EVE Online Getting TV, Comic Book Adaptations 81
CCP Games, creators of the successful space MMORPG EVE Online, have announced they will be harvesting stories from within the game to create comic books, a TV series, and possibly even films set in the EVE universe. EVE has never set records for the size of its userbase, but it's long been known as a game that generates some of the best emergent gameplay in the industry. From battles involving thousands of players to in-game confidence schemes involving currency worth tens of thousands of real dollars, it's likely you've heard about players' exploits even if you haven't played the game. CCP is now looking to bring the EVE universe to a wider audience, and rather than having a group of writers dictate all of the lore, they're letting the players take part. They've set up a site where users can share their tales and vote on those of others. CCP has partnered with Dark Horse Comics to make a comic book out of the stories, and with a production company to make a live-action TV show.
since you brought it up... (Score:2)
Don't all games do this? (Score:2)
I thought this was standard operating procedure for any game these days.
Here are two pages full of examples, many for games most people never heard about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games [wikipedia.org]
http://comicbookdb.com/user_list.php?ID=466&user= [comicbookdb.com]
That being said; EVE Online has done amazing things through their willingness to listen and work with fans and players. I wish more games were like that.
Re: Don't all games do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the right director is chosen, I dare say Eve could work as a great series. There's some deep stories behind the factions, & if the series explains why they are out there in New Eden, I have high hopes.
I used to play Eve, but got bored of it, I'd be far more interested in a TV series to be honest.
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Make it like a Sci-fi version of Suits, where the hot shot space-lawyers are sorting out all the high-stakes corporate espionage that goes on in that agme.
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The interesting thing about your comment is, ...and that's only *one* aspect of that universe. I'd still watch it though. I used to have that trailer loop endlessly with that mad techno soundtrack.
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That's what I mean, so many levels in Eve, from corporate espionage, war zones, pirates, smugglers, & even civilians. Could be a great universe to write a series for, the capacity for some eye watering special effects is boundless. Cap battles, raiding squads destroying transports, even just a busy starbase would be impressive.
Again, all comes down to whether there's a good director & writers for the series.
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Unfortunately, now I've been playing it since december, it basically boils down to:
- spreadsheets in space
- shoot red crosses at huge distances
The interesting stuff always happens "somewhere else", or you need to skill up more (I'm at 6 months training time and I still can't fit a battlecruiser for PvP due to skilling issues), or you're not in a big corp/alliance so you get to miss out on all the fun stuff anyway.
Which is why I think a movie would be great:
- No need to skill up
- No need to spend days and da
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You supposed problems are easily solved. First, if you don't like poring over spreadsheets, then DON'T. Only idiot mix/maxers do that who give a shit whether their missisles do an extra 1.5342% damage or an extra 1.5368% damage. If you want to play the game, then play the game, and fuck spreadsheets. You don't need spreadsheets. You don't need fancy fitting programs, either. I've been having a blast playing the game forever (about 80 million skill points now) and I never, ever, even once, have used a
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If the right director is chosen, I dare say Eve could work as a great series.
As long as it's not Uwe Boll.
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Actually, Postal [wikipedia.org] was pretty good.
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I thought this was standard operating procedure for any game these days.
I think the difference is between "movie/TV show ostensibly set in vaguely the same universe, and maybe we'll throw in a character or two with the same name" and using stories that actually happened involving player actions.
I'd really like to see one of the many EVE heists play out. There are remarkably few sci-fi heist stories about (the only ones that comes to mind are an episode or two of Firefly, and "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – CASH EYE", but that was an Oceans Eleven homage).
Slashvertisement (Score:2)
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Because it's interesting. It's one of the more interesting game worlds because of the economy and the massive effect that player action and interaction can have on the entire world, including what are technically social as opposed to game-rule-defined interactions. There's a lot more to lean about from it than there is from a game like WoW, or practically every other game on the market.
Re:Slashvertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Because in cases of Slashvertisement, you see some product we could give a shit less about, get a glowing story on slashdot, likely because they PAID slashdot to put the story up. In this case, it's a product a lot of readers here are interested in, and was likely posted just because people here are into this sort of thing, I doubt CCP paid anyone to post it.
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And you forgot to mention that the product doesn't really exist yet. Are they even in production? Can we still contribute? Now this is very much relevant to my interests.
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Why is it that I don't see anyone complaining about "Slashvertisement" when EVE Online is being pushed? It gets a disproportionately large number of articles, compared to user base. Why?
I have an ingenious explanation which explains why nobody is screaming 'slashvertisement', *and* why this article was posted considering the mind-boggingly enormously huge number of articles compared to the userbase...
