WIRED: EVE ONLINE: APOCRYPHA LURES NEW PLAYERS INTO HARSH, CRUEL VIRTUAL UNIVERSE

There’s a new massively multiplayer online RPG on store shelves this week: EVE Online Apocrypha.

Well, it’s not technically new. EVE Online has been running since 2003. But with the expansion pack released Tuesday, the MMORPG will experience an inevitable influx of new players. How will the gamemaker introduce them into a complex world that’s been explored by loyal veterans for nearly six years?

Since its launch, EVE Online has earned a reputation for being dull, with a steep learning curve that has so far scared off all but the most patient gamers — and stubborn griefers. Apocrypha could change all that with its “new player experience,” which is designed to give guidance to fledgling space pilots and empower them with new mechanics designed to take some of the edge off the game’s tantalizingly cruel universe.

“Hopefully it’s a lot easier for [new players] to just get up to speed without feeling like they’re slogging through a mountain of manuals,” says the game’s lead designer Noah Ward. “It’s more of a crash course than a three-hour tour.”

EVE Online is appealing because it is a far cry from the typical MMORPG. In a game like World of Warcraft, a player improves his character by increasing physical attributes like strength or intellect. It doesn’t take many leaps of logic to understand which attribute would be best for a warrior versus a mage. Kill enemies, and you’ll gain experience points and levels, allowing you to improve your base attribute and grind your way toward the game’s tougher content.

But in EVE Online there are no classes, and your character’s abilities are determined by a combination of skills, the spaceship you’re flying, and where your own interests lie. The same battleship might serve with equal effectiveness as a hulking war machine, a support craft for repairing allies or even a humble mining vessel — provided you’ve trained the right skills and packed the right equipment for the given job. Skills are trained in real-time even if you’re not logged in, so players with busy schedules can still make progress.

But if you’d like to fly that shiny new cruiser or upgrade its guns, be prepared to wait. Attributes determine how quickly your character accumulates skill points, and choosing the “wrong” attributes at the start will seriously disadvantage new players.

One of EVE Online’s problems was that neophytes had to choose these important character attributes with no information about why they should pick them.

“They really had no business making those choices,” Ward explains. “Spaceship Command IV? Gunnery IV? Is IV good?”

Players who hadn’t done their homework were likely to create a character whose skill set was at odds with their play style. If, for example, a player was interested in fleet warfare, but happened to create a character that excelled at manufacturing or trading, he would face a long wait before he got to play the game as he intended.

In Apocrypha, a revamped tutorial will familiarize players with basic stellar navigation, mining, trade and the nuances of EVE’s complex combat system. That’s Ward’s “crash course.” The three-hour tour comes later, in the form of an Epic Mission Arc. This new quest for rookies spans the game’s massive universe, introducing them to the various factions that populate EVE while testing the lessons they learned in the tutorial.

A skill queue has been implemented, so players are now able to schedule a limited number of skills to train in succession — no more getting up at four in the morning to start a new skill. And Apocrypha also adds the ability to reassign a character’s attribute points once a year, so players young and old who have rethought their personal goals aren’t completely out of luck.

As a gamers’ stimulus package, new players will train their first million skill points twice as fast as normal players. With faster training times, rookies will be able to access a wider variety of equipment sooner, allowing them to quickly get out and contribute to one of EVE’s player-run corporations — or just shoot at other players a bit more effectively.

In the past, skill points were hand-picked by the game’s designers. Rookies might not have understood what a particular skill did, but it was likely there for a reason. Players now have full reign over their characters, but those who haven’t paid attention to the tutorial are likely to make costly mistakes.

“It gives them more control, but it also gives them the ability to screw up,” says Ward.

Of course, costly mistakes are fundamental to the EVE Online experience. EVE remains an unforgiving place. It is notorious for including nonconsensual player-versus-player combat. Rookie pilots are still likely to be ambushed by unscrupulous veterans.

