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CCP and White Wolf Games To Merge
Evod writes "Crowd Control Productions, maker of the MMORPG EVE Online, announced today at their annual fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland that a merger between White Wolf Publishing and themselves is a done deal. From the White Wolf Press Release: 'The merged company will enable CCP to integrate White Wolf's leading expertise in offline gaming development to enhance and create physical products for its MMOG, EVE Online. Products to be introduced in 2007 will include strategy guides, enhanced collectible card games, role-playing systems, and novels all based on EVE Online. White Wolf will leverage CCP's industry-leading technologies to bring its offline role-playing titles online. Conceptualization and early development has begun to bring White Wolf's World of Darkness, one of the world's strongest gaming properties, into the online world.' Each company will keep its own name and Hilmar Petursson, Chief Executive Officer of CCP, will step up as CEO of the merged companies." If you're a MMOG fan, or a table-top RPG fan, this is some interesting stuff right here.
The CCG for EVE is already out(http://www.eve-ccg.com/). Its entitled EVE: The Second Genesis. Its world premier was at this years GenCon at Indianpolis.
"Spaceships and Planets are easy compared to a MMORPG like WoW."
Have you played EVE Online? The amount of time and effort the developers spent on the economy system alone blows World of Warcraft out of the water. EVE isn't some "me too" MMO from a company that has made it's name on rip-offs, it's a highly-sophisticated and sometimes overwhelming *simulation*, and to suggest that its all just "spaceships and planets" is to miss the whole point of the game.
The player counts disagree with you http://eve.coldfront.net/status/tranquility
Sure it's not World of Warcraft, but it's fan base has been steadily growing since it was launched and continues to do so.
As for long in the tooth, they keep dumping out big content updates, the next of which is due any week now. And while the graphics engine is 5 years old you need to bear in mind that they were doing HDR 5 years ago so it still stands well against modern games. Also there is a complete graphics engine overhaul in the works for DX10/Vista which if it is anything like their last engine will put them solidly 2-3 years ahead of the state of the art again.
Take a look for yourself, this is thier "long in the tooth" engine. http://www.eve-online.com/screenshots/collection.
Or if you prefer how about a video http://myeve.eve-online.com/download/videos/Defau
CCCP = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union/
Well, CCCP never actuallly stood for "Central Comittee of the Communist Party" in any case, thats a misinterpretation. The "C" is the Cyrillic alphabet "/S/" sound and the "P" is the Cyrillic "/R/" sound, so you would pronounce this abbreviation in Russian as "Ess Ess Ess Air", and it stood for "Soyuz Sovyetski Sotsialisticheski Ryespublik" meaning "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Good news, come November 28th (Date could change) new characters will recieve more skills on creation (800,000 Skill points to be exact, I believe this is about 6 times more then when I created mine).
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
At the same "Fanfest" during which the merger was announced (which I believe is still going on), CCP gave an official subscriber count number - it was something like 146-148k subs.
EVE is small, but as one of the other posters said, it's been constantly growing.
When I first quit EVE in mid-2004 (about a year after release) my opinion was that it was a great concept with crap implementation. After hearing lots of good things about it this past summer (many from Slashdot posters), I decided to come back in July. My opinion is that CCP has matured drastically from the original "college grads with a dream" start, consisting mostly of an inexperienced dev team that apparently were slackers in college. (One of the girls in my first EVE corp was from Iceland and she and the original EVE team had quite a few mutual friends in school.) CCP has learned a lot from their mistakes and the CCP of 2006 is almost unrecognizable compared to the CCP of 2003-2004. That shows in their steadily increasing subscriber counts.
I suspect that those subscriber counts will continue increasing, as one of the current limiting factors to those counts seems to be overcrowding. (The "everyone in one universe" thing is very cool except for that one problem) With their next upgrade (CCP calls them expansions, but expansion in MMOGs usually means "pay us more money to be able to access the cool new stuff"), CCP is adding eight new regions of space, which should help a lot in terms of crowding. Hopefully the hardware they've added/will be adding will also help with some of the other symptoms of overcrowding. (Although no matter what, until they can parallelize calculations on a node between multiple CPUs for that node, they'll continue having problems with major fleet battles causing the node that hosts the solar system they occur in to drop.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I found lots of things to interest me over the past year, and the game just keeps getting more interesting. I like how things get built in-game, so I've been playing the part-time industrialist for a few months here. In two more months, I'll be able to fly capital ships, and a whole new part of the game (installation assaults and defenses) will open up to my character.
But if you're looking for instant gratification, you're right. It won't be found in EVE.
Regards,
Ross