EVE Online 2008 Fanfest Update

Dec 5 2008 3:42PM

The next major expansion is scheduled for a March 10, 2009 launch. A few hints at its contents were made including wormholes, exploration, modular ships, epic mission arcs, a new focus on the new player experience and Tech 3 items.

CCP announced a distribution deal with Atari (yes that Atari) to bring the next major expansion to retail stores in a boxed form in early March. The CEO of Atari, David Gardner, provided a special address to attendees about the deal. This is big news for a 5 year-strong MMO which has grown to these heights over time using just digital distribution.

CCP also provided a full, hands-on demo of a "vertical slice" of our Walking in Stations project, where pilots can leave their spaceships and interact as full-bodied avatars in stations. A few parts of the planned design were revealed, including a fully-playable mini-game and the experience of walking around in the captain's quarters, the promenade and a bar.

As fans of our fans, EVE developers let go a bit and presaged the future of EVE during major talks like the "World Domination" Keynote as well as intimate conversations with individual players throughout the show.

While Fanfest was a huge success, it wasn't the only November News.

Server and hardware changes with StacklessIO and EVE64 have pushed CCP into unbelievable single-system battles (of over 800 players) and almost completely killed latency issues in all major market hubs.

The Council Of Stellar Management held their second elections and the results are in. Check out the second iteration of EVE's democratically-elected player council here: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=606