Speaking of veterans, the Apocrypha expansion also adds loads of new content for older players to come to grips with — from modular, customizable strategic cruisers to wormholes and the intelligent, brutally difficult sleeper drones that now lurk within new, uncharted solar systems.

There are new challenges, and the learning curve remains steep, but the barrier to entry has plummeted. If you’re at all interested in MMOs, and don’t mind putting on your thinking cap from time to time, you’ve officially run out of reasons to avoid trying EVE Online.

Images courtesy CCP

BIG DOWNLOAD: FIRST LOOK: EVE ONLINE: APOCRYPHA

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!

Apocrypha is the name of the newest expansion pack due for release on March 10th, on both CCP’s site and on popular digital download service Steam. And for the first time in a long time, EVE Online will be available as a boxed product, to be found in retail stores, starting in the US on the 10th and everywhere else on March 12th. From the sound of it, CCP has crafted something that will please players who complain that EVE‘s cosmos is, for all of its seeming empty space, nevertheless contained and crowded. The way this will come about is by the introduction of wormholes, portals to new, uncharted territory. Players will have to use their probes to scan areas of space they suspect might contain a wormhole. These wormholes will be somewhat graphics-coded per risk level, so players will know on sight whether or not it’s for them. And interestingly, none of the wormholes will be instances, meaning that it’s possible for other players to enter the same space you occupy, if they’ve scanned and found the same wormhole as you have.

Players will find that Wormhole Space (WS) contains more than just a new area to explore — there’s also a new race to discover. Known as “The Sleepers”, this mysterious race has entered hibernation, and protects itself from meddling with a system of drones of varying abilities. Players will find that these drones are noticeably different in structure than anything they’ve experienced up to this point in EVE Online. For one thing, they have a very sleek, insectoid look to them that makes them seem menacing, even at rest. For another thing, they’re very protective of their resting charges; to the point where they’ll attack anything that comes near. And once they do, players will discover that CCP has outfitted these ships with a new type of AI — one that behaves quite differently than the other NPC ships they’ve encountered in the past.

Sleeper drones are smart enough to recognize which attackers carry the greatest threat, and will switch targets to acommodate. Rather than, say, typical pirate behavior, in which enemies simply orbit a player ship and keep attacking until destroyed, Sleeper ships will actually call for reinforcements and retreat when they have to. They’ll even “heal” each other when needed, making them much more dangerous adversaries for even the staunchest combat-ready veterans. Sleeper ships will also deal different types of damage, requiring that players have a flexible strategy in place that can be updated on the fly (so to speak).

Add to this the WS environment itself, which will affect player ships in different ways, much like — and please forgive the geek-out factor, here — the way that Kirk and Khan’s ships were affected by the nebula in Wrath of Khan. No telling exactly what the effects will be at this point, but be advised: WS ain’t your old backyard.

What’s in it for the player who manages to win through and claim victory over the Sleepers? Tech 3! Longstanding players of EVE Online will rejoice at the addition of the new Tech 3 level of technology, which can only be harvested from Sleeper ships and structures. Of course, it’s not quite as easy as simply picking up components and attaching them to one’s ship. Tech 3 parts must be taken back to a starbase or player outpost, and reverse-engineered to gain their benefits. This is a new skill that must be researched before it can be used. After that, however, players will find that Tech 3 items are modular and offer a variety of uses — which we’ll leave to the players to discover.

There are also new graphical updates in Apocrypha, including a new particle system, shadows cast on ships (which may not sound like a big deal, but really looks great when you see it), and a new ‘warp in’ effect for ships. And they’ve not stopped there: citing CCP’s desire to constantly upgrade the New User Experience, there will be new introductory movies per race, that explain in better detail how each race differs from the next. The ship fitting system will also receive an update, featuring immediate visual feedback on what the ship will look like after changes have been made.

EVE Online will also change the way that players have previously been forced to make certain advanced choices right out of the gate, feeling that this has served only to confuse new players at the outset. Helping in this will be the new skill called “Neural Remapping”, which allows players to queue up a list of skills for their character to learn while not actively playing, limited by a 24-hour window of time. There will also be new Epic Arc missions, which will be less linear and offering more of a branching of possible storyline avenues. Both of these changes should help ease the sometimes rigid-feeling structure of EVE Online, and make the entire experience more user-friendly.

