eve-online posts

Games can can adapted into movies, comic books and even prose stories and now CCP has announced that a new novel set in their space-based MMO EVE Online is due for release in November. The book, titled, EVE: The Burning Life, is being written by CCP team member Hjalti Daníelsson, who has written much of the game's storylines.

The plot apparently revolves around a man who is the loan survivor of an attack on deep space mining colony and a woman "agent of death" who leaves her gig on her own personal journey. These two people's lives intersect in a story that will "plunge them into the darkest parts of space where they encounter denizens of the chaotic and dangerous pirate kingdoms." Sounds painful. Anyway, the novel will be published by Tor Books in trade paperback and in hardcover and is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

Dave Perry has been hyping his streaming game service Gaikai for the past few months. We were supposed to see it in action at E3 last month but at the last minute Perry pulled out of showing the service to the press due to "patent filing" delays. Today, however, Perry decided to go public with a 10 minute + video showing off how the Gaikai service supposedly works.

You can see the video above with narration by Perry as he plays games like Spore, World of Warcraft and EVE Online with only a few seconds of load time via a Firefox browser. He even had a full version of Photoshop running near the end of the video, showing that the service can be used for more than just games. Perry claims that the video demo was being run via a streaming server 800 miles from his location and that the bandwidth for the demo was "mostly sub 1 megabit across all games" meaning that the requirements for playing these games will be fairly low. Perry took a couple of shots against rival streaming PC service OnLive (without mentioning them by name) saying, "We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less. ;)"

There's still no word on when this service will launch but Perry states he will be talking more about the business model for Gaikai at game development conferences later this summer.

CCP's first and so far only game has been the space-based MMO EVE Online which launched over five years ago. However it's been known that the company has been working on other projects. This August CCP plans to give a first look at one of those projects.

The reveal will come as part of the keynote address for GDC Europe which will be held from August 17-19 in Cologne, Germany. The address will be made by CCP's CEO Hilmar Petursson . CCP announced some time ago plans for a new supernatural-themed MMO World of Darkness, and at last year's EVE Online FanFest showed some footage of a Halo-style FPS without any more comment.

CCP Games continues to show subscriber growth in its space-based MMO EVE Online. Today the developer sent over a press release announcing that today, the sixth anniversary of the game's launch on May 6, 2003, the game has secured 300,000 subscribers (not including trial subscriptions). That's a 22 percent growth in players since the beginning of 2009.

Part of that growth was due to the launch of a retail box edition of EVE Online (via publisher Atari) which contained all of the game's content including its latest free expansion Apocrypha. In addition, the game has reached a new record of concurrent users with 53,850 players at one time on the game's single server.

[Via email press release]

Visit the EVE Online site to sign up for a trial account.

CCP's EVE Online is a spacefaring MMO held in reverence by its players, and a certain amount of respect/fear by those who haven't played it. One thing that both groups seem to agree on is that EVE isn't something to be taken lightly. Word of its complexity has spread among those who don't generally play MMOs, and even the game's developers sometimes refer to the learning curve as more of a Learning Cliff, which tempts the unwary with promises of gameplay riches, only to dash them to the rocks below.

With that in mind, we were hoping that our recent interview with Noah "Hammerhead" Ward, Lead Game Designer for EVE Online, would provide some clarification. Is EVE as hard as everyone says? How can new players manage the overwhelming number of features? What can players look forward to in the upcoming expansion, Apocrypha? What follows is all the information we could extract from Mr. Ward, gotten in much the same way as one might extract ore from an asteroid. See? You're learning already!

World in Conflict: Soviet Assault: PC owners will be able to download this stand alone expansion pack to the terrific 2007 RTS game this week. It's set in the 1990s where the Cold War never ended and the Soviet Union stages a full scale invasion of the US. The expansion from developer Massive Entertainment and publisher Ubisoft adds six new single player missions on the Soviet end of things along with two new multilayer maps. If you don't have the original game you can also pick up World in Conflict Complete in retail stores this week. it has both the original game and the expansion pack.

Torfi Frans Olafsson, Senior Producer of EVE Online takes some time out to clear up a lot of misconceptions people might have about the sci-fi MMO. The video is roughly seven and a half minutes long, and shows Torfi standing in front of a backdrop and talking about different issues that might keep players from picking up EVE, such as the steep learning curve. He also talks how updates will improve the player experience.

There's no game footage or peeks of the upcoming Apocrypha update featured in the video. It's also worth mentioning that Torfi has a fairly strong accent. However, if you're curious about EVE, but intimidated by some of the things you've heard, this should help clear things up.

Download HD EVE Online Torfi Frans Olafsson Presentation Video (284 MB)
Check out all EVE Online downloads

This teaser trailer can also be found on EVE Online's recently launched Apocrypha site, and provides some early looks into the upcoming free expansion.

Download HD EVE Apocrypha Teaser Trailer (34 MB)
Check out all EVE Online downloads

While EVE Online was released first as a retail product many years ago, nearly all of the subscribers to CCP's space based MMO have come from the game's digital distribution model. In March, Atari will finally re-release EVE Online to retail stores and today both CCP and Atari announced what people can expect when they open up the box.

One of the cooler things about the EVE Online retail release is that CCP is giving players 60 days of free play time in the game, rather than the normal 30 day time span most MMO games give to beginning players. Existing subscribers to the game can add that 60 days to their time period if they buy the expansion or sell the time off in the game itself to other players in two 30 day increments. The box also includes a 21 day guest pass for a friend to play the game. If that player decides to become an EVE Online subscriber, you as the giver of the pass will get 30 days of free play.

In addition to the original game and all the previous expansions (including the upcoming Apocrypha) the EVE Online retail box will have an exclusive in-game ship, quicker access to space combat than the normal beginner and a web-based career guide with tips on how to play the game. The retail version ships on March 10. Meanwhile you can get more info on the Apocrypgha expansion via a new web site.

The economic news in the real world isn't good and it looks like its going to get worse before it gets better. While corporations go bankrupt and more people lose their jobs as a result, we at Big Download have to ask ourselves, "Why don't business people take more hints by playing games?"

Yes, there are a ton of different economic models in various PC games over the years. You can manage to grow a whole city from nothing in a game. You can even grow an entire nation or even a vast space empire through the use of managing your money and available resources. Indeed the in-game activities of certain MMO games can actually be felt in the "real world." Here's a quick look at how managing your money in certain games is a good thing. Perhaps our current political and economic leaders can learn a thing or two.

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