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EVE Online Expansion
ELECTRONIC ENTERTAINMENT EXPO, LOS ANGELES, CA -- MAY 10, 2006 -- The
upcoming expansion to EVE Online—codenamed Kali—will introduce an
innovative Advanced Reactive Content System (ARCS), in which the
political landscape and physical borders of nation-states within the
game can be altered dynamically through the collective outcome of
player actions, thus directly controlling the game universe destiny and
resulting storyline.
CCP will also release a newer version of the current award-winning
graphics engine for EVE Online, which will take advantage of the latest
DirectX 9 features to produce superior imagery and detail than the
existing client. This Herculean effort requires that the game’s three
hundred plus starships—each of which is composed of millions of
triangles—be remodeled in ultra-high resolution. Players will then see
these ships rendered by the power of per-pixel lighting, HDR, and
soft-self shadowing.
"Games either provide active content, in which the player reacts to
artificial changes in the game universe, or they provide reactive
content, in which the entire game universe reacts to the actions that
players decide for themselves," said Magnus Bergsson, CMO of CCP Games.
"CCP believes strongly that the players should be the center focus of
the storyline and control the evolution of the game universe. The Path
to Kali will lead EVE Online to great heights in reactive content and
further establish EVE Online as the premium free-form MMOG on the
market today."
Parallel development of an entirely new graphics engine called "EVE
Vista" is also underway. The new graphics engine—named “Trinity
II”—will take full advantage of the new features and optimizations
offered by DirectX 10, which will ship with the new Windows Vista OS.
The highly anticipated graphics API will give Trinity II the ability to
render far greater detail by leveraging the fully programmable shader
pipeline and utilizing the API’s built-in instancing support. The
combined technologies will allow CCP to continue building dynamic
environments with visual effects that will surpass the already stunning
graphical presentation of the game.
The final component of Kali will be factional warfare, in which players
will have the option to align themselves with an NPC faction. Also
included in the Path to Kali will be the opening of new regions in the
game universe, the addition of significant exploration content,
next-generation player R&D that includes reverse engineering
capabilities, additional ship upgrades and player professions, the
introduction of combat boosters, and the addition of new warships.
The Path to Kali will begin in Q2 2006 with the first release, and end in 2007 with the factional warfare implementation.
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