by Cody
“Micajah” Bye



As a gamer there’s little that makes me more frustrated than
seeing my favorite MMOGs slowly fade away. These vibrant games that
were once full of life simply begin to dry out and lose players after
three years, and there numbers steadily decline until they are but
ghosts of their formers selves. As games like Everquest and Dark Age of
Camelot slowly meander their way off into the horizon, there a game on
the market that has outlived the common three-year life span of MMOGs
and is preparing to record even more users as it continues to age. The
game is EVE Online, and after four and a half years on the market
place, EVE continues to grow and set new concurrent user records while
also boosting their subscribed user mark.

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Nathan Richardsson
tells us what's next for EVE Online.

While the graphics of space may be timeless, EVE’s
development company, CCP|White Wolf, is preparing to give the game a
new lease on life; they’re going to thoroughly revitalize the
graphics in the game with their Trinity 2 update, a monstrous 2 GB
upgrade that refreshes every ship in the game. On top of that, the
developers at CCP|WW are continuing to plug away on the long-term
storyline behind EVE while continually adding new content. Released in
conjunction with Trinity 2, the next content update –
Revelations 3 – will hit PCs around November of this year.



To gain some insight into the inner workings of the company, the Ten
Ton Hammer team cornered Nathan “Oveur”
Richardsson, Executive Producer for EVE Online, at the Austin Game
Developers Conference and asked the man about all the upcoming releases
and what we should expect over the next few months from EVE Online.



Initially, Nathan’s biggest focus was on the Trinity 2
upgrade, which is one of the biggest achievements CCP has completed to
date. “Over 50 man years [50 men working 8 hours days for a
year] have been put into this. It’s a complete overhaul of
all the graphics in the game,” Nathan said. “We
have side by side comparisons, and even though we’re happy
with how EVE looks today, its amazing to see where we’re
going in the future. It’s probably going to be the highlight
for this year. Of course we’re also spending time on
improvements and enhancements, but this is the big project for this
year.” Nathan’s excitement for this particular
portion of the upgraded content was contagious; I couldn’t
help but feel enlivened for the upcoming graphics renovation.
“Our end of the year expansions typically have the most in
them,” Nathan reiterated. “It’s
definitely keeping us busy.”

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Trinity 2 is going to
completely overhaul all the graphics in EVE.

“Once Trinity 2 has been released, we can then implement our
full-bodied avatars,” Nathan said. For clarification sake, I
asked Nathan whether this was the ambulation project so many of us are
excited for, and he said that it was. “Trinity 2 must be
released for ambulation to work,” Nathan continued.



Although Nathan’s excitement was centered around the Trinity
2 upgrade, we wanted to direct the conversation more towards
Revelations 3, which we hadn’t heard much about. Most of the
Trinity 2 information has already been covered in our article from the
Leipzig Games Convention, so Nathan moved on to the updates in
Revelations 3. “The focus is really going to be improving
what we already have,” he said. “We’re
really looking at enhancing current features rather than adding new
content, which is partially due to our focus on bringing Trinity 2 to
the gamers as quickly as possible. However, we also want to keep
improving the performance in the client to make sure the larger fleet
battles will run well.” In EVE, large fleet battles are
fairly common, especially for characters that become involved in the
competitive alliances. While numbers can be sketchy, there was a battle
in March 2007 where the number of people in an area hovered around a
thousand. Without optimization, the client would not have been able to
handle the load.