EVE Online senior producer CCP t0rfifrans just published a dev blog about the next major update to the game, Apocrypha 1.5. This is not a completely new expansion, just a significant update they will release in August before EVE's (as-yet-unnamed) winter expansion. While CCP hasn't released the complete rundown of Apocrypha 1.5's features and changes, they have announced a few highlights:

• Perhaps the biggest changes in 1.5 will be factional warfare improvements. Beyond responding to the lag issues many players have been reporting with factional warfare, CCP is going to introduce Loyalty Points (LP) for kills and captures, and each militia will have its own LP store where militia players can cash in for items unique to that faction.

• Several Level 4 epic mission arcs will be introduced, tied to specific races in New Eden. CCP t0rfifrans writes: "These captivating stories deal with moral ambiguity, intrigue, honor, and some people's lack of it. This should come as no surprise to those who know EVE and what we are about. As before with the epic arc that was released with Apocrypha, they provide a deep, interesting story, where your choices influence the outcome."

• One of the long awaited buffs for Black Ops battleships will arrive: specialized cargo holds. The first use of this system will be to give Black Ops ships fuel bays, but this feature paves the way for similar additions to other ship classes in the future. For instance, some ships may one day be given ammo bays, freeing up valuable cargo space.

• Rigs will be offered in different sizes, with frigate and cruiser sized rigs introduced to the game. These new small and medium rigs will be cheaper to buy or manufacture, and thus provide a lower cost way for players to trick out their ships.

CCP t0rfifrans also dropped a few hints about the forthcoming winter expansion, which will *not* be Walking in Stations. He writes: "All I can say, is that it is focused on sovereignty and you will not be able to walk in it."

We'll keep our eyes open for more about Apocrypha 1.5 as information becomes available.

Hilmar Pétursson, the CEO of CCP Games, will keynote Game Developers Conference Europe 2009 in Cologne, Germany. The event runs from August 17 through the 19th at the Cologne Congress Center East. Hilmar's keynote will focus on how CCP Games rose from being a small Reykjavik-based studio with an obscure niche title to becoming a success story in the MMO industry with the growing popularity of EVE Online, now running studios in Atlanta and Shanghai, as well as their hometown of Reykjavik.

Perhaps the biggest news here is the reveal hinted at in the CCP Games press release: "As a testament to the industry's potential for growth despite widespread economic turmoil and as an inspiration for up-and-coming independent studios, Pétursson will give an exclusive first look at the company's latest project, which is currently in pre-production." We can only assume this is the World of Darkness MMO, but it could very well be a closer look at Walking in Stations or any of the other projects CCP announced at last year's Fanfest. Regardless of what this new project is, we won't know for sure until August.

Most gamers probably aren't familiar with IEEE Spectrum, but it's a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest professional technology association. Fans of EVE Online who are curious about the people behind the sci-fi title might be interested in checking out IEEE Spectrum's piece on CCP Games and the man who directs the EVE Online Software Group: Erlendur Thorsteinsson, also known to players as CCP Explorer.

The profile is written by Erico Guizzo, titled "Erlendur Thorsteinsson: Master of the Universe." Guizzo's piece sheds some light on what brought the Computer Science Ph.D. to CCP Games in order to tackle the myriad challenges of improving EVE's single world environment. The article also gives mention to the work done behind the scenes on the title's more ambitious projects, including adding wormhole exploration to the game with the Apocrypha expansion, and the forthcoming Walking in Stations where player avatars will step out of their ships for the first time.

[Via CrazyKinux]

Everyone loves Lego, right? That childhood pastime of snapping together pieces to create new and often bizarre creations is coming to the spaceships of EVE Online, but not all players are happy to hear about this.

The next EVE Online expansion, Apocrypha, is going to introduce some new aspects to gameplay. Some of these new features, like wormhole exploration, seem to be received positively by the player base. But others -- like the modular "Tech III" ship designs -- have drawn no small amount of criticism from EVE's subscribers. Tech III is an aspect of the game that has players pretty well divided, much like the upcoming Walking in Stations (aka Ambulation) expansion. The sentiment a number of players have been vocal about is 'Do we really need this?' Whines and tears are a daily occurrence on the game's official forums and perhaps the opinions voiced there aren't necessarily indicative of the sentiments of the larger player base. But concerns about Tech III are also beginning to show up on player blogs, far from the bandwagoning of the EVE Online forums, and in some cases from players who know the game very well.

A little under five years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a new online game he was playing called EVE Online. A key part of his pitch was that the game was less than a year old and I should get in on the ground floor. My friend correctly anticipated the massive success that EVE would be and that it would be good to get involved as early as possible. Over the years, that decision to start playing EVE in early 2004 has afforded me a lot of opportunities, not least of all being able to contribute to EON magazine and finally become a columnist here at Massively.

