iGame Radio

CCP announced last week the 15th expansion to their vast sci-fi space MMO, EVE Online. Getting back to the basics, Crucible is focusing on the combat aspects of EVE, with updates to ships, graphical improvements in combat, time dilation, ship rebalancing, and more.
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We sat down with lead designer Kristoffer Touborg of EVE Online to talk the ins and outs of the latest update to this space sandbox MMOG, Incarna, and the upheaval that resulted from the launch of their in-game store.

We also had a chance to talk about the myth that EVE Online is too difficult to play, or that everyone hates you while playing it, and dispel those rumors with some more concrete information and facts.

CCP has announced that voting for the EVE is Real contest has begun.

EVE is Real site is a collection of videos, images, and text created by players archiving the eight years of EVE Online’s persistent universe. Over 4000 player-made images, videos and posts are located on the site. The site is divided into the categories of War, Exploration, Corp Recruitment, Freestyle, and EVE is Real, the last of which seems to be a collection of player views on how realistic and lifelike various aspects of EVE gameplay feels to them. The posts range from poignant and precious to terrifying or hilarious.

Every person can vote for one image and one video per day. Prizes include 20 GEFORCE GTX 460 SE video cards for image winners and a grand prize of an ALIENWARE AREA-51 PC for the video contest winner. Voting ends September 1st.

CCP recently announced their EVE is Real site which stores a growing collection of some pretty awesome videos, images, and texts created by players archiving the eight years of EVE Online’s persistent universe.

More than 1000 player-made images, videos and posts have been received so far. The museum is cataloged into War, Exploration, Corp Recruitment, Freestyle, and EVE is Real, the last of which seems to be a collection of player views on how realistic and lifelike various aspects of EVE gameplay feels to them. The posts range from poignant and precious to terrifying or hilarious.

EVE is Real is also running a series of contests that will benefit individual EVE players as well as the EVE gamer universe as a whole. The EVE is Real site provides a method of sharing these videos, images, and text with other players. Each piece of content that is shared is counted towards a whole, with an unknown bulk number unlocking an amount of Aurum for the entire EVE universe.

The first level of sharing rewards was unlocked this week, triggering a 1,000 Aurum reward for each of EVE’s subscribers, the equivalent of over $1.89MM USD worth of virtual currency and the equivalent of 107,000 months of gametime (AKA PLEX). Aurum was recently introduced with the Noble Exchange as part of EVE Online: Incarna, EVE’s latest free expansion. There are still three more levels to unlock.

There is also an image and video contest to enter. Submissions can be made until August 18th, at which time EVE Online players will vote on all images and videos available until the contest ends on September 1st. Players can win a GEFORCE GTX 460 SE or ALIENWARE AREA-51 PC.

 

What’s inside this episode:

• Host Omaha Sternberg goes it alone to talk about the week’s news in Mac and iOS gaming. First up, Omaha talks about the rumored PopCap Games purchase, and whether it makes sense for EA Games to be the buyer.
• Paragon Studios announced that City of Heroes is going to a hybrid payment model called City of Heroes Freedom that includes a free to play membership. She’ll talk about the different memberships and what this means for City of Heroes.
• Tim Langdell, the trademark troll, got soundly sued in the UK court. Omaha talks about the depth of his fraud and why corporations have a responsibility to not enable this behavior.
• LEGO Universe also announced a hybrid membership model with a F2P membership, but this one’s a bit different from CoH. Omaha talks about what this means for LEBO Universe.
• Omaha briefly details EVE Online’s Incarna release.
• Phil Harrison thinks Apple will BE the game industry in the future. Omaha gives a brief view of what that might look like.
• Omaha mentions her sponsorship of this year’s uDevGames Contest and reveals the poll results from last week.

Music Notes:

• Digital Droo produced our theme music here at iGame Radio.
• Matt Jarvis for featuring music from Osmos.
• Bobby “Glorian” Slavov and Victor Stoyanov for featuring music from Eschalon: Book 1.

CCP has announced the launch of Incarna 1.0, providing pilots of EVE Online their first opportunity to step outside of their spaceships with the introduction of the Captain’s Quarters.

The Captain’s Quarters brings with it a ton of features, including Strategic Data and News Feeds, a walkway balcony that allows you to view in its entirety your ship, and panels for managing your planetary structures and selecting agents for missions. You’ll also be able to do a ton of more customization with a mirror specially developed for creating new wardrobes and changing your appearance.

