Sandbox

Dota 2 celebrated the incredible sales of its world championship interactive compendium with free gifts for all players; the compendium has now sold over 266,000 units, raising the prize fund in The International to over $2,000,000 US. Third-person MOBA SMITE has recently entered the competitive tournament scene with two new weekly $1,000 tournaments. Rise of Immortals also announced its first competitive tournament since the Battle For Graxia update and revealed details of its hilariously-named ranged centaur character Murderhoof.

League of Legends revealed the new custom item set feature coming in Patch 3.7 and published a new champion spotlight video on classic ranged carry Ashe. Guardians of Middle-Earth also released its latest paid DLC character, The Mouth of Sauron, based on a character who was originally cut from the cinematic release of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

Diablo III celebrated the first anniversary of its release on May 15th with anniversary livestreams and a magic-find bonus for all players. The latest patch also raised the increments in which money can be sold on the Real Money Auction House to ten million in response to massive oversupply. Path of Exile revealed details of its upcoming Patch 0.1.1.0 that will add new party loot options and other features, and Star Citizen showed off its new website with a special e-commerce section in which players can buy ships for cash.

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If you've ever been involved in a discussion about EVE Online, you've heard it referred to as a sequence of spreadsheets which occasionally let you fly a spaceship. Which certainly has some basis in truth. Certainly it's a game with many possible systems that could be ported to a mobile client, something that CCP's Jon Lander is claiming will be a reality in the near future. Lander has moved from being EVE's executive producer to mobile development, but his new position is clearly still tied to the same game.

Rather than simply being a series of spreadsheets for your smartphone, Lander has made it clear that the mobile team wants for the various EVE mobile apps to be functional games in their own right. It's a field that CCP has explored before, stopping either due to technical hurdles or business concerns. But Lander's confident that players will be using the mobile applications by the time next year's Fanfest rolls around.

Cloud Imperium has taken the wraps off Star Citizen's hangar module, a standalone app that's scheduled to be released to early adopters later this summer. Pledgers will get a chance to walk through their hangars and ogle their pledge ships, as well as climb inside them and invite their friends over for a spaceship-themed soiree.

The hangar module is "about 50 percent fleshed out right now," according to the spiffy Cloud Imperium video tour that you can watch after the cut.

[Thanks Eric!]

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Black Eye Games updated its Gloria Victis Facebook page over the weekend. The occasion was a pre-alpha feature push that saw plenty of new stuff make its way into the fledgling sandbox.

"The forest is now filled with life," the post says, including boars, foxes, wolves, and plenty of raw gatherables like bark, timber, hops, flax, and sunflowers. Black Eye has also enlarged the game world proper and added humanoid mobs. There are screens of all this stuff and more behind the links below. You'll also find some Massively-exclusive screens behind the break.

[Thanks to everyone who tipped us!]

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Last month saw the huge tenth anniversary EVE Online Fanfest, a three-day convention packed full of exclusive reveals, behind-the-scenes talks, and community events. This year's Fanfest was the biggest one yet, celebrating EVE's tenth anniversary with special guest speakers from the scientific community, the reveal of a new virtual reality dogfighter, DUST 514's launch, and details of the upcoming Odyssey expansion. Massively was there to bring you coverage of the big news as it happened, and CCP streamed some of the key talks and events live to viewers at home.

This year's Fanfest sold out so quickly that many people who wanted to go didn't get a chance to, and only a select few talks were shown on the public livestream. With such a packed event schedule, even players in attendance couldn't be there for every interesting talk. Thankfully, CCP recorded over 30 of the most anticipated events and has now uploaded the videos to YouTube. Highlights include the Make EVE Real videos, the EVE keynote, the CCP Presents Keynote, and the talks on how DUST 514 integrates with the EVE economy.

In this week's EVE Evolved, I round up all of the EVE Fanfest videos in a handy list.

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I was talking with a gaming buddy recently who missed the whole space sim experience in the 1990s. He's a Star Wars fan and a real-life pilot pushing 40, so it surprised me to learn that he'd never heard of Wing Commander, Freespace, X-Wing, and the like. My jaw really hit the floor as our conversation turned to current games and I began to evangelize about Star Citizen and Chris Roberts.

"Who's Chris Roberts?" he asked, with a straight face.

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This not-sure-if-serious moment is brought to you by XLGAMES. The Korean MMO maker, presumably hard at work collaborating with Trion to westernize its ArcheAge sandbox opus (right guys... guys?), has published what can only be termed a curious gameplay video to its official YouTube channel.

The clip features car racing and a number of spiffy looking hot rods, which normally wouldn't raise any eyebrows if they weren't located smack dab in the middle of a feudalized high fantasy world that, up until now, has featured sailing ships, horses, and low-tech gliders as its primary forms of transportation. It's hard to tell what's under the hood on these babies -- maybe it's some sort of steampunkish propulsion system -- but one thing's for sure: We can't make this stuff up.

Have yourself a look-see after the cut.

[Thanks Dengar!]

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Recently Nerd Kingdom promised more demonstrations of the tech behind its new TUG MMO hopeful. The company has made good with a new video that shows off the in-house engine, and lead programmer Brandon Nelson starts things off with an interesting tidbit about the game's contouring algorithm. "An algorithm like dual contouring gives us the ability to have the same quality of terrain that other games have, but not have to have them generated by level designers," Nelson explains.

