This year’s grand celebration of the EVE Universe in Reykjavik, Iceland, is 50% bigger than last year’s extravaganza, so we were told during this morning’s press briefing at the Harpa Concert Hall.
David ‘CCP Pokethulhu’ Reid took the amassed journalistic congregation on a whistle-stop tour of EVE’s rise from a modest but ambitious social experiment in 2003, to the multi-platform juggernaut it is on the cusp of becoming.
For the most part, this was the same primer I’d witnessed the previous year, with a few bolted on references to events in the past twelve months. This brought home to me that for many attending journalists, the EVE Universe is a bizarre anomaly on the gaming landscape which I–as a long-time player turned correspondent–take for granted.
As the day progressed and the shoals of EVE players meandered from roundtable to presentation to competition arena, the uniqueness of this Nation of EVE is something that has many scratching their heads. The dedication and investment that EVE players make to their in-game (and sometimes out-of-game) interests can be quite hard to quantify.
David Reid defined the core purpose of EVE as “to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life” and to many of the attendees, this would seem the case. Undoubtedly, the sense of community and the seduction of celebrity that the single-sharded persistent world provides has fostered a level of dedication through its “meaningful” gameplay, allowing EVE to thrive in good times and bad.
Kicking Up DUST
Now, with DUST 514 set to step out of beta on May 6th with its Uprising release, CCP is planning to distil the same EVE effect onto the console platform. Judging by David Reid’s choice of language, they’re coming out swinging. The gauntlet was certainly thrown down at other, more traditional, FPS titles with his statement:
“Millions of Call of Duty players are waiting to be liberated from a prison they don’t know they’re in.”
Judging by the facelift DUST 514 appears to have had, it will be interesting to see how it performs in the free-to-play console market and if the lure of instant gratification can be the gateway drug to a life of “meaningful gameplay” in a freeform universe. Reid’s assertion that players deserve to be motivated by more than vague notions of “duty” and “honor” certainly holds water, as well as being a clever jab in the ribs to certain other titles.
The Ever Changing Game
Brandon ‘CCP Jian’ Laurino gave an overview of the raft of changes to come with the Uprising expansion, pointing out that there has “never been a console game with such a significant update – we could call it DUST 2”. [It seems pedantic to point out that would technically mean it was 512 times worse.]
The visuals have improved by an order of magnitude, with Atli Mar Sveinsson (CCP Praetorian) presenting some comparison stills and video of maps with a far higher degree of fidelity.
The UI looks to be greatly improved too, with many of the design idiosyncrasies inherited from the EVE’s PC interface now banished in favour of a more console controller friendly system.
Perhaps the most impressive part of the presentation was the showcase of the new Planetary Conquest system which will see player organisations in EVE Online making strategic decisions on which planets to compete for in the Molden Heath region of New Eden. I will be looking at this in more detail in a future article, but for now, enjoy the pictures.
Enter the vicious cycle indeed.
The console friendly galaxy map showing player-controlled sovereignty.
The star system view with conquerable planets.
A watering can for use in the new “flowers and friends” gameplay. Maybe.
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