eve-online posts

Halloween is still in the future but many of us are already thinking about getting gifts for the holiday season. One gift you can buy will be a big help to many others. It's the now annual MMO Calendar and its 2010 edition is now available to purchase.

The calendar will once again feature original artwork from a number of current MMO games like Age of Conan, EVE Online, Lord of the Rings Online and others. Even upcoming games like The Secret World and Guild Wars II will have artwork this year. All proceeds from the calendar will go to the famous St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. Also, each order is eligable to win one of 10 prizes for each game in the calendar. The calendar itself will ship on December 4.

It's not exactly a shock to learn today that developer CCP plans to release a new free content expansion for their space-based MMO EVE Online. Coming this winter, EVE Online Dominion will be the 11th such free expansion for the popular MMO.

Among the new features coming to Dominion will be a revamp of the alliance warfare gameplay model along with pirate missions, the first parts of a new social networking feature called COSMOS, visual revamps of planets and more. CCP will discuss the expansion pack during the Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. However they do not plan to discuss the just announced Dust 514 console game at PAX 2009. It's likely they are holding off until their Fanfest in October to reveal more details.

Last year EVE Online developer CCP showed off a video, without any commentary, at their annual Fan Fest that showed what appeared to be a sci-fi FPS title that looked a lot like Halo. Today, the developer officially revealed their plans for Dust 514 at GDC Europe, a console FPS that links up with EVE Online.

According to Gamasutra, CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson said that " infantry successes and failures" in Dust 514 will be reflected in EVE Online while players in EVE Online can "fund mercenaries and give them goals" for Dust 514. A release date for the game was not announced nor which consoles will be used. More info is expected to be revealed at CCP's next Fan Fest on October 1-3.

Some downloadable PC game services have already started some sales that will last through most of the week:

Steam has put EVE Online on sale this week for 66 percent off its normal Steam price. Also two other games from Kalypso Media, Ceville and Imperium Romanum: Gold Edition, are on sale for 50 percent of their normal price. All of these sales expire on August 17.

Over at Direct2Drive they have put World of Goo on sale for 50 percent off this week (this for both the PC and Mac version). Also The Witcher Enhanced Edition Director's Cut is on sale for 30 percent off its normal price and the just released Death to Spies: Moment of Truth is on sale for 20 percent off its normal price.

It's not even the weekend (technically anyway; we do know of some folks who think Thursday is the start of their days off) but the game download site GamersGate is getting a head-start by cutting the price of a few of their titles.

From now until July 12, you can get the action-RPG collection Titan Quest Gold (with the original game and its expansion pack) for 50 percent off its normal GamersGate price. Also on sale for 50 percent off is CCP's hit space based MMO EVE Online. Finally the site is offering both Red Faction 1 and 2 for free with pre-orders of the upcoming PC version of Red Faction: Guerrilla (something that Impulse has already announced).

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!