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Six small changes that will make a big difference to EVE players
Last year, EVE Online developer CCP Games tasked its illustrious Team Best Friends Forever with a project aimed at fixing all those little things that annoy EVE players on a daily basis. Font issues, windows stealing focus, implants not showing on killmails, and the problem of agent standings being overly complicated were all tackled in no time flat. For the Crucible expansion, Team BFF's leader, CCP Soundwave, was put in charge of multiple teams that hammered out hundreds of bug fixes, gameplay balance changes and quality of life improvements. In a new devblog, CCP Punkturis reveals six small changes under development by Team BFF that will certainly make a big difference to EVE players. The skill queue will be getting a search feature, which is good news for older players with over a hundred skills to sort through. The watch list that keeps track of friendly targets in fleet operations will be able to hold 15 players, up from 10, and players will be able to re-order them any way they like. If you've ever seen a player's face appear in the bottom right of the screen to tell you he's just logged in, chances are you've tried to click on it to talk to him at least once. When the next big patch goes live, you'll be able to do just that. The agent list in stations and module overload indicator will both receive graphical updates, and a new compact user list for the local channel with no portraits will be an absolute god-send to nullsec fleets.
CCP shows off EVE neocom updates
Remember that dev blog about a year ago that mentioned updates in store for EVE Online's neocom interface? Well, it hasn't been forgotten, but the New Eden poo-storm of 2011 kind of bumped it to the back of the line. Today, the EVE website has been updated with a look at the new neocom's design, and CCP Optimal has plenty of pics as well as some insights into what's changing below the pretty exterior. Chief among the tweaks is the ability for pod pilots to pick and choose the features they use most and remove extraneous buttons from the interface. The new neocom is slated to go live in the Crucible 1.1 patch coming later this month.
EVE Evolved: Fitting the Gallente Talos
Among the hundreds of changes brought by EVE Online's recent Crucible expansion, the new tier 3 battlecruisers certainly rank as player favourites. Rather than giving each race a bigger, tougher battlecruiser, CCP gave the new ships the ability to fit battleship-class weapons but heavily limited their defensive capabilities. All four tier 3 battlecruisers are turret-based, letting them output massive damage with close-range guns or hit for solid damage at battleship sniping distances. As with all new ships, it can be difficult to figure out how to fit the new tier 3 battlecruisers to make full use of their unique combination of high damage output and high mobility. Last week I looked at three viable setups for the Caldari Naga, which proved to be an absolute monster with 1,000-1500 DPS when using close-range blaster setups and a terrifying 650 DPS when sniping at 100km-130km. This week I take a similar look at the Gallente Talos, a ship designed specifically for close-range combat. I explore a traditional armour-tanked blaster fitting with dual webs, a shield-based variant that packs a huge 1,500 DPS punch, and two long-range blaster fits that give the Naga a run for its money. In this week's EVE Evolved, I explore four solid PvP fittings for the Talos, with both shield and armour setups.
The MMO Report: This is why we can't have nice things edition
This week on The MMO Report, Casey explains that the leaked Guild Wars 2 Mesmer reveal is exactly why we can't have nice things. He highlights Lord of the Rings Online's first major update since the Rise of Isengard expansion, discusses the newly revealed Egyptian-themed zone in Funcom's upcoming The Secret World, and suggests that fan feedback -- "very loud fan feedback" -- is responsible for the fan-pandering of EVE Online's recent Crucible expansion. He also pokes a bit of fun at Q Entertainment's on-the-nose Ninety-Nine Nights Online, a "2-D PC action mmo [that] will most likely play exactly how you expect it to, with lots of clicks and clacks and plenty of hacks and slashes." Finally, Casey dips into Uncle Casey's Mailbag to read an email from a fan who believes Casey is a dead-ringer for Christopher Eccleston (of Doctor Who fame), which gave The Beard an opportunity to plug next week's special edition MMO Report, in which the crew will dish out some insider info on the inbound Doctor Who MMO. The full video is tucked behind the break.
EVE Evolved: Touring a galaxy reborn
EVE Online recently celebrated the release of its incredible Crucible expansion, noted as one of the most feature-heavy expansions in the game's history despite the majority of its features being produced in a period of just a few weeks. Two years' worth of graphical upgrades, features, balance upgrades and quality-of-life fixes hit Tranquility all at once, and the response from players has been incredibly positive. Last week I rounded up all the information there is to know about the Crucible expansion, but reading articles and news posts is no substitute for hands-on experience. This week I took a tour around parts of New Eden to explore the incredible new graphics Crucible delivered. As I have a background in graphics programming, the graphical upgrades are obviously the most exciting change for me. The astounding background nebulae are even more impressive when you know just how difficult it would be to build a nebula system that looks this incredible from any location. In this week's EVE Evolved, I explore a reborn galaxy and catalogue my adventures in a massive HD gallery.
