Every six months, CCP releases a free expansion to the game, introducing a major new mechanic. The last expansion, Dominion, refreshed the 0.0 sovereignty mechanics. Apocrypha, the expansion before that, added wormholes and Tech 3 cruisers. The next expansion, Tyrannis, is adding something called (dryly) “Planetary Interaction.”
Thus far, planets in EVE have had pretty much no role. In the fiction, they house billions of people and drive the interstellar economies and politics. In practice, though, players never interact with them. They’re beautiful (as of the latest expansion, which refreshed their graphics), but almost entirely useless. This expansion changes that. Players will be able to extract, refine, combine, and ship all kinds of new resources around the surface of planets. Players will design and manage networks of these new buildings based on planets’ surfaces. Eventually, this will all plug in with DUST 514, CCP’s upcoming team FPS game. Eventually, players of the console-based game will be able to serve as ground troops for corporations in EVE, attacking enemy ground installations.
We’re still three months out from Tyrannis’ launch, but CCP has been releasing a stream of details about it. They started off with a Dev Blog post – the primary channel for EVE’s designers and developers to interact with the EVE community. At that point, we got a very high level view of the goals of the project, plus an awesome MS Paint diagram of what the UI looks like.
Relatively soon after that, CCP’s current development version of this feature was released to Singularity – the EVE test server. This means anyone can log into this alternate reality version of EVE and play with upcoming features. This includes the first drafts of planetary interaction. A pilot in EVE University (my alma mater!) put together a wonderful video demonstrating the UI (embedded below).
This kicked off a process as old as MMOs – deconstructing new game mechanics. For some people, this is the game. Being the first person to figure out how to build effective planetary mining and manufacturing systems is really satisfying for some kinds of players. For these people, EVE is giving them the experience of doing what amounts to original research. Early adopters will figure out the optimal ways to do this process and then write guides and make videos explaining it to the rest of us. After a few months, I’m sure these groups of early adopters will have worked it all out, collaborating across forums and in-game chat channels and the whole system will be as well understood as wormholes are now. We’re seeing the beginnings of that now, on blog posts like this excellent one. (If you want to read more posts like that, this post by CrazyKinux has links to all the major posts on the subject.)
But those heady first days of confusion and frustration are an experience that you won’t find in other genres in quite the same way. Plus, if you figure this stuff out quickly you can be making a mint while the rest of the galaxy catches up. I’m sorely tempted to make an industrial character to give this a shot…
