EVE Vegas 2017: CCP announces new EVE-based mobile MMO Project Aurora
Each player in Aurora will take command of an upgradable space station, from which ships can be dispatched to gather resources and capture territory. You’ll find yourself on a star map with other players doing the exact same, and can forge alliances, form corporations, and betray other players just like in EVE. The goal is to fight for possession of ancient artifacts in the centre of the map that you can then use to fix a broken ancient stargate and move onto the next map. Each jump brings you one step closer to the ultimate goal of reaching the center of the galaxy — I’ll take a pause here for those currently experiencing No Man’s Sky flashbacks.
Project Aurora has no release date but PlayRaven has suggested that a full release will come in 2018 on both iOS and Android. Developers showed it off this early in order to get feedback from the EVE community, but the crowd at EVE Vegas gave the game something of a lukewarm initial reception. It remains to be seen whether this studio can translate the core elements that make EVE great into a pocket-sized format, and how popular EVE‘s political metagame will be with mobile gamers.
“you can then use to fix a broken ancient stargate and move onto the next map”
This sounds terribly like another game… And I’m not thrilled to be reminded of that said game.
Hopefully this mobile game turns out to be good. I did enjoy Galaxy on Fire: Alliances for it essentially being an Eve-lite on mobile, especially with the inter-alliance political intrigue between players. Sadly that game’s development has been ceased for quite some time, and I wouldn’t settle for anything less for an official Eve mobile game.
Kind of seems like CCP’s main strategy is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
CCP’s main strategy seems to be to stick its fingers in as many pies as possible in order to develop competence in new areas. I think this shift started when DUST 514 failed and the studio realised they’d gained some valuable insights and capabilities as a result. They went head-first into VR and now they want to take a stab at mobile, and who knows what else they’ll try. Hilmar has said the company is now working with several other studios so anything is possible.
CCP is currently a one-trick-pony company, which is a very uncomfortable place to be if your one trick is becoming dated. They need to come up with another big success, or a bunch of moderate successes, to hedge their bets and prevent the company collapsing if EVE ever fails.
Blizzard did the same thing a while ago after WoW hit its peak and started to slide. It’s how we got from it a card game, a shooter, and a MOBA.
The more interesting news today was increasing the skillpoints and ship classes available to alpha (f2p) players in Eve…
You’re a mind-reader, I literally just posted about this!
Eve based mobile game? Hmm. So, I’m guessing it is a lot less Eve than mobile.
-Not made by CCP
-No tie ins with EVE Online
I don’t see how this will appeal to anyone who cares about EVE and the chances any mobile game can stand out in that marketplace is already so slim. I guess this is less of an investment and risk than trying to put out Project Legion.
They’re proceeding with Legion too, it’s now called Project Nova and is in active development in Reykjavik. I think this mobile game is definitely a case of low investment in a new product though, CCP has to build new games if it wants to survive in the long term.
IIRC, at an event, as CCP was moving pieces around the board there was a distinction between “projects” and “products” (or some such words) A Project was more than an idea or concept but still had not gotten a firm commitment that it would be launched. Did I remember that correctly, is Nova still a project or is it a formal project yet?
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I thought DUST and even Legion were done out of the companies they bought in China for that purpose. Am I reading too much into “development in Reykjavik?” Or is that an indication of a PC team starting completely over?
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P.S. thx for your coverage!
Nova is still a Project, and you’re right that this has a specific meaning from CCP. It means it’s been approved and is in active development but it could still be cancelled and nothing is finalised. When it’s ready and CCP has identified that the market is right for it, they’ll give it a new name and branding, start the marketing process, and put it into full production.
It’s still a bit uncertain for Nova because there are a lot of first person shooters on the horizon. I imagine they will have to demonstrate something really compelling beyond the standard gameplay, which for me means one of two things: Territorial Warfare on planets and stations, or a direct integration with EVE somehow. We’ll see what happens, they said there will be announcements coming in the next few months.
Good points. People criticised the strategy of DUST. IMO, it was not that the strategy was bad, just that an OK/mediocre entry in a crowded field was a bad implementation.
EVE is not that well known – at least of the scale of megagames like OW/BF/DOTA/D2. A meh FPS will not compete with the billion dollar brands. OTOH, the low investment outsourcing seems wise and certainly reduces the risk.
I’m glad to hear that the Dust/Legion/Nova concept is still kicking around.
Project Aurora won’t be a game for me, but I would rather it succeeded than fail. I guess before smaller projects like Valkyrie and Gunjack I associated CCP’s game ideas with being much more high concept and interesting like EVE itself or what they planned for World of Darkness.
Sounds interesting. I’ve always enjoyed “management” style mobile games. I really really really hope it doesn’t end up being one of those “building this base will take 35 minutes, or if you buy our currency you can build instantly.
I see three different timers in those four screenshots and I bet the orange currency is the premium currency used to shortcut things like the timers.
There are 99,99999% chances that it will have times. It’s a mobile game and all of them are plagued with this bs timers. It sounds similar to Hades’ Star only that the new EVE might be a spend all full on PVP.
It’s definitely a timer-based game, which makes sense for mobile as they want extremely short play sessions (1-3 mins) but in the context of long-term strategic and social gameplay. The question is monetisation strategy, what resources are in-game and what you can do with cash. I can’t imagine people spending money without getting some advantage (eg bypassing timers). It’s an old but proven model on mobile.