That it is pretty it’s out of doubt.

Red Moon Rising is the upcoming free half-expansion to be released in December. The original plan was to have all features packed in Kali, the next one now scheduled for Q2 2006, but the devs decided to split the project in two in order to keep everything under control considering the sheer scope of the ongoing development.

The new screenshots just released are wonderful and finally show the “Titans”, the biggest ships you will be able to control in the game.

The focus of this further step is on the warfare and PvP action but there are many more features and enhancements that are being added, starting from the client optimization to the addition of four new “asian” bloodlines (one per race) to appeal the eastern market where the game is going to be launched (and it will be truly interesting to see how it goes).

While the hugest ships aren’t going to be accessible if not for those long-time and organized players that accumulated an insane wealth and the support from the largest corporations and alliances, still they reinforce the “sense of wonder” created by the absurd unbalance in the scale of the vessels. And this definitely is what a game also inspired to the Golden Age of the Space Opera should aspire to reproduce.

If at some point you’ll see a Titan passing by during your travels, you’ll surely remember that moment. It’s something real. Those ships ARE insanely valuable and if they are destroyed they are gone. This creates a sense of ownerships and self-consistence in the game-world that sweeps off the “arcade” mood of other games with faked, trivialized environments and rulesets. In Eve things truly exist. The space is huge but in the hands of the players. And it’s undeniable how all these elements are truly appealing and fascinating despite the very slow pace of the game for most of the new players and those not deeply involved in the PvP scene.

It’s not surprising, considering also the steady and ambitious development, that the last press release announces nearly 80k active subscriptions even before the launch of the new expansion and the release of the game on the eastern market. (waiting for proper source)

EVE ONLINE: RED MOON RISING

CCP Announces Major Upgrade to EVE Online

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND – November 18st, 2005 – CCP Games, an independent developer and publisher of massively multiplayer online games, today announced the public release of “EVE Online®: Red Moon Rising”, a new expansion to its highly successful and fast-growing Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) “EVE Online®: Exodus”. Red Moon Rising is scheduled for release this December, and will be provided to subscribers free of charge.

“Red Moon Rising is the last of the EXODUS chapters and is the precursor of the Kali expansion,” said Magnus Bergsson, CMO of CCP Games. “Players will see new ships and features in Red Moon Rising created explicitly to augment warfare, so those who crave the adrenaline rush of action-packed PVP will really enjoy this release!”

With nearly 80,000 active subscribers and over 17,000 simultaneous users on one server, “EVE Online” is the largest independently developed and published MMORPG on the market.

“The introduction of these new components is analogous to adding rooks, knights, and the mighty queen to a galactic chessboard,” said Nathan Richardsson, Lead Producer for EVE Online. “Fighters, carriers, and titans are going to take combat to a scale that the MMPORG genre has never seen before. In addition, the sheer economics required just to produce these leviathans will create great opportunities for industrious-minded gamers to take advantage of.”

EVE Online®: Red Moon Rising is the march towards an epic clash between the empires as the tentative peace presiding over the galaxy continues to slip away. Nations begin to conspire against one another, secretly preparing for the inevitable conflict that threatens to redefine the borderlines of EVE forever.

Some of the key features of this upgrade are:

* Titans: The largest, most fearsome space faring battle vessels ever created
* Carriers: Front line capital ships providing fighter coverage and support for fleets
* Bloodlines: The addition of Asian bloodlines available to each of the races
* COSMOS Constellation Expansion: Addition of constellation missions to Gallente and Amarr territories
* Fighters: The main offensive and defensive weapon of the Carrier
* Starbases and sovereignty: Additions of roles to improve control access of services and improved calculations of player-determined Sovereignty
* Next-Generation Manufacturing & Research Facilities: Mass-manufacturing enabling and remote industry management.
* Performance Optimizations: Optimizations to core systems to provide even better performance.
* Mining Industry Upgrade: New equipment, ships and skills for miners
* Combat Enhancements: Varied improvements to combat, enhanced defenses and configuration overhauls
* Jettisoned Canister Flagging: Removing the contents of a jettisoned canister that is not your own will flag you as a thief
* Drone Enhancements: New drone capabilities and improved performance
* An Eye for an Eye: You are allowed to revenge the unlawful destruction of your ship
* Tech II: 23 new Tech II ships, including destroyers, battlecruisers and mining barges
* New Corporate Logos: Corporations have more options to create their own identity
* NPC Changes: New NPC’s featuring elite ships with advanced capabilities such as cap draining
* UI Improvements: Need info from Hagen. (lol?)
* Full Unicode Client: The EVE client now supports any language in the universe

This while they speak about “growing pains”:

What you guys need to be aware of, however, is that due to CCP’s ongoing growth spurt, we’ve presently hit the absolute limit with regards to how many people we can fit in our current housing. We physically cannot add more people until we move to our new facilities (a move currently scheduled for next month). Therefore, to meet current production schedules with available manpower, our focus needs to remain squarely on static content for the time being.

Our company’s having growing pains, but once they’re past us we’ll be better equipped to bring you a more well-rounded gaming experience.

And fancy projects to spare some space for the exponential growth:

64bits

A common cause for node deaths is memory exhaustion. Sometimes this is due to some memory-eating monsterbug, but often the virtual address space of 2GB in a 32-bit process simply fills up with legitimate user data. No matter how much memory is installed on the machine, each process can only address 2GB of this.

In order to alleviate this and to buy us more room for growth, we have been working on porting the server binaries to the new x64 architecture and have them run as 64 bit processes under Windows 2003 server 64, or even XP 64.

The ~150k subscriptions of City of Heroes aren’t that far away. We’ll see for how long this will be considered “niche” or “outlier”.

The GoonFleet may also help:

It’s a completely different game than it was in beta/launch.

What the hell…I’m game. I’m sick of WoW. And since I’ve been busy at work lately, this sounds like a good game to get stuff done while I do work with the mining and all.

As new people can see, the devs maintain a very active and responsive relationship with the player base. They frequently post on the online forums in response to threads commenting/complaining about changes, and make an effort to justify their decisions in a way SOE never would.

Btw, they added an into movie to the game with a voice narrating the backstory and mostly-static beautiful art screens to illustrate it. It sets the mood rather well.

Fascinating, indeed.