Spotlight On - EVE Online (Incursion and Other Updates)

In EVE Online, mankind has reached the stars, but the galaxies are troubled. Massive enemy fleets are gathering just off the interstellar horizon and an age of incursion is on its way. Developer CCP has been supplying its sci-fi massively multiplayer online game with updates since the game's launch back in 2003. With Incursion, the developer plans a whole suite of new features, both on the battlefield and off. We got a chance to sit down with the team and get a briefing on these latest additions.

Incursions are intergalactic attacks by a massive enemy fleet, and battling this fleet will be similar to a large-scale raid. Incursions spawn randomly and require a huge player force to route. When one starts, the galactic skies will turn a sinister shade of green and all players in the area will be slapped with a long list of "debuffs" that weaken their ships. With so many penalties (and cannon fodder enemies) up front, players will be unable to simply attack the heart of the incursion. Instead, they'll have to fight their way inward, starting with the weaker ships on the incursion's outer rim. The debuffs will then be stripped away as the players progress.

Because incursions can spawn anywhere, CCP hopes to see the various alliances and player factions battling it out to determine who gets the privilege of combating them. Each incursion should take two to three days to complete, though the developers did hint that it's technically possible to finish one in as little as two hours--assuming you can lead an organized assault with high-powered ships piloted by, oh, maybe 4,999 of your closest friends or so. During an incursion, individual enemy ships do not carry bounties. Instead, participants in an incursion are paid out after the incursion's completion--this feature is intended to discourage players from simply sitting on the sidelines and repeatedly sniping small-fry enemies without really contributing to the battles. However, the richest prize in one of these assaults is the blueprints of the incursion's capital ship: the super carrier. Once the enemy super carrier, located at the heart of the incursion, is destroyed, there is a chance it will drop its schematics. This will allow a lucky faction access to its destructive capabilities (or just sell the ship on the open market for a huge profit).

Off the battlefield, CCP is completely overhauling its avatar-creation system. Up until now, EVE was entirely a ship-based game, meaning that character creation was limited only to creating a captain's portrait of your character--who never disembarked from his or her spacecraft. Planned future updates will include a full-on character-customization system to accommodate the game's future landlocked areas (such as meeting halls and interstellar speakeasies). The customization system has an array of menus, color palettes, and sliders that let you tweak every last detail of your character's appearance, though you can also click directly on several parts of your character and drag anatomical parts to your liking to give your character wider cheekbones or narrower shoulders. While this new system does promise a lot of variation, certain races are still going to retain specific physical traits to differentiate themselves from the others.

Once your character has been molded to your liking--in our case, into a fat, aged version of popular late-night moderator Conan O'Brien--you can then set up his or her glamour shot, which will function just like the original game's portrait. As with molding the faces, you can mold your character's expression, as well as choose different lighting and camera angles. Conan ended up with a twisted smirk and some killer shades, for instance. Looking ahead, CCP hinted at plans for character tattoos and customization redos. Depending on how much you're willing to pay, you may be able to rework different aspects of your character's appearance. Taking a new portrait won't be too expensive, for instance, but rebuilding your whole facial structure is going to cost a bit more.

Of course, CCP maintains it wants this cosmetic economy to be in the hands of the players--much like most of the game's other economic systems. The developer expects that you'll eventually be able take your avatar to a player-managed cosmetics shop or a variety of other social spaces. These will run the gamut from trading hubs to corporate headquarters. In the latter's case, security is certainly a sensitive issue. With that in mind, the developers are fine-tuning a list of customizable security options for players to arm themselves with to guard these spaces. For example, a corporate headquarters could be modified so that only members of that corporation could access it.

Finally, planetary mining is getting a more-competitive edge. Using a color-coded heat map, players will be able to plot the highest concentrations of resources. As players mine a certain area, the resources in that sector will gradually deplete, forcing miners to move their drill operations to another location. However, because you're not the only one digging up the place, players will have to be quick to maneuver to the next high-yield area or be outmined by the competition. To help manage this, the mining program can be set to stop at a specified time to alert you when it's time to move. This enhancement to mining is part of CCP's continued tuning of the game to be compatible with Dust 514, the upcoming console game, which will take place planetside as a complement to EVE's space-travel gameplay. Incursion has just been launched and additional features will be rolling out into the game in the near future.