OK, want to know why? OK,get ready....this is big-sky thinking sort of stuff, and in many circles this sort of thinking may be highly controversial, but im going to put it out there, and watch what sort of reaction happens once the world is presented with this utterly incredible, stunning leve
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"Its not a slashvertisement"
I don't believe you. Every article on bitcoin has cries of slashvertisement. Yes, they aren't hawking a single product on a single site, but they are advertising a "product".
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The user base might be small (compared e.g. to WoW) however they all play on a single server. 65k concurrent users online *on one server* is something impressive. (A typical WoW server has less than 2k users and often less than 1k online).
I did fleet battles in Eve where both sides had far over 1k ships in the same single solar system, and roughly the same number still incomming.
That is as if all WoW players on the same server would be in the same Alterac Valley (a battleground) instance.
Can't wait... (Score:2)
Re:Can't wait... (Score:4, Funny)
...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
Me neither. Its inevitable considering how internet spaceships and fantasy sword and sorcery are so alike in almost every way imaginable.
Remember, CCP Games had to change the name of the game to EvE because they were about to get sued for copyright and trademark infringement for the word-for-word similarity that Dungeons and Dragons has to EvE Online. Almost every person who has ever seen these two games side by side actually cannot tell them apart, such is the similarity in evidence here.
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*rolls*
ThePeices places a Critical Hit against Bieeanda with Biting Sarcasm and Intellectual Dry Wit.
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Well, I guess the chicken finally has his answer.
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...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
Me neither. Its inevitable considering how internet spaceships and fantasy sword and sorcery are so alike in almost every way imaginable.
Remember, CCP Games had to change the name of the game to EvE because they were about to get sued for copyright and trademark infringement for the word-for-word similarity that Dungeons and Dragons has to EvE Online. Almost every person who has ever seen these two games side by side actually cannot tell them apart, such is the similarity in evidence here.
You should see what Phil and Kaja Folio had to say about the differences between High Tech role player, and Medieval fantasy role playing: "None."
Portal spells? Windows.
"With this rod of power I banish thee to nothing" / "Eat hot photons, alien slime".
That sort of thing.
Oh, sure, some minor differences.
"Help!" / "Sorry, we're 6 months away because of the distance of space" vs
"Help!" / "You rang?"
[ rummaging though my link collection ]
http://www.airshipentertainment.com/growfcomic.php?date=20070617 [airshipentertainment.com]
Read it. Y
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Considering CCP owns White Wolf[1], wouldn't it be better to compare it to Kindred: the Embraced?
[1] - Yes, I know about Onyx Path, and Rich and Eddy and everything, let's keep it simple; ruleslight as it were.
Gotta be there (Score:5, Interesting)
For most of the content in EVE, you simply need to be there, on site, to experience it to its fullest.
Sure, you can watch a live stream of the Battle of Asakai [youtube.com], where enough ships were present to instate a time dilation factor of 90%, and force the movement of the system to its separate physical node, but it doesn't capture the pure awe at the number and size of ships, the cacophony of fleet chatter, and such.
You can read a comic about how a young, intrepid explorer (yours truly, in fact...) went through a decaying wormhole to explore the hostile system on the other side, forgetting about the 1-hour timer, then found that the wormhole vanished, forcing him to take the "clone express" home, but it doesn't capture the terror upon finding no trace of your exit, and the realization that you're alone in a hostile system, with no chance of rescue, and any moment, hostiles may come hunting for your little frigate.
You can read about how an organized wormhole raid got stuck inside when their salvaging Noctis went through the low-mass wormhole first (instead of yours truly's scanner ship, which could have found the new exit), followed by some combat ships before the wormhole vanished, stranding the rest of the fleet outside, but it doesn't really do justice to the uproarious laughter of the fleet, then the creeping dread that the enemy knows we've arrived and are actively hunting us, and we don't know where to run, nor the relief when our commanding officer begins negotiations for the location of the new exit, and we return to known space 10 million credits poorer, but with our ships intact.
Most content in EVE is like real life - you gotta be there to fully appreciate the joke/story.
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to instate a time dilation factor of 90%
I love it when fanbois tout shitty hacks and game limitations as main features of the product
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Apple store was so popular and packed with people I couldn't hold my phone "the right way" hence no reception. .. while standing in line in a parking lot.
