EVE Fanfest 2023 – Reactions from the Remote View

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EVE Fanfest came and went this past weekend.  Lots of people flew to Iceland to attend and likely had a very special experience.

My own experience of the event was through some early morning Twitch streams and reviewing the VODs of things that happened while I was still asleep.  The pain of being 7 hours behind UTC and Icelandic time.

So my reactions are very much information focused.  Did I learn something new?  Did I get enough details?  How was the presentation?  There is little camaraderie or feeling of being part of the crowd at the event when you’re sitting at home alone and watching a replay of an event on your monitor.

I wrote about what my expectations were in the days leading up to EVE Fanfest, so I will use that as my structure for my Monday morning feelings about the event. (Or Sunday afternoon feelings, but this post will go live on Monday morning.)

Keynote

A much better keynote than last Fanfest.  It was a lot less self-congratulatory and a lot more focused on new things coming, things to be excited about, and things that would be talked about later.  It probably also helped that they didn’t just raise the subscription price like last time.  Also, they didn’t totally over promise the content aspect.  Last year was just awkward.

On the video it seemed a little embarrassing that Hilmar and Ratatti and a couple of others had to ask people to cheer to get the responses they expected at times.  That looked like a bit of a rebuke on video, but you can’t really tell what the audience is up to.  And, at events like this, the audience sometimes has trouble settling down to focus on the presenter rather than chit chatting among themselves because it is cool to be hanging out with friends and fellow players.

There was a decent amount of info in the keynote.  Others have gone through it in detail, so I will be lazy and link out to those at the bottom of the post with other related items.

And, of course, you can watch the keynote yourself.

I suppose the highest compliment I can give is to recommend you watch it to get a sense of what was announced at FanFest.  Or read the coverage of the keynote at the bottom of the post.

Expansion Announcement

We did get this, and it is a big deal.  We will get the expansion on November 14th.

EVE Online Havoc

The primary new content aspect of it is, as with Viridian, focused on Faction Warfare.  This time around they are letting players ally with the Guiristas or Angel Cartel to jump in and disrupt the battle zones.  The Jovian stargates in Alsavoinon, Turnur, G-0Q86, and H-PA29 now take you to Zarzakh and there is a shipcaster under construction there that will send you to the front lines in Faction Warfare when the expansion launches.

Two expansions focused on Faction Warfare, good for them.  But if it becomes three, people will be upset.  All other groups get jealous when one group gets too much attention, be it deserved or not.

There are also a bunch of low key, quality of life changes under way, some in response to player feedback on things introduced in Viridian.  I am waiting for the dev blogs and patch notes before I get too invested, but it looks like a lot of good stuff.

Again, CCP Ratatti said “automated SRP” and I think expected to be showered with adoration during the presentation.  Instead he had to stop and say it again to try and elicit the response he was expecting.  It is hard to tell if this just isn’t a feature in huge demand… quite possible, since SRP is kind of a big null sec alliance thing, and not even all of them do it… or if he just doesn’t get cut any slack anymore because he is now and forever the DUST 514 guy who came in, told players he knew better than them what the game needed, then proceeded to screw up the economy for 18 months in pursuit of an impossible goal leading to a precipitous drop in player activity during what I called “the year of disappointment.”

The CSM18 Election Results

We did get the results.  I wrote a post about that, which you can read here.  As I noted in the post, doing the results in the midst of Fanfest means they didn’t get a lot of focus, but we know who made the cut.

The 18th Council of Stellar Management

And we know who CCP hand picked from the 11-20 positions to fill out the two extra spots.  I still have to go back through the VOD to see if they explained their choices.  But it doesn’t matter as much as that these are the choices they made I suppose.

EVE Online Board Game

This got some mention, but I came away feeling like the whole thing was much further out than I expected.  Somebody has been trying to build up a lot of hype for this on social media and it feels like that was mistakenly premature now.

