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Manifesto » Eve Online: Incursion Impressions
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Eve Online: Incursion Impressions
Posted on Tuesday, January 18 @ 15:15:40 Eastern by Josh_Laddin
Well, your virtual personal space anyway.
Last week I sat down and chatted with a couple folks from the dev team at Iceland-based CCP games, who were willing to emerge from said land-of-ice to give me a rundown of what's in store for the newest expansion, dubbed Incursion, to the long-running MMO EVE Online. We laughed, we cried, we worked through technical difficulties (turns out a coffee shop isn't the most reliable place from which to get your internet), and here's what they conveyed to me about the expansion, which incidentally releases today.
The most impressive new addition to EVE Online is in the very powerful character creator tool. CCP was quick to admit to me that the old character creation system was incredibly antiquated - essentially just a 2D portrait that you could glance at as you piloted your ship around - and desperately needed a modern overhaul. The Incursion character creator is light-years beyond it; we're talking flint-and-tinder vs. central heating system here.
You get to play with a highly detailed 3D model of your chosen character, using your mouse to click and drag pretty much any aspect of the face to reshape it, from noses to cheekbones to brow ridges. You're not endlessly clicking through options or adjusting sliders here - the tool lets you mold the character yourself, almost like a far more advanced version of Mario's grabbable, stretchable floating head when you booted up SM64 back in the day. A simple "EVE Online character creator" search on Youtube will bring up tons of videos demonstrating the versatility of it. As cool as the tool is, though, keep in mind that you still only control your ship in EVE Online, so your fancy 3D avatar will remain just a work of art until sometime down the road when CCP implements areas in which you can actually walk around and stretch your virtual legs.
Incursion also features some new gameplay elements, like further development to the interactive planets introduced in the last expansion. The player community was essentially griping that those planets were more "clickfests" than anything else, so CCP is making it a little more interesting, removing some of the excess clicking and requiring you to return to planets to move your extractors around to richer spots for better resource harvesting. There are also new battles called Incursions (who'd have thunk it?), which are like huge PvE battles to reclaim territories of space that have been invaded and occupied. Areas under incursion have their normal activities hindered, so it's in the community's best interest to fight back those dastardly NPCs to get back to business-as-usual.
CCP's end goal with EVE Online is to turn it into the "ultimate sci-fi simulator", and they're hoping the Incursion takes them one step closer to that lofty goal. As some of you may know, I'm a rabid WoW player myself, so I never got a chance to get into EVE, but this expansion definitely piqued my interest enough that I might go and give a trial account for a spin.
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