Club was so cool we spend whole night dancing
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You know what is even more proffered than graceful failure? Moving into >2000 year and finally supporting more than one CPU thread per solar system
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I would think Eve would support more than one CPU thread per solar system or what would be the point of moving other systems off the time dilated server
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No, it doesn't. EVE is hard-designed to be one thread per system. The other systems just get less hardware resources. If the node is put into reinforced(which is done manually by CCP admins), the other systems are "rebooted" on other nodes for the duration, which can cause people to lose connection.
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Also reinforcing before the fight usually means moving SOL from "slow" (3GHz) blade onto top of the line Xeon X5698 4.4 GHz servers (even faster than the Jita node).
This model is not sustainable and pretty much sucks donkey balls.
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Further, what's the point of a fancy remake of the parallelism architecture? They already get substantial increases in capacity over time from better server equipment.
Sure, they can make a moderately better game at great cost, but that's not much of a case.
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The point is to make a system that can be dynamically reconfigured for increased performance on the fly. Currently, nodes need to be put into reinforced mode manually, which requires a reinit, and thus is generally only done during downtime.
At great cost? Why would it have to be at great cost? It could even save them money in the long run. Also, if done Erlang-style, they'd also get better reliability/fault tolerance.
Instead, CCP are wasting a lot of CPU cycles, pissing about bragging about being "Agile", i
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The point is to make a system that can be dynamically reconfigured for increased performance on the fly.
They already have that. The game segregates everything into star systems and stations. That's easy to parallelize and under normal loads a server handles several star systems.
At great cost? Why would it have to be at great cost?
It's a huge change in the architecture. As I understand it from about a year ago, they cut out a lot of the player interactions in heavy battle conditions, introduced time dialation (which is a remarkable innovation, I might add), and pumped up the servers that are intended to handle battles.
But you still have a large number of inte
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They already have that. The game segregates everything into star systems and stations. That's easy to parallelize and under normal loads a server handles several star systems.
Every star system and the stations in them is limited to 1 thread, ergo load cannot be spread over multiple cores. The activities that run independently of star systems are things such as Market, Contracts, Chat etc. Also, it cannot be dynamically reallocated. Moving a system to a reinforced node can only be done during a restart, with the system being reinforced started on a separate node with beefier processor(And even then you can only use a single core....)
It's a huge change in the architecture. As I understand it from about a year ago, they cut out a lot of the player interactions in heavy battle conditions, introduced time dialation (which is a remarkable innovation, I might add), and pumped up the servers that are intended to handle battles. But you still have a large number of interactions between players. If you hide some players from each other, then you can end up with situations like battlefield commanders unable to target critical ships because they can't see them (focus fire or everyone shooting the same target is a key tactic). Ships can have many drones apiece (5 for normal ships, 10-20 for "carriers" and "supercarriers"). And of course, someone will want to see the pretty explosions and pew pews. That means your multiserver infrastructure will have considerably more interaction than the current Eve cluster experiences. And if you're going to bother with that, why not just have a really beefy server with multiple CPUs which has built-in the necessary communication network?
It's a major change, for sure, but it doesn't h
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Interactions square as the number of players
No it doesnt. How many times does your ship 'interact' with ships next to you in your fleet? How much do you interact with ships that are on ANOTHER GRID in same SOL?
Of course that doesnt mean CCP wont suck - I also remember one blog post boasting about leet Python hax0r discovering every single additional missile on the grid was generating exponential load because of the data structure they decided to use.
And a big limiting factor in the current size of the biggest fights is the lag. Lower it and more players will show.
Let them. Space itself is the limiting factor, just like in a big crowd you reach a point where you ca
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> Your average GPU can solve 500-700 of those MILLION TIMES PER SECOND, or million of those 500 times per second if you prefer. 500 million of those every EVE server tick.
umm im off by 3 orders of magnitude, its billions not millions :)
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What Dyinobal said: the server cluster employs time dilation to cope with the load of many characters present in one system or constellation (one level up from systems in the three-tier location system) - the greater the load, the greater the slowdown (which, by the way, is only indicated to players by a small dial on the screen, not an actual slowdown). In extreme cases, such as the 1000+-ship Battle of Asakai, the system or constellation may be moved to a separate server node to avoid crashing the entire
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the greater the load, the greater the slowdown (which, by the way, is only indicated to players by a small dial on the screen, not an actual slowdown)
wait what? no actual slowdown? Have you ever been in TD system?
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My favorite moments:
- Running a successful career in L4 missions with a ship that can't really tank them, warping away every time the damage gets too much, and then one day discovering the hard way that CCP just introduced scramblers in mission targets.
