EVE Evolved: Fanfest 2013 video roundup

CCP Presents Keynote
The CCP Presents keynote is normally a fairly dry talk with stats on CCP as a company, but this year's had some big reveals. We heard about the new EVE collector's edition, an upcoming lore book, a new comic book series, and even a TV show that's in the works.

EVE Keynote
The EVE Keynote is usually the most important talk for EVE players, and this year was no exception. CCP Hilmar shared a personal story about EVE's early years, Jon Lander looked back on the success of previous expansions, and new Executive Producer Andie Nordgren revealed what the next five years holds for EVE.

Lowsec PvP / Crimewatch
The Retribution expansion completely revamped the crimewatch system that determines how criminal acts are handled in EVE. This talk looked back at those changes and introduced new lowsec PvP features coming in Odyssey.

Ship Balancing
Following on from Retribution, CCP revealed plans to continue rebalancing every class of ship in the game. This talk goes into specific details on Battlecruiser nerfs, Battleship buffs, Command Ship changes, and more. This talk is definitely worth a watch if you like to know what changes are coming ahead of time to help plan your skill training accordingly.

Retribution Roundup
On paper, Retribution was the most successful EVE expansion to date. This talk digs into features that made it so popular with new players and veterans alike, from the bounty hunting and PvP changes to simple UI improvements. CCP Greyscale then answers some good questions from players.

EVE Economy
Do you love graphs? Does your idea of a good time involve spreadsheets and price indices? Then you'll love Dr. Eyjo's hour long lecture on the economics of EVE Online; it's positively bursting at the seams with bar charts!

Make EVE Real: Asteroid Mining
Former NASA Flight Director Chris Lewicki discusses mining asteroids in real life and his new company, Planetary Resources. I found this to be the most interesting and realistic of the Make EVE Real talks, and asteroid mining certainly sounds a lot more interesting in real life than it is in EVE Online!

Make EVE Real: Space Elevator
LiftPort Group President Michael Laine talks about his company's goal of building a space elevator anchored on the moon following a small but successful Kickstarter campaign experimenting with robots climbing cables. I got the sense that LiftPort can't actually build a real space elevator, but it's nevertheless interesting to see that private companies have turned their eyes to space exploration.

Make EVE Real: Bringing FTL to IRL
Icarus Interstellar co-founder Dr. Richard Obousy explores the various ways that we could theoretically build space ships able to travel faster than light. The ideas are all very theoretical but haven't yet been disproven.

DUST 514 Keynote
If you only watch one talk on DUST 514, make it this one. The Keynote summarises everything in the other talks, providing an overview of the Uprising patch and development plans for the future. It also includes classic lines like this one: "There are millions of Halo and Call of Duty players waiting to be liberated from a prison they don't know they're in."

DUST 514: Progression and Gear
In this short talk, DUST 514's Lead Game Designer gave details of many of the changes coming in the now-released Uprising update, including a new and more intuitive skill system and changes to gear progression.

DUST 514: Planetary Conquest in Lowsec
Of all the DUST 514 talks, this is probably the best. It introduced the core planetary conquest feature, giving DUST players the ability to invest in something, and even looting the battlefield after a match.

DUST 514: Reflecting the Universe
In this talk, Technical Art Director Anders Caspersson set the scene for some big reveals in the DUST 514 Keynote. He briefly introduced planetary conquest, talked about how battlefields are created, and events. If you like learning how games work under the hood, there's some interesting stuff on terrain generation and rendering in this talk.

DUST 514: Advancing the Core
If you want to know CCP's planning for DUST 514 in the not-so-distant future, this is where you'll find it. In this talk, CCP lays out the development roadmap for the next six to twelve months.

Alliance Panel
Alliance leaders from all areas of EVE gave presentations on what they got up to this year, with a particularly interesting talk on wormholes by ExookiZ. Be warned that the video does contain Game of Thrones spoilers.

CSM Panel
Members of the player-elected Council of Stellar Management answer player questions.

Concept Art Live
EVE concept artists draw concept art in front of a live audience and ask the players for their input. This talk was surprisingly muted compared to previous years.

Game Design Live
In a fun and slightly work-unsafe event, Game Designers CCP Greyscale, CCP Bettik, and CCP Masterplan showed the game design process they use when making a new feature and let the crowd help design a hilarious feature live. But don't worry, super-wormholes with capital NPCs won't really be coming to EVE!

EVE/DUST Tournament Finals
During the Fanfest, CCP ran a tournament played simultaneously in EVE Online and DUST 514. Ships fought it out in orbit of the planet while DUST marines fought over a district below.

Coaching them up in EVE
EVE players DNSBlack and ExookiZ gave this interesting presentation on how leading a corporation in EVE is a lot like coaching a sports team. There are some great lessons in here for any corp CEOs.

EVE Art Panel
A panel of CCP concept artists and graphics programmers showed off graphical updates coming in the Odyssey expansion. This was the first time players saw the new jump effect and the new radial menu UI. There are also some exciting concept mock-ups of a new fleet commander system overview.

Game Design - Balancing Tears and Laughter
Lead Game Designer CCP Soundwave gave this in-depth talk on the principles that go into game design and some of his favourite features, then he answers a series of game design questions from attendees.

Progressing with Ship Identification System
Developers look at EVE's poor sense of skill progression and overcomplicated ship skill requirements and some cool tools CCP is working on to solve the problem.

Prototyping the future of EVE
Team Avatar and the aptly named Team Prototyping Rocks show how new EVE features are prototyped before being fully developed in order to test ideas before wasting a lot of development time.

Player Fiction in New Eden
CCP Falcon and CCP Eterne discuss the EVE NPC storyline and some great player-written stories that complement the official fiction.

Games as Art - EVE at the MoMA
Celebrating EVE's recent inclusion in the New York Museum of Modern Arts, the museum's senior curator Paola Antonelli presented this panel on the topic of games as art. The creators of Dwarf Fortress and Cananbalt also joined Torfi Frans Olafsson to discuss whether games are art or engineering.

Merging Economies
CCP's in-house economists discuss the different economic systems in EVE and DUST 514 and plans to merge the two games' economies. The first step is to allow ISK to flow from EVE into DUST, but the long-term goal is much larger in scope.

Remixing EVE - You did what?
Those in attendance at this year's Fanfest got to play an awesome EVE-themed arcade game called EVE Offline. It was an unofficial side-scrolling shoot-em-up built with the EVE Online game engine and using art assets from EVE. This talk goes through the game's production process from start to finish.

Reimagining the Apocalypse
Amarrian players will be happy to know that the Apocalypse battleship is getting a redesign as part of the Odyssey expansion. This short talk shows the design process behind the rebirth of one of EVE's oldest ships.

Improving EVE's Player Experience
Since its release in 2003, EVE Online has been plagued with usability issues and arguably poor UI design. It's up to CCP Fear and Team Pony Express to make all the features we use every day more user-friendly.

EVE Securrity
In EVE's annual security talk, developers talk about the problems in implementing authenticators, banning stats for the year, the effect of botting and RMT, and EVE's security policies.

Dev. & Ops are in a Relationship
We know there are teams of developers behind our favourite games, but it's not often that we hear about the operations teams that deal with the server environment. This talk discusses how the two departments at CCP interact.

EVE in China
CCP recently relaunched EVE in China, which helped to push the playerbase over the 500,000 global subscriber mark. This talk from Chinese partner Tiancity looked at how EVE was successfully brought to market in China.