EVE Strategy Board Game – War For New Eden

The game was available to try at Fanfest, which doesn’t really do much for those of us not there.  I also didn’t hear even a tentative date for when the Kickstarter campaign would kick off.

Whatever The First Person is being Called These Days

It is being called EVE Online Vanguard, because that is a name with a glorious history I guess.

EVE Vanguard – Coming Soon

It is a first person shooter, it will somehow be integrated with EVE Online, it has been built with Unreal Engine 5 and Carbon for engine and UI, it is in alpha right now, and current EVE Online Omega subscribers will be able to sign up for a special test even in December which will be called First Strike.  There was the idea of “founder” status or whatever mentioned, something special for the early adopters.

This does not excite me at all.  I was previously promised orbital bombardment and never got to drop things on FPS players, so I am salty.

I know there are a couple dozen die hard and very vocal DUST 514 veterans out there who really want this, but every game or feature, no matter how bad, is somebody’s favorite thing.  There were a lot of problems DUST 514 had to overcome, not the least of which was being on the PlayStation 3.  But had it seen a strong enough response, it would have been moved to PlayStation 4 the way DC Universe Online was.

Maybe after 15 years of trying to make a successful FPS, CCP will hit the mark.  But I am dubious.

Project Awakening

My desire was to hear nothing about this at all, but with Hilmar speaking I knew that was folly.

Just wake up already

That said, Hilmar was mercifully brief.  He reminded us that CCP has been given $40 million to make this title and reiterated the “Not For Tranquility” promise when it came to blockchain technology.

I remain nervous on that front all the same.  Despite the absolute collapse of the blockchain, crypto, and NFT market over the last year, most of that being expected due to the whole thing being mostly an outright scam, that somebody thinks this is worth $40 million means that that they will want some return on that, and may demand EVE Online integration at some point.  And we know promises from CCP have about a 12 month shelf life after which they are deemed null and void by the company.

The EVE Online Monument

It was unveiled.  I saw pictures online from people.  It was mentioned a few times during presentations.  There are now 765K names inscribed on it and an offhand promise to revisit it for the 30 year anniversary.  But there wasn’t a lot about otherwise.

That said, they did update the monument name finder page so you can find where your name is on the monument.

There I am

Clicking on that brings up an image of the panel with all the names.  You can find your own name in the mix.  They are all sorted alphabetically.

In with the Wilhelms

Honestly, that exceeded my expectations, so I salute the effort.

Random Space Statistics

There were many.  I need to go back and review the VODs to dig some out.  But if seemed about sufficient.

Else?

What else was there?

There was Project M5, the mobile 4x conquest title, which is now called EVE Galaxy Conquest.

EVE Galaxy Conquest

That will be coming soon on iOS and Android, with a PC client promised for a future date.  As somebody put it, we now have “EVE Clash of Corps” to look forward to.

There was some look into the underlying technologies for EVE Online going into its third decade.

Carbon and Quasar

Carbon is the front end technology which anybody playing the game now know because it powers the revamped UI, while Quasar is the backend technology.  Also, Hilmar was able to make a joke about moving to Python 3 for the third decade.

Project Discovery, the in-game citizen science mini-game, will be moving in the future to help with cancer research.

Project Discovery

If science can harness our need for ISK and ship SKINS to help cure cancer, so much the better.

It was also announced that PLEX For Good would become a continuous effort that people could donate to at any given time and that players would help guide where the funds would go.

I am a little less excited about this, if only because my experience with human nature is that we tend to respond better to an urgent, current, specific need than enhancing the general good of the world in some general, unspecified way.  I am not saying that is healthy, just that it is the way people tend to respond.

Finally, we got the word that ticket sales for the next EVE Fanfest were already on sale… and that it will be in May of 2025.  So there will be no EVE Fanfest in 2024.

Tickets on sale now!

Overall, for myself as a remote viewer, I did learn a bunch of new things, so am not disappointed.  Expectations were met and occasionally exceeded.  But I am waiting for some dev blogs to nail down a lot of details.  CCP is usually pretty good with that.

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