Expansions

When Star Trek Online rolls out its Legacy of Romulus expansion on May 21st, you'll be playing a Romulan (or Reman) captain on a Romulan ship. But you will be allying with either the Klingons or the Federation, and so you might worry that you'll be surrounded by distinctly non-Romulan officers. Never fear, as the latest development blog makes it very clear that Romulan characters will be able to access a unique pool of Duty Officers and Bridge Officers unavailable to the other factions.

While Klingon or Federation characters may occasionally earn a Reman or Romulan Duty Officer, these are rare recruits that can only be obtained after exceptional effort. Actual Romulans will be able to recruit new officers of these races with unique traits simply by visiting New Romulus. They will also have access to recruitment from their allied factions, ensuring that the ship may have a mix of races while still remaining Romulan at its core.

In just over two weeks, Star Trek Online's first expansion, The Legacy of Romulus, will be released. The developers at Cryptic Studios have been working furiously, and we'll all get to see the results of all of the hard work on Tuesday, May 21st, 2013.

I've had the opportunity to jump into the Star Trek Online's test server, Tribble, to catch a few glimpses of some of the character works in progress. With more material being pushed to Tribble on almost a daily basis, there should be lots to see in the next couple of weeks!

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Tomorrow marks a huge milestone in MMO history as sci-fi sandbox EVE Online officially turns ten years old. Released by a tiny icelandic development studio whose only previous release was a board game featuring Reykjavik's favourite cross-dressing mayor, EVE has slowly grown over the past decade to become one of the industry's biggest and most stable subscription titles. Following 2011's monoclegate scandal that led to around 8% of players quitting and CCP Games shedding 20% of its employees, this year saw EVE Online climb to new heights as it regained the playerbase's confidence and smashed the 500,000 subscriber barrier. As a special side-note, the EVE Evolved column also turned five years old last week; it has now officially been running for over half of EVE's lifetime.

The past year has been remarkably successful for CCP, with both of the year's EVE expansions being extremely well received and console MMOFPS DUST 514 finally starting to take shape. The Inferno and Retribution expansions fixed a staggering number of small issues that were broken in the game while also making big changes to bounty-hunting, piracy, and PvP across the board. We also saw huge emergent events like the Battle of Asakai, a $6,000 ship kill, and the five trillion ISK faction warfare exploit this year. With DUST 514 officially launching in just over a week on May 14th and players fired up about the upcoming Odyssey expansion, the future's looking bright for EVE Online as it heads into its second decade.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I look back at some of year's top EVE stories, stories that touched real life, and what the future holds for EVE's second decade.

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When Star Trek Online launches its first expansion, Legacy of Romulus, players will find themselves facing off against the formidable Empress Sela right from the start. The return of Sela also marks the return of veteran actress Denise Crosby to the game, and the community team behind STO had a chance to speak with Crosby about returning to the franchise and to the same characters she portrayed years ago on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Crosby mentions that while she enjoyed the chance to reprise the role of Tasha Yar (a character she jokingly says simply refuses to die), revisiting Sela is a chance to dive deeper into a character who was not fully realized during her first appearances. Sela's life is the Empire, and she feels that any means necessary to restore the power and prestige of her people is more than justified. Click past the break to see the full video and learn a little bit more about the face of the Romulan Empire in the expansion.

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Two new world expansions are on the horizon for Pirate101. KingsIsle is prepping Books 13 and 14, which feature the war-torn skyway of Marleybone and the "legendary beauty and danger found throughout Aquila," according to the studio.

The updates comprise the free-to-play fantasy title's largest expansion to date. KingsIsle says that these new worlds are coming to the Members Only Test Realm in short order, with deployment on the live servers soon to follow. Sail past the cut for a bit of lore and some exclusive screenshots.

[Source: KingsIsle press release]

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Late last week, Star Trek Online community manager Brandon Felczer posted an enormous dev blog delving into the details surrounding the influx of new ships heading into the game the moment the Legacy of Romulus expansion goes live.

So today I'd like to touch on these new ships and the new Legacy Pack and Starter Packs that were announced as being available for Star Trek Online!

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We usually don't expect to see much from the final day of the EVE Fanfest, but for this year's tenth anniversary celebration, CCP isn't doing anything by half measures. The first two days of the event had a strong focus on DUST 514 and EVE Online, delving into the specific details of DUST's upcoming Uprising update and EVE's Odyssey expansion. I went into the convention centre today expecting a nice slow wind down with the usual CCP Presents keynote looking at the state of the company, but I left with several huge reveals that seemed to come out of nowhere.

Not only did we find out that EVE Online is finally getting a collector's edition box full of goodies, but CCP revealed that a new EVE comic book and lore compendium are both on the way. As if that weren't enough, there's also an EVE TV series in the works based on player-submitted stories of true events inside the EVE universe. I couldn't help escaping the feeling, though, that this year's CCP Presents talk was more than a little marketing-oriented. As one of the press put it to me after the talk, it felt at times like watching an infomercial. On the plus side, we did get to see more of CCP's future vision for the EVE universe and an amazing new trailer showing the game's core storyline.

Read on to check out the incredible EVE Universe Origins trailer and my summary of the final day of Fanfest 2013.

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While I'm quite excited to hear the news of this year's Lord of the Rings Online expansion, Helm's Deep, there are two small nits that I must pick, two little peeves that I must pet before moving onward. The first is that Turbine could not have worse timing; I've been prepping for a vacation and pre-written a couple of weeks of this column, and now this announcement's forced me to scramble last-minute to write a new one.