EVE Online: Apocrypha is available tomorrow in two flavors: Premium, and Premium Lite, which will be less graphically intensive for players with lower-level systems. Those of you new to the universe of EVE Online will find a great deal of incredible content to sink your teeth into. Those of you who already play can look forward to yet another amazing update to the game you already know and love in Apocrypha. Go get it now — your ship awaits.

MASSIVELY: EVE ONLINE DEVELOPER NOAH WARD ON PLAYER DRAMA IN THE SANDBOX

There’s been no shortage of player-driven drama in EVE Online over the past few months. The things players can do within the game is a testament to EVE‘s sandbox design, but also to the developers who allow the players accomplish whatever their devious little hearts desire. It’s true that most who play the game don’t embezzle virtual currency from player-run banks, engage in spycraft or turn double agent, much less publicly assassinate another player during a PvP tournament, but all players in the game benefit from the risk these activities inject into the game. It all becomes part of the game’s setting and ultimately makes New Eden a gritter place.

This is a topic of discussion over at MTV Multiplayer this week. EVE Online‘s lead game designer Noah Ward (aka CCP Hammerhead) sat down with MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John, to discuss some of the potential within the EVE sandbox. The interview focuses on CCP Games‘ hands-off approach to what the players are doing in the game. As long as players aren’t spouting racial epithets or making real-life threats against one another, EVE‘s gamers can basically do whatever they choose on an individual or collective level.

Many people first heard about EVE through some of the infamous things written about the game, most notably The Great Scam (largely fictitious) and Murder Incorporated (quite real), which chronicles the Guiding Hand Social Club‘s in-game assassination of a player, nearly one year in the making. It’s exactly this kind of unpredictability about EVE that’s a large part of the game’s allure, and it even catches the developers by surprise. Ward says, “We could’ve never scripted that; you would never be able to come up with something like that. It’s what the people like, they have this freedom and that’s why this stuff is happening.”

Check out the MTV Multiplayer interview with Noah Ward for a closer look at the game’s player-driven drama and CCP’s perspective on it all.

KOTAKU: EVE ONLINE SCANDALS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS

Massively-multiplayer game EVE Online has had its fair share of scandals and controversies. That’s what happens when you let the gamers run themselves. But they’ve hardly been a deterrent to subscriptions.

Speaking with MTV, Noah Ward, from developers CCP, reveals that after the latest user-induced meltdown to hit the game – in the form of the disbandment of the largest player alliance via treachery - people didn’t really seem to mind. Prepared for a backlash of users leaving the game in their droves, Ward & CCP actually found that:

The largest alliance in the game was broken up by a trader on the inside and when this happened we were really worried at first because we were like, “Oh no! Everyone’s going to quit!” And it was really horrible for us.

That was in the morning, but a couple hours later the buzz on the forums was crazy, subscriber numbers were growing, and everybody was really excited. Because everyone was becoming complacent and bored with being the biggest alliance, and then all of a sudden now there’s war and turmoil. People who used to be in the alliance were re-subscribing and everyone was really excited about it so it’s not necessarily always a bad thing when this sort of stuff happens.

Gotta say, despite MMOs as a whole never really grabbing my attention, it’s this kind of thing that has me leaning towards giving EVE a good, hard look. You just don’t find that kind of real-world intrigue in other games.

‘EVE Online’ Designer: Players Actually Like In-Game Scandals, Corruption [MTV]

MTV MULTIPLAYER: ‘EVE ONLINE’ NOT COMING TO CONSOLES, BUT POSSIBLY IPHONES

The lead designer of “EVE Online” talked to me about how his game holds up against other upcoming space MMOs. He also shared plans to connect “EVE” players on handheld devices and a Facebook-like social networking site.

