Spacefaring massively multiplayer online game EVE Online may be going mobile in the near future. At their annual EVE Fanfest, developer CCP was showing off the graphic-intensive gaming running on an Nvidia Tegra 2-powered Android phone and tablet. Of course, these are just preliminary testing phases, but it’s not like there isn’t a precedent set; Vendetta Online is doing more or less the same thing, with the added challenge of real-time combat (though it isn’t nearly as huge as EVE). A lot of MMOs, like World of Warcraft, opt instead for mobile companion apps to check on how virtual items are selling, or review character data, rather than running the whole game, but as 3D graphic rendering capabilities expand and wireless connection speed and reliability become less of an issue, fully mobile MMO games are not out of the question. CCP’s CTO Halldór Fannar said of the transition:
“We’ve been working a lot on the backend to enable EVE over HTTP, but the problem we run into is that a lot of people seem to equate that with a web browser. It doesn’t necessarily mean that; it means any of these devices can start extracting data and also writing data back. So it opens up the possibility of having dedicated applications for doing market transactions, managing your skill queue and, for instance, fitting your spaceship. … What you saw today was more of an exploratory project we started with Nvidia to see what quality of graphics we could get on these devices. [For] trading on the market or managing your skill queue, you don’t need much in the way of graphics, but we’re a very visually oriented company and players are really attached to the [ship] models. It would be far more meaningful for them to see their assets.”
For those unfamiliar with EVE Online, or even MMO’s, it’s a subscription-based computer game that takes place solely online. You create a character in a fictional universe with a variety of skills (ranging from combat to trade, manufacturing, hacking, electronic warfare, to transportation, and more) that can be trained over time in the background, even when you’re offline. Players interact with environments and one another in a variety of cooperative and competitive ways, including blowing each others’ expensive ships to smithereens. What really sets EVE apart is that instead of splitting up its players across multiple manageable servers, EVE puts everybody into a single, giant, shared universe where at any given time there are tens of thousands of people playing. Check out more of the game info over here.
As you might be able to tell, I’ve already in a “few” hours into the game, but I rarely stick with it for more than a few months. It can very quickly turn into a second job, what with regional politics between player-run corporations, asset management, trading and transport, and a lot of nitty-gritty math running behind all of the various game mechanics. It’s certainly stimulating, if you’re looking for something to get absorbed in, and there’s a wealth of interesting back stories explaining various factions and interstellar empires.
Currently I’m a little more interested in CCP’s next project, called Dust 514, which will be an entirely separate first-person shooter game which takes place on the various planets within the EVE universe. The kicker is that the results of the battles played in Dust 514 will affect players and their corporations in the EVE Online MMO at large. Now, I could really see that scheme working really well for mobile, too – what if there was a suite of mini-games that directly affected the EVE universe? A dedicated market/trading app is a good start, but maybe some gemcutting game that could yield custom mining laser crystals, or something. Add accelerometer and gyroscope support so you could manually cut up some precious space stone across an ion bandsaw, polish with touch contgrols, and depending on how precisely you work, you could generate an item in EVE Online that could help you mine asteroids more efficiently.
Just a thought. Any MMO-players out there interested in that kind of thing?
[via EDGE]