Paradox buys White Wolf and VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE from CCP

Paradox Entertainment has purchased the White Wolf roleplaying company and all of its licences from CCP. These licences included the Exalted and Trinity roleplaying games, but, far more importantly, the family of games known as World of Darkness, most notably Vampire: The Masquerade.

White Wolf was bought by Icelandic firm CCP - the creators of EVE Online - in 2006 with the intention of releasing an online roleplaying game based on the World of Darkness properties. However, the project sunk into development hell before CCP canned it early last year, preferring to refocus their attention on EVE Online.

Paradox's purchase of White Wolf came out of the blue, but is highly encouraging. Paradox is a Swedish developer best-known for the Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron strategy games, but it has recently made a move into publishing third-party games, including the hugely successful Cities: Skylines and Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity. Their collaboration with Obsidian is particularly important with regards to the White Wolf news, because several of Obsidian's senior developers and programmers used to work at Troika Games, who developed the critically-acclaimed Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines in 2004, still rated as one of the best CRPGs ever made.

In a statement, Paradox confirmed that they will be pursuing new video games based on the White Wolf properties in the near future, which is sure to delight fans of what has traditionally been the second-most-popular roleplaying game of all time.

Happy 10th Anniversary to EVE ONLINE

EVE Online, the popular space opera massively multiplayer online game, celebrates its tenth anniversary today.

Launched on 6 May 2003, EVE Online was an attempt to bring the spaceflight, trading and combat of games such as Elite to the online multiplayer arena. Set more then 20,000 years in the future, the game's premise is that a large number of human colonists went through an unstable wormhole - made usable by a massive jumpgate called 'EVE' - and settled the New Eden galaxy. The wormhole later collapsed, making a return to Earth impossible. The colonists spread out across more than 7,500 star systems in this new galaxy. Players create a character belonging to one of four nations: the Amarr Empire, Caldari State, Gallente Federation and Minmatar Republic. Players can then undertake missions ranging from asteroid mining and bounty hunting to striking out on their own or joining one of the Corporations, massive organisations (some with tens of thousands of members) whose members work together for their mutual gain.

EVE, the creation of Icelandic developers CCP, is notable in that relatively little of its narrative is created by the game developers. Instead, the history of EVE's alliances, corporations, wars and economy is written directly by the players themselves. Stories abound of corporations alerting their members to an impending space battle by smart phone messages, resulting in massive engagements with thousands of ships on each side. The players of the game direct much of the shape and direction of the game, and elected representatives of the players meet with CCP several times a year to discuss the game's future direction. EVE is also notable for its relative generosity: all of the game's expansion packs (of which there have been eighteen to date, with a nineteenth due next month) are available to subscribers for free, and everyone's copy of the game is automatically updated to the latest version. Unlike games like World of WarCraft, which divide its players into separate shards or servers, EVE Online has just one server for the entire world (with the exception of Chinese players, who, at the request of the Chinese government, have to play on their own server), meaning you can always find your friends and other people to play with.

The game has a reputation for being hard to get into, and certainly during the year I played the game (2006-07) it had a learning curve that was more of a wall. Since then there have been refinements to the UI (user interface) and the addition of more tutorials to make joining up easier. The game is fiendishly addictive (I made the decision to remove it and not play it again, otherwise I wouldn't be doing anything else) and is truly remarkable for the way it has evolved and transformed over the last decade as a collaborative effort between the developers and players. With periodic all-encompassing updates to the graphic engine to keep it looking amazing, there's no real need for CCP to ever develop a sequel. They have, however, developed a first-person shooter spin-off, the free-to-play Dust 514 for the PlayStation 3, and are currently considering developing a twitch-based space combat game set in the EVE universe. There is even talk of an EVE Online TV series, which will be inspired by player-driven events in the game.

EVE Online is easily the most interesting MMORPG ever released for its emphasis on the player driving the action of the game, and it's surprising more MMORPGs haven't followed this route. Congratulations to CCP and their fans, and it'll be interesting to see what the next ten years brings to the game.

A space empire made up of 300,000 real people

PC Gamer has published a lengthy interview with CCP, the Icelandic developers of the online, space-based role-playing game EVE Online.


Originally launched in 2003, EVE Online is one of only a few successfully-competing MMORPGs in a field dominated by the all-consuming World of WarCraft. As of 2010, the game had more than 300,000 long-term players and 50,000 trial accounts in operation, virtually all on the same server (a smaller server is dedicated to Chinese players, who for censorship reasons aren't allowed to play on the same server as everyone else), an impressive technical achievement (even if the number of players is about one-fortieth that of WoW).

Unlike WoW, EVE is creatively driven by the player community. The game's economy, major powers and military alliances and a lot of its technology is the result of player activities rather than decreed-from-on-high. The game has also won plaudits for giving its massive expansions to all of its player base free of charge, so every player remains on a level footing. Its battles have also won a lot of coverage in the gaming press, with one recent engagement seeing almost 4,000 players fighting alongside and against one another. On the minus side the game has a reputation for a notoriously unforgiving learning curve. Whilst recently much-improved, it can remain a challenge for new players to get into the game.

In the article, the CCP founders recall how they started the project in a rather bizarre way (by producing a board game concept that kept them ticking over), how they went without money for weeks at a time and living in the offices to keep development ongoing. Finally that decision appears to have been vindicated by CCP becoming a major Icelandic company, one of the few to flourish during the recent credit crunch, and is on the verge of spreading the EVE universe to console gamers via the upcoming shooter, Dust 514, in which console gamers will be mercenaries contracted out by the PC gamer-run corps to take, hold and defend various planets. It'll be interesting to see if this cross-platform cooperation takes off.

Back in 2006-07 I spent about eight months playing EVE. Whilst the game was challenging, it was also thoroughly engrossing and a massive time-sink, to the point where I had to uninstall it or risk getting nothing else done. Good to see the game still going from strength to strength.