An official Eve Online developer blog post has revealed information regarding the upcoming free expansion “Apocrypha”, which aims to bring a little excitement back into the aging MMO, by giving players the ability to explore uncharted space. The expansion will add thousands of new solar systems, reachable through wormholes through the entire game-world, which will end up hosting loads of new content, such as extra characters to interact with, resources to exploit (miners take note!) and new missions to grind through.

One exciting aspect, wormholes will unexpectedly close, potentially trapping explorers in unknown and potentially dangerous new areas of the game. Players will then have to explore the system, performing actions and completing missions in order to find their way out (if they choose to leave). Sounds awesome so far!

Wormholes will bring us to this new frontier, appearing all over New Eden as a result of a cataclysmic event, the nature of which we’ll reveal in the coming months. These wormholes are unstable and will spawn and vanish randomly throughout the known universe. A pilot who stumbles across one of these stellar phenomena can fly through it and travel to unknown space, where there are no stargates or stations, just the unexplored void of a new solar system. And when I say “new solar system” that is exactly what I mean. It will not be moving you to instanced space but rather to one of the thousands of new solar systems.

At the most recent EVE Online FanFest, EVE developers gave attendees a long demo finally showing the first version of in-game characters, walking around space stations. A huge milestone and an exciting one for the massive multi-player which for many years has locked their players into their ships.

Showing a darkly lit, nicely animated in-station world, complete with shops and mini-games playable against others, EVE Online is taking one step closer to becoming a 3rd person MMO!

With the recent upgrade to Revelations 1.4 comes an interesting new EVE plugin for voice communications named EVE Voice. Fully integrated into the EVE client, EVE Voice is also built into every player channel within the universe, without the need for potentially dangers third party applications. Voice can handle up to 200 players per secure channel for the low fee of $15 a year, giving you unlimited usage, though there is a special offer now for only $10 a year, so, get going early adopters!

Read more: EVE Voice

EVE Online recently launched their much anticipated first-step into the Revelations story line, bringing all of the EVE factions one step closer to war and lots of nifty new ships and features. As is typical with most MMORPG expansions, there are quite a few bugs roaming around, but, CCP is hard at work clearing them up.

For now, enjoy the Revelations trailer after the jump..

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CCP, the makers of the sci-fi MMO EVE Online have announced that they will be merging with White Wolf Publishing, one of the leading creators of traditional RPG franchises in the world. The companies will operate autonomously, but with White Wolf owning some impressively rich worlds such as World of Darkness, it looks as if CCP is positioning themselves to release some interesting new MMOs in the coming future.

Read the full press release after the jump..

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EVE Online parent corporation CCP Games has announced that they’ve sold out of all available tickets for their upcoming EVE Online Fan Fest 2006 to be held in Iceland start at the end of this week. Not a bad feat getting over 650 people up to Iceland for a festival dedicated to an online massive multiplayer with less than 150,000 subscribers. Next year they’ll hopefully allow some tickets to be part of an online casino system, where those slow to subscribe may have a gamers chance of winning a ticket or two.

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EVE Online developer CCP Games has updated the information for the EVE Online Fan Fest 2006, a yearly festival in Iceland where fans are allowed to meet, greet and party with EVE’s developers and other fans from around the world. Among presentations and roundtables where the devs showcase the upcoming changes coming for the rapidly growing MMORPG, there is also a feedback session, where members of the EVE team from all disciplines address questions and feedback from players on subjects such as PvP, agent missions (PvE), the future of EVE (expansions, etc), and many other elements involved with the game. One particularly neat event is a developer PvP match, where the QA team takes on the development team in a massive PvP grudge match. We’re of course on QA’s side.

EVE Online’s Fan Fest 2006 takes place in Reykjavik Iceland, November 9th through the 11th with passes, flight and hotel packages available through the EVE Online web store.

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Worlds collide in the latest EVE Online developer’s blog post, where EVE developer and amateur economist “Redundancy” takes on the heavy task of analyzing the massive multiplayer’s player-driven economy, resulting in a short tutorial on how EVE Gross Domestic Product is affected by inflation and deflation and giving fans insight into the latest financial data available for EVE. Whew. I need a Tylenol after just thinking about that. The data runs from October 2003 until June 2006 and shows that EVE’s GDP is growing monthly, appearantly inline with EVE’s subscriber growth. Ah, back in the old days when we were only making 60,000 ISK a month, those were hard times.

Read more: Analyzing the GDP of EVE Online

Good news for European space-mmo fans! With the launch of the recent German localisation of the Eve Online client, CCP have started shifting more resources onto the European marketing of their online massive-multiplayer, Eve Online. In a recent interview with CMO (?) Magnus Bergsson, he admitted that during the past 12 months, CCP’s focus was focused primarily on America (”80%” of their marketing efforts), with only 20% being split between Europe and presumably China). This is set to change, as CCP plans more localizations for the Eve client, new payment options (a real problem in Europe) as well as hotfixes and patches to address some of the numerous bugs that have popped up in the recent patch changes.

Read more: Eve Online returns marketing focus back onto Europe

Massive (and I do mean massive) multiplayer space RPG Eve Online is especially unique among the other MMORPGs. Eve’s server structure is setup in a way that all players, regardless of geographic location, are simulataneously playing within the same game world, as opposed to other MMORPGs, which create many small instanced worlds with around 5000 users at one time max. Utilizing extremely intelligent load balancing and a huge distributed computing environment, Eve allows all players to occupy the same game space, at the same time. Recently, Eve parent company, CCP announced that on September 4th, at 1936 GMT, 30,538 simultaneous registered users occupied Tranquility (the live Eve Online server), once again keeping Eve in control of the world record for most simultaneous users in an online gaming world at one time. Congrats Eve and CCP!

Official announcement after the jump..

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