The other issue is that Turbine's abandoned the "[something] of [place]" title structure it's had ever since Shadows of Angmar. A vain, egocentric part of me thinks that this might've happened because a developer read my expansion prediction column and decided to spite me.

With that out of the way, let's digest the official announcement and see what we'll be doing this fall when LotRO's fifth expansion hits!

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EVE Online's tenth anniversary Fanfest promised to be its biggest yet, with over 1,400 players packed into Iceland's Harpa convention centre to find out the latest on EVE Online, DUST 514, and World of Darkness. The first day focused mainly on DUST and its link with the EVE universe, but today the focus largely switched back to internet spaceships. There were plenty of roundtable discussions, and the CSM and Alliance panels were as awesome as ever, but it was the EVE Keynote that really blew the crowd away.

The day got off to a good start with the highly anticipated World of Darkness talk. Most fans were probably expecting to see more airy game design ideas and another shiny trailer, but this year CCP just came out and put all its cards on the table. We saw that the game is still firmly in pre-production, with much of the previous work going into developing the engine and cool content creation tools and shaders. While I was initially disappointed at the lack of gameplay progress or shiny cinematics, I found this approach of being open and direct with fans very refreshing. As I told WoD art director Thomas Holt, honest beats shiny every time.

Read on for a full run-down of the EVE reveals from the second day of EVE's tenth anniversary Fanfest, including in-depth details of the Odyssey expansion's features.

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Details of EVE Online's exploration-focused Odyssey expansion have been floating around since PAX East, but it seems the company saved some pretty huge changes to reveal at this year's tenth anniversary Fanfest. In two massive devblogs accompanying today's EVE Online Keynote speech, CCP Fozzie discussed plans to overhaul EVE's entire resource distribution system. Everything from asteroid and ice mining to moon harvesting and nullsec industry will be affected by the revamp.

Miners will find their ice belts have been moved from static locations to hidden exploration sites that have to be scanned down, but to compensate it will now mine at double the normal rate. Normal asteroid mining in lowsec and nullsec is also due for a buff with the addition of large quantities of low-end minerals. Hidden asteroid belts will no longer need to be probed down but can be quickly located with the new Discovery scanner, and to top it off there'll even be new high quality ore sites that can only be found in prime areas of nullsec.

Outpost industrial infrastructure is due for an update with new purchaseable upgrade paths expanding factory, office and research lab capabilities to the same level as fully-fledged empire stations. Lastly, moon minerals are finally being addressed with a redistribution of rare materials and several new reaction paths to bypass current bottlenecks. A lot of value will be moved from Technetium back to rarer materials like Thulium, Neodymium, Promethium and Dysprosium, and new supplies of all four will be distributed randomly into moons across the universe. Re-scan all of your nearby moons when Odyssey lands because it could suddenly be worth a fortune!

Whether you're a die-hard fan of internet spaceships or just a gawker on the sidelines, EVE Fanfest is the EVE Online event of the year (and the key source of new DUST 514 and World of Darkness scoops!). Follow Massively's Brendan Drain as he reports back on this year's Fanfest starpower, scheming, and spoilers from exotic Reykjavik, Iceland.

The Romulan faction in Star Trek Online will be unique in many ways, but exactly how the addition will work within the context of the game is still unclear. That's why many of the questions in the latest edition of Ask Cryptic focus on Romulans, such as what ships they will have access to from the C-Store (all ships from a player's chosen allied faction) and how Romulans with different allies will interact (they will not be able to group together for Romulan missions but can group for cross-factional content).

Other topics of discussion include the long-anticipated revamp to Exploration, which is being moved over toward encouraging the use of the Foundry to fulfill a similar niche. Klingon progression will be improved with a full leveling path, including episodes ported over and heavily tweaked from the Federation line as well as unique bits of content just for KDF characters. For the usual buffet of questions and answers you can check out the full installment on the official site.

The 10th anniversary EVE Online Fanfest is beyond massive, with over 1,400 players piling into Reykjavik's Harpa building for three days of intense internet spaceshippery. Players fly from across the world to meet their corpmates and chat with other players as passionate about EVE as they are. CCP runs a packed schedule of game design presentations, reveals, and roundtable discussions with players, but for many attendees, the event is about being a part of a tight-knit community that usually exists only inside a game server.

CCP made the bold statement to the press team this morning that its goal is "to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life," and with so many people flying across the world to meet other players face to face, I'd say the studio has succeeded. Today saw talks on EVE's hugely successful Retribution expansion, ship rebalancing, map generation in DUST 514, and lowsec PvP, and of course, we attended the DUST 514 keynote speech. There were also some hilarious shenanigans with the wormhole roundtable room filling to bursting and a guest science lecture on the possibility of faster than light travel in real life.

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Over at Lord of the Rings Online fansite A Casual Stroll to Mordor, Andang gives us a nifty walkthrough video of the incoming Wildermore region for Update 11. The 19-minute video shows off the snowy mountainous region near Dunfast down to the plains near Norcrofts.

Take note that this tour is done on the public test Bullroarer server, so things may change before the update is officially launched. Still, it's worth watching the whole video if you're a LotRO fan anticipating the new content.

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Lord of the Rings Online is one of those MMOs, at least for me. You know the ones I mean. They're great games for the most part, but for whatever reason you've quit and returned and quit and returned to them more times than you can count.

With yesterday's announcement of the forthcoming Helm's Deep expansion, I'm finding it harder than ever to keep to my pledge of staying away from Turbine's Middle-earth.

What about you, morning crew? Assuming you're a LotRO expatriate, will Helm's Deep bring you back?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!