A Look at the History of Expansions - Part Twelve

A Look at the History of Expansions - The Series

Previous entry: Revelations to Revelations II


Eve Online: Revelations II is part of a series of expansions with a goal to bring large scale player war and conquest into Eve Online. Eve is moving towards war and destruction as its focus versus its earlier look at just creating a game full of spaceships doing things. CCP has decided to start defining their spaceship game as one of spaceship warfare.


There is an interesting expansion note:

Immersive New Player Experience

To better acclimate new players to EVE, the rookie tutorial experience will spawn directly in space beginning with Revelations II, inside a protected dungeon inaccessible to all but the new player.

Revelations II at a glance does not seem like a big, dramatic expansion. But it is one that adds many smaller things into the game that will mold it. Things such as faction drops, T2 sentries, faction POS and modules, corporation tools and overheating. We also get stealth bombers and triage carriers.

This is also the birth of the weekly Eve TV show. Summer has always been a winding down period for CCP as employees go on vacation. CCP's interest in e-sports is not new. With the goal of a weekly Eve TV program they were going to run tournaments there as well. Also, player gatherings were becoming more common with CCP hosting them in connection to their other activities.

Development for the Eve API was going well. Nods were made to ICSC jump planner, EveMon, and other fitting tools that had been developed by the player base. Until now, CCP was feeding players information through data dumps.

CCP had brought sovereignty improvements into the game with Revelations II. Once released the question was what did they do? This is one of the first development blogs I have stumbled across with pictures.

And let's welcome Dr EyjoG. He joined CCP in June of 2007.

"In 2004, UNAK hosted a conference on experimental economics. One of the lecturers at the conference was Dr. Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, then the lead designer for EVE, who gave an introduction to the EVE Online community and its economy. I was fascinated by the “smart gaming” aspect of EVE-– where the sandbox nature of the game requires players to use a higher level of strategic thinking and real-world business skills-–a unique feature among its counterpart MMOs. It is obvious that only the smart ones can survive in EVE."

A big topic during the summer of 2007 was testing eve itself. There is a blog about the upgrade to Stackless Python 2.5 and several about the live Q&A processes as well as improvements to testing in general.

CCP is not waiting for its next expansion. A new ship is coming with a goal to improve mining in deep space. Welcome the Rorqual. CCP does care about what the miners want. It will compress ore, have mining foreman links, have capital tractor beams, and be able to repair mining barges at the speed of light. It is shall be created by Outer Rings Excavations (ORE).

Mining is the oldest profession in New Eden and as the true foundation of EVE from which all other things are made (to one day be destroyed in the great circle of EVE life) deserves more love and attention that it has received. We hope the upcoming and future patches are just the initial scratch on the surface (literally) of what is possible with mining.

ATIV will be at the end of August. Unlike today where there are months of planning and announcements and cutoff dates the Tournament is announced at the start of August and it will cover two weekends. It is also only one day. The ring size is 250k and the rules simpler and more intense.

However, everything is not yet pointing to Trinity. The smaller Revelations patches are coming. With them they bring the great nos nerf and bring in the era of neuts. Also, the Khandi ships are being rebalanced across the board with special thanks to a players ideas. Science and Invention skills are to be seeded on the market (I have no idea where they were before. Rewards? Spawns?) and new mobile laboratories focused at copying will be introduced.

There is an interesting note that Eve Online: Trinity the December, 2007 release was origionaly billed as Revelations III. However, the name Trinity has two interesting aspects to it. For one, it is a form of three which nods to the end of the expansion arc. For two, it is the name of the gaphics engine and the last part of this arc will one of the first major overhauls of Eve Online's graphics.

Revelations's midterm release is almost a mini-expansion with new ships, items and balancing. The corporation transaction log is added. I have to admit I wonder how they were keeping track of this before or if they even were. The signature radius's of carriers were increase so that they would be easier to scan down then battleships. Interdictor warp disrupt probes now prevent warp even if it is initiated.

The most interesting patchnote may be:

You can now warp to gang members who are over 150 km away by clicking them in space, or on the overview.

I cannot even imagine a world without being able to warp to each other on the grid. Yet, until the summer of 2007 that was not something that players could do.

There were some improvements to CONCORD:

CONCORD officers will now drop the donuts and immediately deploy with the intention of smoking your criminal derrière if you remote repair criminal NPCs. They will no longer set up a roadblock at the next stargate and wait for you.

And let us not forget that CCP has decided to create the CSM. An article from the New York Times written on June 7th of 2007 discusses this interesting decision.

This specter of corruption has emerged most recently not in some post-colonial trouble spot but in the virtual nation of an Internet game called Eve Online (population 200,000) where aspiring star pilots fight over thousands of solar systems in a vast science-fiction universe every day.

So now, in a sociological twist, the company that makes Eve, CCP, based in Iceland (population 300,000), says it will tackle the problem the way a democracy would. In what appears to be a first, the company plans to hold elections so that players can select members of an oversight committee.

The company will then fly those players to Iceland regularly so they can audit CCP’s operations and report back to their player-constituents. And taking cues from transitions to democracy in the developing world, CCP says it will call in election monitors from universities in Europe and the United States.

“Perception is reality, and if a substantial part of our community feels like we are biased, whether it is true or not, it is true to them,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.

“A government can’t just keep saying, ‘We are not corrupt.’ No one will believe them. Instead you have to create transparency and robust institutions and oversight in order to maintain the confidence of the population.”

It is August of 2007 and Eve online is gearing up for the winter release, Eve Online: Trinity.

Resourses

Eve Online: Revelations II
Eve Online Revelations II Trailer
2007 Eve Online Dev Blogs
Eve Online Patch Notes
New York Times