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EVE Evolved: The Bloodbath of B-R5RB
To the vast majority of gamers, EVE Online is an unforgiving sci-fi dystopia that's one part epic sandbox stories and nine parts spreadsheet. Once or twice per year, the gaming masses get a glimpse of the game's true depth when stories of incredible wars, political corruption, and record-breaking heists spread across the internet like wildfire. From the 2005 Guiding Hand Social Club heist that was plastered over the pages of gaming magazines to last year's infamous Battle of Asakai, tales of big events from EVE have always managed to grab the gaming media's attention. This week saw the largest record-breaking battle to date as a total of 7,548 players belonging to EVE's two largest megacoalitions fought for control of an innocuous dead-end solar system in the Immensea region. A total of 11 trillion ISK in damage worth over $310,000 USD was inflicted during what has now become known as The Bloodbath of B-R5RB and is allegedly the largest PvP battle in gaming history. The odd story of how the fight started and its record-breaking destructive scale are both big news, but the unsung heroes of B-R5RB are the people who work behind the scenes to ensure that the server can remain online during major battles. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at how one player forgetting to check a box on a form sparked this immense battle and how technologies like Time Dilation help to keep the server online when the ship hits the fan.
EVE Evolved: Everything we know about Rubicon
Back in April, EVE Online Senior Producer Andie Nordgren delivered an incredible long-term vision for the game's future that included deep space colonisation, player-built stargates, and players controlling practically everything that's currently run by NPC empires. This vision sets the tone and direction for development over the next ten expansions, each of which will introduce a small component of the overall goal. In a live interview session earlier this week, CCP revealed the first steps it will take toward space colonisation in its upcoming winter expansion. Named Rubicon, the expansion will be in players' hands on November 19th and promises to give individuals and small groups unprecedented control over the sandbox. It will let players fight over planetary customs offices in high security space, significantly buff the ability of small ships to participate in hit-and-run style warfare, and even introduce a new set of personal deployable structures that can be hidden anywhere in space. All this comes alongside two new Sisters of EVE ships, twitch livestream integration, and significant balance changes to Marauders, Interceptors, Interdictors, and Electronic Attack Frigates. In this week's EVE Evolved, I run down all of the new features and changes announced so far for EVE Online's Rubicon expansion.
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.