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.
CCP expands EVE's asset search functionality
If EVE Online is truly spreadsheets in space as some of its detractors (and even fans) have surmised, thus far it's been a spreadsheet with fairly limited search capabilities. Now thanks to the efforts of CCP developers, finding your random crap spread across the cosmos in various New Eden station storage facilities just got a lot easier. The latest EVE Online dev blog has the details on the asset search functionality updates, and they include new keyword searches and a complete listing of keyword values. "There [is] definitely more we can do with this in the future but we started this rather late and [we] didn't want to add lots of broken functionality, but rather a few simple options that work and cover the basics and a bit more," the dev blog explains.
EVE trailer shows off new Crucible expansion
What do dubstep and EVE Online have in common? A new expansion trailer, for starters. Yes, Crucible is finally here, and so is CCP's return to a singular focus on internet spaceships. To celebrate, the company has released a slick new video, and the clip marks another return of sorts. All of the footage was captured in-game using real players, and the metagame stylings we've seen in some of EVE's more recent trailers is noticeably absent. The video shows off most of Crucible's major bullet points including new visuals, captain's quarters, tier three battlecruisers, and a ton of balancing tweaks. See for yourself after the break.
EVE Online: Crucible forges a new game today
Crucible is an apt name for EVE Online's 15th expansion, considering that the game, its developers, and its players have gone through a severe testing this year in many respects. CCP is hoping that Crucible will be better received than its previous expansion, Incarna, and is hyping it as "EVE reforged." Today Crucible is coming to the game as a free expansion following a period of extended downtime. It's very much a "kitchen sink" update, with major improvements and reworkings of game systems. These include items as big as improved space visuals and dilating time to allow for large fleet battles to touches as small as contrails, an improved font, and new Captains Quarters. New ships in the expansion are a given, but ground-bound pilots might be attracted to opening up their very own customs offices to tax planetary businesses. There are so many additions and changes, in fact, that it's almost futile to try to crush them into a couple paragraphs, so while you're waiting for the game to come back up, make sure to check out the patch notes, the EVE Online: Crucible website, and our own Brendan Drain's thoughts for more info.
EVE Online shows off new Crucible engine trails
Veteran EVE Online players will remember the joy of engine trails, a simple graphical effect that really added a feeling of speed to fast ships like interceptors or microwarpdrive cruisers. While the much-lauded Apocrypha expansion brought us countless new features, developers were forced to remove engine trails due to performance issues. We recently learned that engine trails will be making a comeback with the Crucible expansion, and in a new devblog today CCP Mankiller released details of the tricky work involved in getting the much-loved feature back into the game. Mankiller explains that the old engine trail effect actually needed to have its vertex buffer updated every frame, making it a massive performance hog. The new trails use a much less costly approach that generates the geometry inside a vertex shader using splines. For those who fancy themselves mathematicians, CCP Mankiller provides the gruesome details of the equations that had to be constructed and solved to program the new shader. The new technique has additional advantages, like no longer skipping around when you're lagging and the possibility of new effects like heat shimmer, light absorption and refraction. The new engine trails go live with the Crucible expansion on November 29th.
EVE Evolved: Returning EVE to the Crucible
When EVE Online launched in 2003, it was a barren game without many of the comforts we enjoy today. The user interface was abysmally worse than today's (if you can imagine such a thing), players with cruisers were top dog, and practically the only activities were mining or blowing up miners. The culmination of years of hard work by a small indie studio, EVE Online sold almost entirely on its future potential. When I was introduced to the game by an excited friend in early 2004 during the Castor expansion, he encouraged me to get in on the ground floor because he believed the game was going to be huge. Years later, I find myself introducing the game to thousands of readers on the same premise. EVE's continual success over the years transformed a fresh-faced CCP Games into a multinational game development giant. And yet, for all that growth and all the updates to EVE over the years, the fact that the game sells largely on future potential is still firmly embedded in both players and developers. Players subscribe not only because they like the game but because they want to support development to reach EVE's true potential. Two years with very little iteration on existing features sent the message that developers weren't trying to reach that potential, but it seems that trend is soon to be completely reversed. With the newly announced Crucible expansion, CCP will be adding countless small features, graphical updates and iterations that put EVE firmly back on the path to reaching its full potential. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at CCP's plans to return EVE to the crucible and reforge it into something awesome. Those waiting for the third part of my look at the new player experience can catch that in next week's column, as Kajatta is enjoying his final week in EVE before delivering his verdict.
