Stellar Relic

Author - Thomas Howell

Paradox Announces New Grand Strategy Title: Stellaris

Stellaris

Paradox just finished up their Gamescom presentation in Cologne, Germany today and have officially revealed their new grand strategy title under development. Stellaris, their new game, is being developed by their internal studio and was codenamed “Project Augustus.” Partially because of this codename, there was some hope that this would be a Roman Empire-centric title. However, given that Runemaster was “Project Nero”, Hearts of Iron IV was “Project Armstrong” and Europa Universalis IV was “Project Truman”, cooler heads suspected that, if anything, a project codenamed “Augustus” categorically could not be a Rome game (though a few Paradox devs took the opportunity to gleefully troll the community). Speculation was further fueled by a series of hints posted by Paradox on their official forums.

Unfortunately for Paradox, their big reveal was undercut by a leak from the Steam client, with images from the upcoming title’s Store page uploaded to Imgur. Today’s reveal confirmed the leak: the new title from Paradox Development Studio is Stellaris, a pausable real-time strategy game set in space, with a focus on exploration and diplomacy.

Game Director Henrik Fåhraeus (former lead for the Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron series) spoke after a short cinematic trailer. Stellaris is an intriguing concept – the game map is always randomized, and the alien species you encounter will be random as well. The experience is designed to be original and unique with every session, with a focus on procedural storytelling. There is no easily-predictable tech tree. Technology is acquired individually, like “loot” or a trading card. The initial stages of the game are focused on discovery and exploration, with players sending out science ships and crewed by hand-picked officers and diplomats. In the late game, as players encounter larger alien empires, the diplomacy and war functionalities become more prominent, with the experience being similar to Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. Also promised by Fåhraeus are a ship designer, visually-appealing space combat, and internal factions within your population.

The Swedish publisher and developer had quite a lengthy presentation before the Stellaris announcement – awkward and scripted, as these things always are. Probably most exciting was the announcement of the first major expansion for Cities: Skylines, titled After Dark and focusing on a newly added day/night cycle. Josh Sawyer came on stage shortly after with an update on Pillars of Eternity’s upcoming expansion and patches.

Next on the docket was Hearts of Iron IV, with a new trailer focusing on a hypothetical successful Operation Sea Lion. Following the trailer, lead designer Johan Andersson spoke a bit about the upcoming WWII strategy game (nothing we don’t already know). Probably the most entertaining part of this presentation was the spectacle of Johan – a short-ish man in what appeared to be jean shorts with a high, lilting Swedish voice – talking about blitzkrieg and coordinated assaults. This was a slightly uncomfortable trailer to watch, given the cultural context and Gamescom’s location. Going on about alternate history victories for the Germans in WWII without mentioning Nazis or Hitler isn’t a good look and reminds one of the Hearts of Iron III “Hitler narrates the tutorial” debacle.

At any rate, Stellaris represents an ambitious step for Paradox’s developers. All their previous games have been grounded in history, drawing on nationalism and alternate history fantasies to help hook players. Stellaris is entirely their own universe. Can randomized alien races on a random map be compelling nemeses? I’m optimistic (PDX hasn’t really misstepped since Hearts of Iron 3 in 2009) but we’ll just have to see.

Stellaris is expected to release sometime early next year.

EVE Sovereignty At The Brink

EVE Online

Two years into its second decade, EVE Online is in serious trouble.

This is a game that, at its best, is about politics – influence, war, territory, diplomacy, tribal gangs flinging spaceships and slurs at each other. Lately, it’s about different things. Things that other games do better. And the playerbase is shrinking as a result.

The actual number of subscribed accounts is hard to determine. We do know that it is significantly lower than the 500,000 subscribers figure trumpeted by CCP in February 2013, and that number included their relaunched Chinese server. Two posts by EVE blogger The Nosy Gamer dig into the exact numbers, though he believes that subscriptions don’t matter so much in an age of microtransactions and cash shops. He may be right; subscription numbers aren’t the best measurement of EVE’s vitality, given the number of players with multiple accounts. The most accurate metric we have is the number of accounts actually logged in and, thanks to EVE-Offline.net, that data is available.

