Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

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.

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.”

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.