forever as the company wants it to be a seamless part of the game world rather than a separate game in and of itself. The announcement of the ship hangar's return has effectively overturned that statement by giving players a way to stay out of Incarna environments indefinitely if required. This is a big deal for current EVE players, but most of my friends and colleagues who don't play EVE don't see the importance of what is on the surface a purely cosmetic change. In this week's short EVE Evolved column, I discuss the plans to bring back ship-spinning in EVE and explain why this change is a big deal for players.
CCP working on EVE ship spinning patch
Incarna haters rejoice! OK, maybe rejoice is too strong a word, but surely the return of ship spinning is worth a smile or two, amirite? Today's second piece of EVE Online news comes courtesy of Torfi Frans Olafsson's latest blog post. In it, he mentions how CCP is rethinking its captain's quarters design and working toward reimplementing the ability for bored pod pilots to rotate their cameras around their active ship while docked. The ability disappeared with the introduction of full-body avatars in last summer's Incarna expansion, and Olafsson says that soon "you will simply be able to board and unboard your ship, toggling between captain's quarters and ship spinning mode." Incarna's hefty graphical requirements have also inconvenienced players logging in via "craptop" portable computers that lack gaming-quality hardware, and the post says that fixes for this are on the way as well. Finally, there are a few blurbs about improvements to captain's quarters shaders and new turret graphics. Read all about it at the official EVE website.