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Released in 2003, “EVE Online” is about to launch its 10th free expansion “Apocrypha.” Lead designer Noah Ward of CCP Games stopped by last week to show me what’s new in the space MMO, and I also wanted to know just how “EVE” continues to thrive in this economy.

He said that they’ve continued to see increasing subscribers since launch, except at the end of last year. “That’s when we went into overdrive and started making this expansion,” he explained. Though the company typically does two expansions a year, one in the summer and the winter, “Apocrypha” is coming out this month. “So not only is this the most ambitious and biggest expansion feature-wise and the number of man hours put into it,” he said, “it’s also coming out in 75 percent of the time [it usually takes].”

“In this economic crisis we’ve been seeing a lot of people being laid off, while here at CCP we’re actually hiring.”

Ward credits this to the streamlined process that the company’s developed, as well as cutting back on other projects. “In this economic crisis we’ve been seeing a lot of people being laid off, while here at CCP we’re actually hiring,” he said of the Iceland-based company. “‘EVE’ is our core breadwinner, and we’ve dropped a lot of side projects, but we didn’t just fire all those people, we said ‘What can you do for ‘EVE’ and how can you make ‘EVE’ a better game?”

The designer also said that the economy hasn’t affected its subscriptions. “It may have even helped because if people are laid off that means they’re at home with nothing to do!” he added.

Although “Tabula Rasa” is now shuttered, there are still forthcoming space MMOs to look out for — namely titles like “Jumpgate Evolution” and “Star Trek Online.” I asked Ward if he thought these games might take away “EVE” players.

“‘EVE’ is more of the older thinking man’s game, and ‘Jumpgate’ is the more ‘pew-pew-pew’ space shooter that’s going to appeal to a much younger audience.”

“I don’t think they’ll really rob players from us,” he replied matter-of-factly. “They are sci-fi and they’re in space, but the actual philosophy those games have is so different from ‘EVE.’ ‘EVE’ is more of the older thinking man’s game, and ‘Jumpgate’ is the more ‘pew-pew-pew’ space shooter that’s going to appeal to a much younger audience. ‘Star Trek’ is sort of the same formula as all the other MMOs: you got your dude and you go on mission with a couple other people, and it’s really storyline-based and just very different from ‘EVE.’ We do see our players playing more than one MMO though.”

And although console MMOs are becoming the new trend, “EVE” players shouldn’t expect to pick up a controller anytime soon. Instead, Ward revealed that CCP is currently focused on having “EVE” on other platforms — like mobile phones. “We obviously looked at the console space because it would be silly not to consider it,” he said, “but ‘EVE’ is such a deep game that the gameplay doesn’t really lend itself to sitting on the couch with a controller. What we’re more interested in is augmenting ‘EVE’’s gameplay in the handheld space, like iPhone or Smartphone [applications] that let you check your skills or that sort of thing.”

“‘EVE’ is such a deep game that the gameplay doesn’t really lend itself to sitting on the couch with a controller.”

Other projects that CCP is working on is a social networking site called Cosmos, which Ward described as “Facebook for your ‘EVE’ character,” where players will be able to upload screenshots and link their character with their corporation and alliance. Ward also promised that there will be a calendar and other applications to keep players connected to “EVE” wherever they are. CCP also plans to work on an “EVE-lite” client, which would not only let players do everything they normally could in the game (outside of space exploration), but also stay connected via chat.

Not to mention the the 11th expansion that’s due out before the end of the year; Ward says it will most likely be out this winter, though they haven’t picked out a name for it yet.

Until then, the “EVE Online” expansion “Apocrypha” is out on March 10. It will be available online as well as in stores with 60 days’ game time and an in-game collectible ship as a vanity item.

THE ESCAPIST: EVE PLAYERS LIKE SCANDALS AND CORRUPTION

With scandals and cut-throat treachery the rule rather than the exception, the dog-eat-dog world of EVE Online isn’t quite for the faint of heart. But according to Noah Ward, one of the game’s developers, that’s exactly what the game’s players love about it.