In addition, Incarna 1.0 has added updates to ships and turrets, improved performance and balanced gameplay more, and added the Noble Exchange, where luxury items, rarities and articles of distinction can be purchased.

Looking at the patch notes, we were interested to note that on Macs, depth effects had been disabled but only if you have an ATI card. We have a question regarding this into CCP, and will report back when we get a response.

Check out more details at the Incarna section of the EVE Online site, or view the video introduction.

CCP has released some initial information about a big feature coming in the next update for EVE Online…Incarna. This feature, the Captain’s Quarters, will change the way individual players relate to the game.

From the EVE Insider blog:

Captain’s Quarters are your place of power, center of your control, operational nucleus, living room and home office. They are the dusty motel room for the vagabond capsuleer. Whether docking your ship to a station or entering EVE for the first time through the character creation, you will enter the Captain’s Quarters as the living, breathing EVE You. It’s a new dimension of immersion. For all players ( the future newbies/future points on your killboard), it finally gives EVE a human face, a sense of familiarity to “real life” and other games.

You can read more at the EVE Insider blog about this cool new feature.

Yesterday the incursion began. Droves of capsuleers are being shot down in the wake of the first attack by Sansha Nation ships in New Eden. Thus begins the final stage of EVE Online: Incursion, this winter’s free expansion by CCP.

To mark the occasion, CONCORD, the coalition-based security force of EVE Online, released a video detailing the threat for all pilots. To join in the battle, you can download EVE Online and try it out for a 14 day trial, if you can survive it, and join the hundreds of thousands of others who play the game, breaking their Peak Concurrent User record last Sunday at 63,170 players in one world space (EVE Online is not a sharded world).

UPDATE: The patch notes from the previous 1.0.0 release made mention of Fixed and resizeable Windowed-modes not working in the Mac. Those still seem to be disabled, but anti-aliasing has been enabled now for Snow Leopard users only (disabled for Leopard because of client start-up problems).

CCP, developers of EVE Online, has released the final stage of the free Incursion expansion for EVE Online. Incursion 1.1 includes the Sansha Incursion/PVE play and the long-awaited Incarna Character Creator.

The Sansha Incursion is both a main storyline addition as well as a new PVE aspect to the game. Sansha Kuvakei was a messiah of a Nation, bent on creating a Utopia. Until everyone found out that he was creating cybernetic “True Slaves” by melding man and machine. The last Alliance of Empires supposedly wiped him, and his nation, out of existence. Now raids by Sansha Nation ships and claims that “The Master” still lives cast doubt upon this belief.

The PVE aspect means random as well as purposeful encounters with NPC characters in-space at the level of large-scale encounters. The focus will shift from awards for knocking off NPCs to completing objectives. The idea is to tie all of those objectives into the larger picture of the Sansha incursions.

Incursion 1.1 also includes the Incarna Character Creator, a character creation tool for creating highly detailed and individualized characters. This tool alone could end up sucking hours of your time away from your day.

CCP, developers of EVE Online, has released the first stage of the free expansion, Incursion, for EVE Online. This portion focuses on storyline and ship additions, game mechanics, and user interface improvements.

Changes in Incursion 1.0.0 include the addition of over 80 new storyline missions, the Noctis salvaging ship, and rebalancing rockets and Tech 2 ammo. The update also includes improvements to EVE’s user interface (UI) based on player feedback. A full list of changes is available in the patch notes. It’s important to note that a few of the changes have not made it into the Mac client yet, such as the new windowed-modes and anti-aliasing.

Incursion features two main aspects, the Sansha Incursion and the Incarna Character Creator. The Sansha Incursion is both a main storyline addition as well as a new PVE aspect to the game. Sansha Kuvakei was a messiah of a Nation, bent on creating a Utopia. Until everyone found out that he was creating cybernetic “True Slaves” by melding man and machine. The last Alliance of Empires supposedly wiped him, and his nation, out of existence. Now raids by Sansha Nation ships and claims that “The Master” still lives cast doubt upon this belief. Incursion will also include the Incarna Character Creator, a character creation tool for creating highly detailed and individualized characters.

The second portion, 1.0.1, will be released on December 14th. Though CCP has not revealed all the details of what will be in this patch, they have said it will include removal of learning skills with another holiday gift for EVE players. The final portion of the expansion, 1.0.2, will include the Sansha Incursion storyline/PVE and Incarna Character Creator, as well as updates to EVEGate and the Planetary Interaction feature, and will be released in mid-January 2011.