Letters from the editor | EVE Online

Letters from the editor

2006-06-12 - By Gnauton

Hi guys,

I’m gonna pound out a few words about the main projects I’m working on these days. I pondered doing a playlist thing like t20 did with his blog, but the new Aphex Twin is pretty much the only thing I’m listening to these days. (Incidentally, if you like music, you should go pick it up.)

Main things right now are:

• Story outline for the Path to Kali

As most of our long-suffering, battle-hardened roleplayers know, we’ve generally tried to maintain a certain open-endedness when it comes to in-game story interactions, allowing players to impact the course of the story for better or worse. For the Path to Kali the game will undergo changes on a grand scale, the largest among them of course being Factional Warfare, something that will change the landscape of empire space and drastically alter the way players will interact with the story.

To adequately set the scene for that, some things must perforce be set in stone. We’ve therefore completed an outline for the way the story will progress in the coming months, with an emphasis on creating points for player interaction along the way. If all goes well, this will allow interested parties to participate in the story while still permitting us to lay the foundations necessary for the new and improved sandbox.

• Chronicle detailing the current story status quo

This one’s been in the works for a while, but is inching closer to completion. I’m basically going to draw together the plot lines that have been left hanging in the last 6 months or so and bring them up to date in a nice and neat package. The Chronicle will be named after our current game version, and its release will signal everything’s in place for the story to kick off again. I’m getting some help on the story front next month; 2 new people, one of them a full-time writer, have been added to the roster, so I won’t have to divide my time as much as I currently do.

• New event ships On my other monitor, in the embryo of an Excel sheet, over twenty new ships are waiting to enter the world. These ships are being made for a dual purpose: firstly as event rewards and secondly as a way of adding more spice and immersion to event fleets. Hopefully this will stimulate even greater event participation while increasing the palette of ships available out there. In terms of power, they’ll be slightly modified versions of tech 1 base counterparts, significantly less powerful than the faction ships currently on TQ, but more often than not slanted towards niche roles. Should make the spacelanes even more varied.


In addition to these main projects, there’s the day-to-day incidentals like vetting event producers’ ideas for story consistency, making sure AURORA and the Interstellar Correspondents get the in-house support they need, typing up blurbs for various departments, spell-checking and editing outgoing texts, reviewing and editing fiction submissions, coming up with names for various sundries, writing descriptions for even more various sundries, correcting in-game typos, and poking my co-workers in the ribs with a pointy stick then running away (the last, though not technically part of the job description, is nonetheless a most enjoyable activity and highly recommended).

That’s all for now. Peace.