The futuristic world of EVE Online is not a friendly place. Why, just last month, one of the top executives of the biggest in-game alliance went turncoat, defecting to the enemy and dissolving the alliance for good. Before that, it was a cabal of approximately 70 players exploiting a bug to harvest entirely more raw materials than they were supposed to, affecting the in-game economy of more than two hundred thousand people.

Despite all of the uncertainty, lead designer Noah Ward told MTV Multiplayer, gamers weren’t being turned away from the turbulent universe of EVE, as the developers at CCP had feared. In fact, they saw quite the opposite:

That was in the morning, but a couple hours later the buzz on the forums was crazy, subscriber numbers were growing, and everybody was really excited. Because everyone was becoming complacent and bored with being the biggest alliance, and then all of a sudden now there’s war and turmoil. People who used to be in the alliance were re-subscribing and everyone was really excited about it so it’s not necessarily always a bad thing when this sort of stuff happens. Somebody on the other side was interviewed, and he was saying “When you beat the biggest raid in WoW you don’t get an interview in The New York Times but when this sort of thing happens it makes real-world news.

Nor does the dev team intend to step in and put a stop to it – after all, the extent to which EVE is player-run is in fact one of the game’s main draws: “We let them do their own thing. We will step in if there are racial slurs going on or any real-world threats, but if it’s all within the role-play and within the game, we don’t change anything.”

MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John goes on to ask Ward whether or not he thinks that other MMOs should follow suit and try to be like EVE. Me, I’m torn. On the one hand, the stuff that goes down in EVE is completely awesome, but it only really works because it’s the game that it is – the only other way another MMO could have the same kind of interactions is … well, if it was EVE. Sometimes you’re in the mood for an EVE, sometimes you’re in the mood for a WoW, or a LotRO, or a WAR. Let EVE stay the unique gem that it is.

MASSIVELY: EVE EVOLVED: APOCRYPHA EXPANSION PREVIEW

As March 10th draws ever closer, EVE Online‘s Apocrypha expansion is coming more and more into focus. Information on the new game mechanics and content is being released in the form of developer blogs and the official expansion page complete with screenshots and artwork is already up. Most importantly, a test version of the expansion is live on Singularity, EVE‘s main test server. Like any good journalist, I took my camera crew onto the test server to get some pictures of Apocrypha in action. What I found blew me away, literally.

In this gallery article, I take a visual sneak peak at parts of the impressive new Apocrypha expansion with a whopping 37 screenshots. In each screenshot, I talk about all of the new additions to the game.

MASSIVELY: NEW EVE ONLINE CHARACTERS WILL INITIALLY TRAIN SKILLS TWICE AS FAST IN APOCRYPHA

Massively recently mentioned a few of the changes coming to EVE Online through the New Player Experience, part of the Apocrypha expansion which rolls out next month. Of particular interest, or concern, to some EVE players is CCP’s decision to reduce a starting character’s skillpoints to 50k from the current 800k many existing characters began with. CCP Games apparently hopes to clarify this decision, and thus stave off any torches and pitchforks, with today’s dev blog. EVE developer CCP Flatboy writes,“In Apocrypha, new characters train at double speed until they reach 1.6 Million SkillPoints. That is all.”The reason that new characters will get this boosted skill training rate is to compensate for the fact that, for simplicity’s sake, new characters will begin with less skills. The New Player Experience is all about reducing the complexity that someone just starting out can find themself mired in, and having more control over how the character develops.

CCP Flatboy estimates that an Apocrypha character would catch up with one made with the current system in about six weeks, and this is without learning skills or implants to accelerate that window. He writes, “The main point here is that this will increase a new player’s understanding of his skills. Today it’s near impossible to remember all these skills one starts with and how they work. But if you start with less and get most of the skills while experimenting to find your own path, learning about your skills becomes much more enjoyable and you become efficient and useful sooner than otherwise possible.” The players are weighing the pros and cons of this system in a forum thread connected with CCP Flatboy’s dev blog “A Virgin Mind“.