It doesn’t look great.

peep that slope

2013 was a very strong year for EVE. After a brief slump at the end of 2013, the PCU (number of concurrent players) was spurred to what would become 2014’s high point by the famous Bloodbath of B-5RB, netting CCP a massive publicity win. It has been almost all downhill from there, with the huge activity gains of B-5RB wiped out within months. (I’m not cherry-picking data here – if anything, the 5-year graph looks worse.) From 2011 through 2014, EVE averaged nearly 50,000 concurrent players. For the past few months, New Eden has struggled to draw 30,000 – a drop of roughly 40%. How did we get here?

Let’s dispense with some oft-repeated untruths. No, CCP’s anti-botting/RMT efforts haven’t driven away nearly half the playerbase. That is silly for reasons of proportionality alone. No, the banning of ISBoxer and other automation tools is not responsible for the situation. The idea that a relative handful of multiboxers and ISBoxer users was inflating EVE’s PCU by tens of thousands is laughable. Players are leaving EVE because EVE isn’t interesting anymore and what makes EVE interesting is the political narrative.

To know why EVE is struggling, we must understand the political history of the game.

Influence.png

First, let’s clarify this “politics” idea. There are of course many things that EVE does decently enough and a few things that EVE is fantastic at. But EVE’s most unique feature (and its greatest draw) is the political narrative in nullsec space, the territory conquerable by players and unpoliced by NPC do-gooders. In this space, unique among MMOs for its particular brand of lawlessness, groups of players can forge political bonds, control and exploit territory, and strive for dominance unfettered. This is the arena that produced B-5RB, Asakai, the Goon/BoB conflict (known by its participants as the Great War), spies and commanders, heroes and villains, and the vast majority of the stories about EVE worth reading. It’s what makes the Verite Rendition Player Influence map so magical – every entity on that map is composed of hundreds or thousands of people, and they all have stories.

Take any major EVE battle of the sort that occasionally leaks into the broader media. The actual fighting itself is usually only interesting in a narrow technical sense; the actual experience of a player combatant may not be particularly exciting or even enjoyable. I’ve participated in my fair share of big fights. I remember high points like magnificent bombing runs and Doomsday beams flashing across the starfield. Mostly, I remember low points: interminable waiting, time dilation, my client stuttering and choking, tediously following the fleet commander’s orders, boredom and frustration. This is not interesting. What is interesting is the battle’s consequences; in New Eden, the battles have consequences – or at least, they should.

EVE doesn’t seem to produce many meaningful struggles anymore. B-5RB is, once again, illustrative: the battle occurred only as a result of a series of mistakes and uncharacteristic moves on both sides. Players without an obscenely expensive supercapital-class ship were directed away from the battle proper by their commanders, to preserve server resources for the more useful Titans and Supercarriers. Finally, the battle’s actual strategic consequences were muted, as both sides had sufficiently deep war-chests to replace their losses in a matter of weeks. The war itself was a passionless thing, driven mostly by the need to give players something to do. No righteous fury or struggle for survival animated B-5RB.

These are symptoms of the game’s political ossification.

Shuffling the Deck

In December 2009, EVE’s 12th expansion (Dominion) was released. Dominion came with a new sovereignty system – a complete overhaul of the mechanics determining player control of space in nullsec.

It was not a good overhaul. The pre-Dominion sovereignty system wasn’t good, exactly, but it lacked the more pernicious and damaging flaws that Dominion carried. Dominion-era sov warfare was a grinding, oddly-designed mess that heavily favored the defender. The complexity of the system discouraged new blood from attempting to enter the nullsec game and conferred further power to the veterans who already held space.

The number of new alliances moving into nullsec plummeted and even alliances with terrible leadership were able to hold their space indefinitely, simply because grinding through Dominion’s legion of timers and other obstacles was not worth it. Even the conquest of uncontested space was a chore. To successfully attack, alliances needed more members. They began to merge and grow. Coalitions became less “alliances of alliances” and more autocratic.

Dotlan

As alliances bloated in size, their culture and identity became diluted. As they became richer and more well-established, leaders were less inclined to risk their hard-won gains on wars or other failure-prone ventures. The Verite Influence map started to have mostly the same names on it. For years.

These player organizations, mostly safe behind the high walls of Dominion sovereignty, evolved, becoming more Byzantine and bureaucratic. Familiarity with the mechanics bred the ability to exploit them. Coalitions developed unified communications platforms, reimbursement and welfare programs, and a whole system of internal management. Groups that were once autocracies now insulated the leader behind a wall of fleet commanders, diplomats, metagamers, and a dozen other kinds of functionaries and specialists. Some of this was happening before Dominion and would have happened without it, of course – players evolve. Dominion just reinforced the stifling effect that the sovereignty mechanics sparked.