EVE Online monument commemorates the summer riots
Back in June, the EVE Online community reacted negatively to the release of a lackluster Incarna expansion and controversy over microtransaction prices. Complaints eventually erupted into in-game riots with the leak of a company newsletter on microtransactions and an internal memo from the CEO denouncing complaints as noise. Players got together in trade hubs across the game to protest EVE's development direction, attacking a pair of invulnerable monuments outside the systems' major stations. As a nod to players' refusal to accept the status quo and force change, CCP recently altered the Jita monument that was the main focus of the summer riots. The statue now stands destroyed, and its plaque congratulating Heinky and Shin Ra of Burn Eden for solving a riddle contest several years ago has been changed to the text below: "This was once a memorial to the winners of a riddle contest sponsored by late entrepreneur Ruevo Aram. After standing proud for half a decade, it was destroyed in late YC113 by capsuleers who were staging a mass uprising against an intolerable status quo of intergalactic affairs. Today, the ruins of this once-great work of art stand as a testament to the fact that change is the universe's only constant." The change is currently only live on the test server, but will likely come to the main server on November 29th when the Crucible expansion launches. Thanks to Drew for the tip!
EVE Online's Crucible expansion coming Nov 29th
CCP's feel-good post count has been building to a fever pitch in recent weeks, and today the company has announced the ultimate win-back promotion in the form of EVE Online's 15th major expansion. The content drop is called Crucible, and it's currently scheduled to debut on November 29th. "Crucible evolves the graphics, interface, and game mechanics with over three dozen updated and improved features based on feedback and challenges put forth by its players. This is EVE re-forged," CCP says on the expansion's teaser page. The web portal also provides a handy collated list of the aforementioned developer updates, and in spite of what was unquestionably the rockiest summer in the sci-fi sandbox title's eight-year existence, the future is looking pretty bright.
Wings Over Atreia's Aion 2.7 sneak-peek: Dev death match
You all just better be grateful that NCsoft is working out the kinks by using me as a guinea pig so you can have a smooth launch! Even if by launch I only mean the PTS, which is set to go live today with Aion's newest patch. Yes folks, I -- your intrepid Wings Over Atreia correspondent -- was invited to a media sneak-peek to check out the Crucible 3 arenas coming very soon to a live server near you. Who am I to pass up a few practice runs through the new arenas before the rest of the masses? So I touch-down mid-week for some additional Atreian coverage. And come on, no one could pass up the chance to stealth up behind a dev and unleash a flurry of dagger blows into his/her back! Unfortunately, logistical and technical difficulties stretching for days plagued this endeavor. Yours truly was especially cursed. However, just when it seemed like the event wouldn't happen, there we were, standing in Kaisinel Academy in spiffy new duds and queued to enter what is arguably the highlight of 2.7: the PvP arenas. At this point, I forgave all previous problems because I got to commence some slaughter on a few NCsoft employees. What?!? You all know you want to! I tested my dagger and sword against Scott Hannus, producer of the game guide; two members of the game guide team, Sean Orlikowski and Ryan Compton; Adam Christensen, Associate Producer; Dom Wai, Brand Manager; and two members of the community management team, Felicia Johnson (Nyx) and Curtis Grooms (Anhtoo). Oh, and I learned some pretty neat things about the upcoming patch as well. So how was the experience? And just exactly how tasty are Aion's forthcoming goodies? Whet your appetite past the cut with my impressions of the two instances and the new PvP gear as well as check out a video. Then join in on the PTS server to experience for yourself.%Gallery-136333%
Wings Over Atreia: Coming soon -- Crucible III
Look Pa! It's rainin' patches! In the midst of Daevas gorging themselves on festivities and goodies galore, NCsoft tossed out another juicy bit of information that might have been lost in the frenzy: Patch 2.7 will release on October 19, 2011. "Wait a minute!" you say, with second-anniversary cake dribbling from your mouth. "Didn't Aion just have a recent patch?" Aye folks, that it did! This patch will actually be the third in only a five-month span. Color me hopeful, but it certainly looks like someone was listening when I requested more frequent content updates. And I have to say I am pleased! Giving players more options only helps stave off boredom and retain players. From new instances (3rd Crucible, Padmarashka's Cave) to reductions in DP costs and skill cooldown timers, there are enough little goodies to keep Daevas entertained until the -- dare I hope not too long in coming -- next update. So what does Aion have in store for us this time around? Join me past the cut for a look at the the upcoming changes.