Getting in on the ground floor:
Five years down the line from EVE day one, it's easy for new players or those that want to sign up to feel like they've missed the boat and can't achieve what the older players have. In the same way that my friend introduced me to EVE, it's my turn to try and convince people that they can still get in on the ground floor of something new and immense. With two major expansions coming soon, including the revolutionary "Walking in Stations" expansion, I firmly believe that right now could be the best time in five years to get in on the ground floor of the incredible on-going journey that is EVE Online.

In this article, I discuss the reasons why EVE will continue to endure for the foreseeable future and how getting involved now could be just as good as getting involved from day one.

Everyone knows that the death penalty in EVE Online is harsh but is it really as bad as we make it out to be? Is losing a ship really a devastating blow or does the emotional factor of losing something we've put care and attention into make us exaggerate the loss? Since EVE's gameplay is focused entirely on piloting ships rather than walking around with your character, we can get very attached to our ships and feel a great sense of loss at their destruction. It can be hard to keep in mind that our ships in EVE are just tools, which can make their loss feel a lot harsher than it should be. Is this the fault of the player for getting attached to their ship or of the game design for not encouraging us to form attachments with our characters instead?

In this brief article, I discuss some of the golden rules of EVE used to minimise the death penalty and ask whether our perceptions of EVE Online's death penalty are really that accurate.

For most of us who weren't able to attend EVE Fanfest 2008 earlier this month in Reykjavik, at least there have been videos of the various presentations and panels. CCP Games released quite a number of these just over a week ago, but they recently went ahead and added more.

The new footage, which can be seen in higher resolution on the EVE Online Videos page or on the CCP Games YouTube page, gives viewers a look at:

• Designing the Walking in Stations expansion

• The Fanfest 2008 PvP Tournament

• Roxor

• QA! Are we ready to ship?

• TQ Servers: Making mountains out of molehills

All footage on the EVE Online Videos page is available in two resolutions, viewable as embedded video or downloadable.

Some new directions for EVE Online were announced at Fanfest 2008 earlier this month. Torfi Frans Olafsson is the Senior Producer for EVE Online, who presented many of these new features. Eurogamer's Oli Welsh recently spoke with Torfi Frans about the Fanfest announcements and how they'll impact the game as it moves forward.

The interview focuses heavily on the Walking in Stations expansion, which -- despite no small amount of negative sentiment from some of the playerbase -- has the potential to expand the limits of gameplay in New Eden. "The expansion is about growing EVE Online as the general-purpose science fiction simulator out there... the whole idea is just to deepen the experience," Torfi Frans tells Welsh.

When EVE Online launched in 2003, it came in a box through the game's publisher, Simon and Schuster Interactive. But for much of EVE's lifespan, it's been a digital product. Nothing to buy at a store, no physical media to save. It seems CCP Games has gone retro, from what was announced by CCP's CEO Hilmar Pétursson today, live from EVE Fanfest 2008 in Reykjavik. He announced that CCP Games will be partnering with Atari to establish a retail presence once again... which is fitting really, as Atari will also be publishing Ghostbusters. Hilmar introduced a short presentation by David Gardner, Atari's CEO, who discussed the partnership with CCP Games.

EVE typically has a winter expansion and a summer expansion. The winter expansion, Quantum Rise, is just days away. The summer expansion is expected (but not confirmed) to include Walking in Stations, only there's a little twist with the timing... They're not waiting for summer. It's coming in March. In a box. In your local game store. That's the information we have at this time, but we'll keep you informed as more details surface.

Update: Note that we haven't locked down a release date with Walking in Stations yet. Massively will report on Walking in Station's official release date once that's available -- at this time we only know it's tentatively slated for 2009.

In further news coming from EVE Fanfest 2008, CCP Games has given a press-only presentation detailing the upcoming Walking in Stations expansion for EVE Online. While this is an aspect of the game that's so far been a divisive issue among EVE players, the expansion will allow players to step out of their ships and interact as highly detailed avatars in ship station interiors and captain's quarters aboard their own ships (presumably while docked in a station hangar).

Walking in Stations is a project that's drawn on the talents of "special effects artists from the world of television and movies into the video game medium, a number of whom have been brought on to the team at CCP," writes Jon Wood of MMORPG.com, reporting from Reykjavik.

EVE Online's Fanfest 2008 is now underway, and reports are already coming through on what's happening in Reykjavik. CCP Games held a press conference that discussed EVE's technical side, namely its server technology, but also touched upon EVE's impending graphic enhancements in 2009. EVE Online's Premium 'Trinity' graphics engine was a significant leap forward in the game. While some players felt that the graphics as they were prior to Trinity were still ahead of the curve in terms of what's expected of an MMO, the look of the game changed dramatically with Trinity. However, the Trinity deployment wasn't a complete revamp of EVE's look. Ships and stations benefited from Premium graphics, but other celestial objects did not, jump gates notwithstanding.