After a few years of adjustment, EVE’s political narratives stopped being as interesting or dynamic as they once were. Everyone had fought everyone before, usually many times.  Just as a first-past-the-post, all-or-nothing electoral system discourages third parties and narrows the field of viable candidates and parties, the all-or-nothing sovereignty system discouraged smaller alliances, eventually forcing the vast majority of nullsec players into a trinary, and then a binary, galaxy.

As a member of one of EVE’s most long-lived and influential alliances, Goonswarm Federation, I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. The first half-decade of EVE was a time of consequences – dramatic upsets, narrative, clashing ideologies, space opera made real. After half a decade of Dominion all we had left was the core gameplay, and it’s not a secret that much of EVE’s core gameplay isn’t actually very good.

 

influencecropped

Fozziesov

To CCP’s credit, after more than five years of Dominion stagnation, they have finally come around to replacing the Dominion sovereignty system. Developed under the aegis of Game Designer CCP Fozzie, the new mechanics are almost universally referred to by the community as “Fozziesov.”

The way Fozziesov actually functions isn’t that important; it follows the EVE Online tradition of taking already-complex game mechanics and obscuring them further behind weird terminology. Activity Defense Multiplier? Entosis Link? Ugh. The question is: will it work? If it does work, will it be enough to revitalize the nullsec political game? Ideally, Fozziesov would shake up or break up EVE’s coalitions and lower the stakes of conflict. Many prominent coalition and alliance leaders have in fact stated that they’d welcome to a return to the freewheeling, balkanized EVE landscape of old.

It’s an extraordinarily difficult task for CCP to attempt, akin to reversing a historical process – taking EVE from coalitions down to nation-states down to tribal groups. However it is an extraordinarily difficult task worth doing; revitalizing the nullsec game is probably the only way to reverse EVE’s declining numbers.

Respected EVE politicians and alliance leaders are skeptical. Reaction to Fozziesov in action has largely been neutral or negative. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything; EVE players will gleefully attack CCP for any action they take or propose to take and it’s too early to make a definitive judgement of Fozziesov. Still, it is worrying. A failure to return dynamism and fun to nullsec could be fatal. One experienced fleet commander hits the nail on the head:

Mechanics might change, but the general vibe around Eve is that most people have been around the block so many times that they don’t want to put much effort into it anymore. Content creators of olde are largely inactive. Apathy from the old guard isn’t a bad thing – as long as there is a fresh generation to take over. But does that exist?

I hope that new generation does exist because this game is worth saving. Let’s not underrate what CCP has accomplished: more than a decade after launch, despite everything, EVE Online is unique. Games that pitch themselves as competitors to EVE tend to fail (see also: ArcheAge, Perpetuum, Darkfall, etc). Figuring out how to make PvP territorial control work within an MMO is terrifically difficult. MechWarrior Online has been putting it off for three years now.

EVE is not dying. I suspect that New Eden will be around for another decade, if not longer. It’s just becoming less and less interesting – which could be worse than death.

CCP Announces ‘Gunjack’

Gunjack

On August 3rd CCP Games, developers of EVE Online, blasted out a press release, unveiled a trailer, and activated social media accounts for the rollout of a new game: Gunjack. It’s an arcade turret shooter, set in the EVE universe, and intended to be a release title for the upcoming Samsung Gear VR (the mobile-based ‘little brother’ to the Oculus Rift). The release of Gunjack is stated to coincide with the ‘official release’ of the Gear VR, which appears to be a bit of a nebulous concept; the Gear VR Innovator Edition has been available for purchase since 2014 and other iterations have since come out.

As for the game, it looks – well, it definitely doesn’t look great. And as someone who has long watched CCP, this announcement is more bewildering than anything else. Among the many questions that come to mind are the following:

  • Why a simple, bland-looking turret game? Just to have a piece of the action on another upcoming VR platform?
  • Isn’t having not one, but two games in development for unreleased platforms while the playerbase of their core product shrinks kind of, um, risky?
  • For that matter, why do this instead of fleshing out Valkyrie?