- Seeing a bunch of obscure tags on contract for $200k each, with a market buy order for $10M each, and buying them - then realising the market order was for 100 units, and just canceled, put by the the same person who you just purchased them from. Followed b
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In EvE there are no "1-hour timers" on any wormholes. This kind of throws the rest of your paean into the "unreliable info" category.
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Not one hour straight away, but if you scan it down, find it says "Reaching the end of its life" (0-4 hours remaining), then come back about three hours later and it's still there, you can be pretty sure it only has one hour left of its life.
Re:Gotta be there (Score:4, Insightful)
In the context of the game what you say makes sense, but we're talking TV or comics here. A medium where we're going to be introduced to a band of characters, their ship, the people they run with, and a familiarity with their histories all as part of a long story arc leading up the Battle of Asakai. By the time we get to the battle we'll have had so much invested in the characters we've come to know and love, the outcome of the battle will be just as important to us as it was to you when you played it.
I didn't need to live in the 24th century to feel connected to the the battle for DS9 [youtube.com], my investment in the story of the people who lived there made me feel connected. If the cast and crew of EvE Online: The Series do their jobs right I won't need to live there to feel connected to the Battle of Asakai [youtube.com] either.
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For most of the content in EVE, you simply need to be there, on site, to experience it to its fullest.
I disagree completely. You bring up Asakai as an example so let's run with that: Pressing F1 on whatever square bracket your FC tells you to while everything feels like you're moving through syrup (10% TiDi doesn't make a submarine sim any better) is not a fun or "full" experience. Dealing with lag, desync, bugs (drone control, argh), the terrible EVE UI, .... is not fun in any way. The only reason you undergo that ordeal at all is because it is embedded in a somewhat interesting metagame (which takes place
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I hear people often say "bad UI" but no one comes up with hints of improvement.
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Randomly change anything and it will probably be an improvement, is how bad it is.
Despite that, I played the game for over 5 years. That's how good the meta-game is, if you're in the right alliance at least ;)
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Well the changes they did the last two years are a pain, I still hate this new Font ... and where is my. hangar and my items, lol. I have to "open" my ships cargo to find the hangar ... how do you do that in a capsule? (I go via assets then, but it is so retarded)
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Yes did that. But the pinned windows get so often lost :)
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Less intuitive than Dwarf fortress but roughly as engaging, is how I'd describe it.
Also: Elephants need 75 days of gameplay till your skilled enough for your dwarves to ride them, for no good reason.
Ie a total nightmare to get past the learning curve, but when you do, it's possible one of the most engaging and intricate games available.
Reaction to Star Citizen? (Score:1)
Wonder if this was already in works, or if they are trying to further market and entrench due to concern of Star Citizen and the new Elite games possibly stealing some of their user base.
Accountants...in...SPAAAAACCEE (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally, a sci-fi movie where Microsoft can sponsor Excel placements.
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If you're playing EVE without a spreadsheet... you're doing it wrong.
Actually, I think they should integrate Google Docs with EVE. Or even drop the entire GUI and just keep Google Docs as main EVE interface.
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True, but it also requires a quite large organization. I don't think playing EVE outside a large corp is viable, unless you only trade/mine. And even then, mining with a mining corps means you get much more money faster.
WoW has explicitly toned that down, and I'm not sure it's a good thing. When large guilds were no longer a neccessity, they split up in minor factions and that took away a lot of the game appeal to me. But finding a good corp in EVE is difficult. And if you can only spend some time now and t
EvE The Movie (Score:5, Funny)
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A new pilot will spend the entire first half of the movie downloading skills into his brain, then will spend the rest of the movie mining an asteroid, only to have his can stolen by some guy in a destroyer.
And to portray the annoying scam bots in local at Jita the director will use a bunch of Jar Jar Binks look-a-likes.
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I'm interested to see how they portray the Goons on TV.
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Probably they will be wearing Guy Fawkes masks all the time. Easy to spot and categorise as bad guys thriving in chaos and confusion - just the way the film industry likes it...
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Still a better love-story than Twilight.
Oh yeah, XLS. (Score:3)
I don't play the game, but I am a huge fan of the spreadsheet adaptations. I mean, when you see a Titan stretched out on a pivot table, it's like, oh yeah. This is the medium it was meant for.
A great EVE mechinima: Clear Skies (Score:3)
Some people made a series of sci-fi mechinima features [wikipedia.org] using EVE for exteriors and custom Half-Life 2 sets for interiors and characters. Very well done, each is better than the previous.
Clear Skies [youtube.com]
Clear Skies 2 part 1 [youtube.com]
Clear Skies 3 [youtube.com]
Web site [clearskiesthemovie.com]