There's quite a lot of additional info packed into the clip's six-minute running time, all of which you can see for yourself after the break. You can also learn more about TUG via the project's Kickstarter site.

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Darkfall's long-awaited Unholy Wars makeover launched almost a month ago, and now Aventurine is turning its eyes toward the future of its PvP-focused fantasy sandbox. AV's Tasos Flambouras posted a schedule of planned content updates on the forums earlier this week that stretches all the way into July. Aside from the usual MMO bug fixes and tweaks, there are major additions like the Svartvann, Marthnyr, Hardruk, and Dulguna dungeons, new families of monsters, new ships, and sea fortresses. [Thanks Dengar!]

[Update: Aventurine is reporting that its NA servers are suffering the effects of a DDoS attack. The official blog reads, "In regard to the ping issues on the NA server the past couple of days, this was due to a DDoS attack during NA prime time. We have taken measures in cooperation with our hosting providers to filter this attack, and we're monitoring the situation. We'll keep you updated and we apologize for any inconvenience."]

Guilds are pretty much ubiquitous in MMOs -- they serve as a way to bind players together into a group. But the team behind TUG thinks that all too often guilds come about mostly so you can have a name and a chat channel all to yourself. Which is why the latest design post about the game explains that the designers want to remove that sense of artificially created communities. To strengthen that sense of forming player groups, guilds have to go.

As the post explains, too often guilds become things formed for the purpose of having a guild, placing an artificial limitation on what groups players belong to. Instead, the goal is to get players to form societies and groups organically, creating more freedom by removing arbitrary restrictions. It's an idea with a lot of promise, and as the game's Kickstarter continues you can decide if that promise is something you feel like supporting.

Man up MJ, you said. Forsake the fetters of safety and wander the wilds of the world. Yes, folks, for the next phase of our Choose My Adventure project, you directed me to leave the confines of the starting cities and surrounding lands to explore and harvest in the unprotected areas in Darkfall Unholy Wars. That, and get familiar with the workbench for crafting. So said you all, and so I did.

I ran little Emey Brokenclaw beyond the bounds of the safe zones and introduced her to the vast lands stretching across Agon. I enjoyed some exciting experiences as well as learned quite a few things during that journey, though not necessarily what you'd expect.

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Want to be a part of EVE Online's 11th annual Alliance Tournament that starts on July 20th, 2013, but not from the cockpit of your ship? You can apply to be one of the PvP commentators who will discuss the tourney, tactics, and teams involved live on air with developers as well as providing commentary on matches as they unfold. Yes, live means you'll actually be in Iceland for this gig! Qualifications include having a valid passport, being over 21, having a sharp wit, and being well-versed in PvP. Full details for the application process are available on the official site.

If you'd prefer to participate in the battles themselves, note that there will be a few changes to the tourney from years past. To start, Alliance Tournament XI will run over only three weekends, not four. Second, qualifying rounds and group stages have been replaced by double elimination from the get go. Next, from the second weekend onward, two ship types will be banned from the match by team captains. And finally, to fly with an alliance you had to have been a member since downtime this morning. Dev blogs covering all the rules, the broadcast schedule, and sign-up details will be coming soon.

[Update: CCP has been busy today! The official site has now also been updated with a dev blog announcing that dual character training will ship with the Odyssey expansion next month.]

Playing EVE on my couch is bizarre. I know, technically it's called DUST 514, but let's be serious. DUST is basically the beginnings of a massive EVE Online expansion if you subscribe to the notion that EVE is a virtual world as opposed to merely a strategy game featuring internet spaceships and internet drama.

I've played EVE in some strange places prior to this. In an airport terminal, for example. On my toilet, even (yes, nature occasionally calls in the middle of a fleet fight and thank God for laptops). But DUST marks the first -- OK, technically the second -- time I've ever played in New Eden with a controller.

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This time of night I've only got one thing on my mind, and that's dinner. Seriously, the Massively graveyard shift makes my stomach rumble. Fortunately Cloud Imperium is here to fill it up with some sweet, sweet Star Citizen concept art.

The main course is a trio of gorgeous images from the former colony world of Orion III. Armitage, as the world was also called, was "the site of the farthest human colony from Earth... and one of the first targets of the Vanduul menace."

After you've dined on the establishing aerial artwork, it's time for dessert in the form of some early sketches for specific planetary locations. Feast your eyes at the official Star Citizen website.

Diablo III was hit with yet another exploit this week as players discovered a way to duplicate gold via a bug in the auction house. Blizzard responded by shutting down the auction house but did not perform a server rollback to reverse the damage. Star Citizen clarified its stance on the lifetime insurance available to veteran backers amidst debate over whether it gives early adopters an unfair advantage over other players. Path of Exile also released a new Letters of Wraeclast lore feature in its latest update, and MechWarrior Online's update 15 added a new Misery mech.

Dota 2 began preparations for its biggest world championship tournament yet with the release of a new Interactive Compendium that players can use to stay up to date with the matches. Rise of Immortals has now officially launched its Battle For Graxia revamp, and Infinite Crisis officially entered closed beta this week with the release of new champion The Joker. Finally, Smashmuck Champions released its hilarious new community-designed champion that's half platypus and half unicorn.

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