The answer to that last one may have something to do with CCP’s structure. Valkyrie is being developed by a team based in Newcastle, while Gunjack appears to be the product of CCP’s Shanghai studio. Of course, it’s obviously very much based on Valkyrie – to my eye, it’s essentially Valkyrie with player movement stripped out and turret game mechanics slapped in. It seems likely that CCP essentially sent Valkyrie over to Shanghai and said “alright, make a game for Gear VR using this tech.”

CCP Shanghai was supposed to be working on something else, though. We can only speculate about the fate of Project Legion (a re-imagining of CCP’s troubled PS3 shooter DUST 514 intended for the PC), which, as of earlier this year, was already being downplayed in favor of its predecessor. It is unclear what impact the development of Gunjack had on Project Legion’s apparent deprioritization, if any.

There’s historical reason to be skeptical in a more general sense here; CCP has a checkered track record with new titles. DUST 514 was (and remains) a flop and the long-lamented World of Darkness MMO was cancelled after languishing in development for nearly 8 years. EVE Valkyrie looks fantastic, but remains unreleased.

One thing is clear: CCP is going in hard on VR. As CCP’s CEO says in the press release linked above:

“We believe that virtual reality will be a defining element of gaming’s future.  It may take some time to get widespread adoption, but we’re going to be there on day one,” said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP.  “We’re making smart investments in VR so we can learn important lessons early and blow people’s minds when they get their hands on their first VR headset.”

CCP appears determined to make a big splash as VR arrives for the broader consumer market in the near future. Whether the investment is worth the risk remains to be seen.

Welcome!

welcome

Stellar Relic is the result of three people who liked working with each other at another outlet being slowly (but inexorably) let go for ‘business reasons’ – pesky things like requesting actual pay or pushing back against business decisions in editorial. James, Dave, and Thomas all love games, particularly obscure titles that don’t get a ton of mainstream coverage. Our old gigs allowed us to explore some of this, but here at Stellar Relic we’re creating the opportunity for ourselves (and hopefully others!) to spread our wings.

We want to bring together the serious and the silly in a way that makes sense to intelligent readers. We’re not here to capture the latest triple-A trailer teaser traffic; we’re here because we love games and want to understand them on a fundamentally deeper level than most gaming media. We want our readers to feel edified by reading a piece, to feel enlightened in some small way, and ultimately to share in our love of games that often don’t get much of it.

The Team

James Murff is a veteran of multiple gaming publications, including Joystiq, PC Gamer, Gamefront, and more. He likes sentient machines, obscure indie games, and dissecting game mechanics.

David Andrews used to work at Sony Online Entertainment (back when that was a company that existed) and ran a gaming media site for a couple years before his soul was crushed.

Thomas Howell is an undercredentialed dork who plays games and writes about them. He’s passionate about the intersections between gaming and history, identity, politics, and the future.

The Goal

The first and foremost goal of Stellar Relic is to give complexity a chance to shine.

We love complex games here. Whether they are dense grand strategy games put out by Paradox, or deceptively simple indie fighting games such as Nidhogg, our goal is to showcase how games can be subtle and nuanced. Whether that nuance is a number buried in a spreadsheet or a mindgame played with an opponent doesn’t matter; we want games that challenge you and push you in new directions.

This also means that we won’t be dropping old titles to focus on new ones. If a game is being covered here, it will be covered as long as the writer is interested. So many sites rely on the eternal churn of new games, new content. We would rather enrich your experience with an existing game than try to tell you about every new release. Don’t worry, though; we’ll still tell you about upcoming titles that catch our eye.

The Community

As you can see below, we have comments on every article! While so many sites suffer for this, we won’t. Here’s why:

Our comments will be heavily moderated. There is no illusion of free speech here; if you say something repugnant, whether ironic or not, we will delete your comment and ban you. There is a line here, and being overly aggressive, personal, or bigoted will guarantee a deletion and ban. We want comments to be a place where people can express themselves safely and without others coming in to ruin their good time. If you come here to do that, we won’t let your comment stand. It’s as simple as that.

As long as you abide by this simple rule, have fun! We read every comment and we love to respond to readers, whether it’s to clarify a point, encourage deeper discussions, or just make jokes.

The Fun

Above all, we here at Stellar Relic do this to enjoy ourselves, and we want you to enjoy our work and community as well. We will always strive to cover new and interesting games and media, join with you to play and talk about games, and create opportunities for you to share in our journey.

Welcome to Stellar Relic!