Hunted preview: Co-opportunity knocks
Hunted: The Demon's Forge was plagued by a number of issues, both technical and fundamental, when Joystiq last saw it two months ago. At Bethesda's recent "BFG 2011" media event, developer inXile Entertainment brought a markedly improved build, if not a less generic game title. "Feedback has been a large part of the process," David Clayman, associate brand manager for inXile, told me at the event. Gone is the shoddy blocking animation Joystiq encountered in the last build that registered a block no matter if your shield was facing an enemy or not. (inXile has since added an auto-targeting mechanic that turns your character to face the nearest attacking enemy as you begin blocking.) And fixed is the indicator that now more clearly and immediately alerts you to your partner being down and in need of a healing potion. %Gallery-121458%
Sega says Crucible not its Silicon Knights title
And another company responds to the massive Intellisponse information leak. This time its Sega commenting on the video of a game called Crucible: The Evil Within, allegedly a title under development by Silicon Knights with Sega as publisher. According to Sega representative Steve Groll, who was speaking with MTV's Multiplayer, the video leaked earlier this week is not a video of the game Silicon Knights is developing for Sega. "That video is not the game that Silicon Knights is creating for us. I have no idea if it is a game they are working on for someone else, but it's definitely not the project that Silicon Knights and SEGA are producing," said Groll, adding that the name of the Sega project is not The Crucible either.Joystiq notes that Sega did file a software trademark for "The Crucible: Evil Within" in April of 2007. It was allegedly an action horror game, which certainly fits Silicon Knights' modus operandi. Looks like we'll have to wait and see what becomes of The Crucible.[Via Joystiq]
Intellisponse Survey Rumor Roundup
'OMG Megaton' is a phrase often uttered by fanboys everywhere. Rarely, however, is it done with any sort of sincerity. After yesterday's massive leak of Intellisponse Survey info, we think it's safe to use the phrase with complete and utter confidence: OMG MEGATON!!!!111LOLZ1! Seriously, there is so much information being disseminated that people are actually starting to mock up fake survey pages in an attempt to grab the spotlight. Here we have gathered up all the rumors -- they are just that, by the way: rumors -- that we've posted so far as well as some that Joystiq posted while we foolishly slept.Of particular interest, note the video above, which reportedly comes from an as yet unreleased Silicon Knights game entitled Crucible: The Evil Within. Looks like Too Human set in a more traditional fantasy realm, which is an idea we fully support. 'Avatars' are Microsoft's take on Mii's? First video of Silicon Knight's Crucible: The Evil Within Forza 3 will have 2 discs, 400 cars, more Guitar Hero 4 costs $179.99 w/ upgraded instruments 'Lips' is MS response to SingStar? Powers & Titans - multiplayer superhero game for 360, PS3, PC Spider-Man vs. Marvel Zombies creeping to Wii, 360, PS3 Tony Hawk to get board peripheral on 360, PS3; new Spider-Man to use Wii Fit board Ultimate Band coming to 360, PS3, compat with Rock Band instruments; new trailer for Wii Xbox Live getting massively competitive social games - Jeopardy, Millionaire, etc. Possible COD5 box arts
Rumor: First video of Silicon Knight's Crucible: The Evil Within
Also uncovered during the great marketing leak of ought-eight was the above video for a game said to be The Crucible, which leads us to assume it's Sega's The Crucible: The Evil Within, a horror game rumored to be developed by Silicon Knights. Though not officially announced, the title has been in development as early as 2006. Though it's unclear which platforms the game is for, it was supposedly in development for next-gen platforms (think 360/PS3). If true, it sounds like Sega's got quite the E3 lineup: Obsidian's Alpha Protocol, Gearbox's Aliens: Colonial Marines, of course the Platinum Games ... games, and now this.
SEGA unveils "The Box"... a new console? No... just a game...
Sad. While we all know deep down we'd like to see the Sega Phoenix before we die, that's a pretty darn slim possibility. But if they pulled their heads out of Microsoft's, Sony's, and Nintendo's bums and make sequels to games that more than deserve them, it could happen. Ranting aside, there are rumors surfacing about Sega making a new horror title called The Box. Or The Gift, The Sacrament, or Crucible. The Box is the best... aren't the Gift and the Crucible already titles for books? I guess everything is, really, but those sound like really well-known books...Anyway, Sega passed out a survey that had a short description of the supposed PS3-60 (get it? It's multi-platform genius!) horror title. It went a little exactly like this: "An open free-roaming action horror game where the player undertakes a terrorizing journey of suspense, fear, power and discovery, And where every decision has multiple consequences... Uncover an ancient chest with unimaginable power that seduces you into evil, sin and corruption." This sounds kind of like a mix between Indigo Prophecy and Siren. Both were good. Will they mash together well, though, and create the new Silent Hill? Or will they sort of smush around and make some sort of blemish like [insert crappy horror title here, I can't think of any right away]. Don't say Fatal Frame 2 though -- that game scared the bejeezus out of me. Multiple times. Leave us your thoughts!
