infrastructure posts

EVE Evolved: The road ahead for 0.0 alliances

by Brendan Drain Sep 20th 2009 at 6:00PM

Filed under: At a glance, Sci-fi, EVE Online, Culture, Expansions, Game mechanics, Patches, PvP, Endgame, Opinion, Politics, EVE Evolved

A lot of MMOs rarely (if ever) revisit old gameplay mechanics or areas, focusing instead on new expansions. EVE Online is different in that the developers go back and re-visit old aspects of gameplay rather than just focusing on new mechanics and content. Even Blizzard have seen the wisdom in redevelopment of old content, and in their next planned World of Warcraft expansion "Cataclysm", the entire game world is being given a revamp to bring everything up to their most recent development standards.

CCP Games have been using this development strategy for years and coupled with player-based development in the community, EVE Online is truly a game that evolves over time. Player-managed political states shift allegiances, entire empires can rise, span the galaxy and fall within a year and the emergent gameplay that typifies EVE's sandbox style is constantly being expanding on by players. The game we know now is very different to the one we had a year ago and if recent devblogs are any indication, EVE is about to undergo a major evolutionary leap. The entire sovereignty system and the state of capital warfare is about to undergo a complete revamp.

In this article, I take a more in-depth look ahead at the changes that are coming to 0.0, capital ships and the sovereignty system and how I think they could turn out, given my experiences in EVE.

Tags: 0.0, alliance, capital, ccp, ccp-games, dominion, eve, eve-evolved, eve-online, evolution, expansion, featured, infrastructure, mothership, opinion, politics, revamp, sandbox, sov, sovereignty, titan

EVE Evolved: The road ahead for 0.0 alliances, part 2

by Brendan Drain Sep 20th 2009 at 6:00PM

Tags: 0.0, ccp, ccp-games, eve, eve-online, expansion, feedback, infrastructure, patch, singularity, sovereignty, testing, war

Masthead Studios announces GNi as worldwide server host for Earthrise

by James Egan Apr 21st 2009 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Business models, MMO industry, Earthrise

Masthead Studios is a relative newcomer to the massively multiplayer online game industry and is presently developing the post-apocalyptic MMO Earthrise, a sandbox game where players will vie for control over finite resources in a large, open world. As players of another prominent sandbox MMO know very well, ensuring smooth operations in an unsharded game requires a substantial investment in server technology. To this end, Masthead Studios has partnered with server infrastructure provider GNi to host Earthrise.

GNi's 'Infrastructure as a Service' (IaaS) offers "dedicated storage, network, and server capacity on a pay-as-you-grow model." With this week's announcement, Masthead Studios joins companies like Vivox and Frogster Interactive Pictures AG as a GNi client.

[Via IGN]

Tags: business-models, earthrise, frogster, gni, iaas, ign, infrastructure, infrastructure-as-a-service, masthead-studios, mmo-industry, post-apocalyptic, sandbox, sci-fi, servers, vivox

Jagex developing new MMO, seems not to care

by Akela Talamasca Jun 19th 2008 at 3:30PM

Filed under: MMO industry, News items

Here's a strange one for you Runescape fans. Geoff Iddison, CEO of Jagex, said that the company is working on "Nextscape", a new MMO to be released March 2009. This news, revealed at the GameHorizon Conference in Newcastle, England seemed almost beside the point compared to what Iddison really wanted to say about his company.

"We've got an infrastructure behind Runescape which is the real silver of the Jagex, the value of the company," he said. "It's not the game, the game is going to come and go." Now, granted, this was at a developer's conference, so he's not there to hype the next big project necessarily, but talking up your infrastructure is like saying "Forget about my personality and skills, my skeletal and circulatory systems are where it's at!" While we're sure things are great at Jagex, we'd like to have heard a little more about the game -- you know, the reason that infrastructure exists.

Tags: gamehorizon-conference, geoff-iddison, infrastructure, jagex, nextscape, runescape