"EVE is in a state where, if you run the Premium graphics edition, half of it is done, you could say," said Chief Technologist Halldor Fannar of CCP Games, at Reykjavik's Fanfest 2008, as reported by Oli Welsh of Eurogamer. Future graphics updates will bring celestial objects in line with what's currently seen in Trinity, and may well arrive with the forthcoming Walking in Stations expansion which is slated to launch after the Quantum Rise expansion, just around the corner.

While the official EVE Online forums have always been very active, there are other options out there. For those who like how busy the official forums are, but not the rules that govern it, there's Scrapheap Challenge. SH-C is a forum which is chiefly dedicated to discussing EVE Online, but not moderated by CCP Games themselves. Recent months, however, have seen a large number of EVE players striking out on their own, with their own blogs that focus on a particular aspect of the game linked to that blogger's playstyle. Industry, finance, piracy, 0.0 alliance warfare, and now even boosters (drugs) are being written about on a daily basis.

While over 100 of these blogs are out there, the more prolific among them have joined under the banner of CrazyKinux's Blog Pack. By all accounts, it's been a successful community effort by EVE players, and now CrazyKinux is adding another dimension to the Blog Pack: conversation topics that are collectively tackled by the various bloggers, called "Blog Banter." The first Blog Banter got underway this past week, and the first issue up for discussion has been a timely one: EVE's Walking in Stations expansion, formerly known as Ambulation, which Fanfest attendees will get to try out firsthand in just a few more days. The question itself was proposed by PsycheDiver, who asked, "Ambulation: What are your hopes for your avatar and new functionality of stations?"

Given all the EVE Online news of the past two weeks, not limited to new features being added to the game and old 'features' being taken away, CCP Games has announced a Live Dev Blog for tomorrow, October 23, at 20:00 GMT. The event is expected to last for about one hour. This time, the Senior Producer of EVE Online, CCP t0rfifrans, will be fielding questions from the players. As with the last few live dev blogs, the way this works is you need to post in the announcement thread with the questions you'd like answered.

You can listen to the dev blog tomorrow by joining the in-game channel 'Live Dev Blog' and enabling EVE Voice via your right-click options once you're in. No doubt there will be a wave of Ghost Training nerf questions but it seems unlikely that this issue will be addressed any more beyond the two dev blogs on the matter. Then again, why should that stop you from trying if you've got legitimate concerns? But this would also be an excellent time for people to get Walking in Stations (Ambulation) questions answered as CCP is prepping a playable demo of it for Fanfest attendees, not to mention asking about new ship models like the Orca capital industrial ship.

The latest EVE Online dev blog comes to us from CCP Eris Discordia. Her post, "Boozing in Stations", deals with the Walking in Stations expansion (formerly known by the much cooler name 'Ambulation'). She states that CCP Games is making good progress on Walking in Stations, but some more feedback from the players is needed: "We are continuously testing, designing, integrating, iterating and polishing on our internal server, but something is missing... the MM part from MMO -- the massively multiplayer part. Our fix? Open up the internal release for the Fanfest attendees so that for a few days our internal release will be public!" As reported earlier, EVE Fanfest 2008 attendees will get to preview Walking in Stations firsthand, well in advance of the expansion's release.

She writes that this preview is not a public beta or even an alpha, just that CCP wants to share what they've done with the players. "There is only so much that we can explain through pictures and visual aids. In the end, you need to experience it in order to get a good idea of what we are truly doing." Eris also writes that EVE Fanfest 2008 will have a number of presentations by CCP devs on the Walking in Stations expansion, as well as roundtable discussions. Check out her "Boozing in Stations" dev blog for more info about where the Ambulation... no, Walking in Stations expansion is in terms of its development and what EVE Fanfest 2008 attendees can look forward to.

Ambulation, or 'Walking in Stations' as it now seems to be known, is a hotly anticipated feature coming to EVE Online. It represents the first effort by CCP Games to add a more interactive dimension to the game, where players will finally be able to step out of their ships to socialize, play games, and ... modify one another's bodies? Apparently so.

While some information about Walking in Stations is already known, EVE Stratics recently turned up more details. Trish "Seridove" Bennon and Michael "Solace" Lutes recently got some face time at PAX 2008 with CCP Games devs Jeremy Albert (Associate Producer) and Noah Ward (Lead Game Designer, aka CCP Hammerhead) who talked about aspects of the expansion.