Obsidian showed off 20 minutes of live gameplay from their highly-anticipated RPG The Outer Worlds at PAX East yesterday. We got to see humorous dialogue, two companions and plenty of combat—including a baton that shrinks and enlarges enemies' faces when you whack them.

The slice of alpha gameplay came from inside Byzantium, city of the elite. For starters, the protagonist was invited to take part in a propaganda film shoot at Odeon Pictures, and cast in the role of a hero fighting off pirates that were trying to steal food pills from a town. The dialogue, which doesn't have voice acting yet, seemed genuinely amusing, and had plenty of chances to roleplay, including options to simply "exude wordless fury" or make your eye twitch. 

At the end of the scene, the player could stay in character and carry on acting, or—and this is naturally what the devs decided to show off—you could murder the other actors and steal their stuff. The director was ecstatic with your commitment to the role, until he too was peppered with bullets. In The Outer Worlds, you can kill anyone, the developers explained.

The rest of the footage featured combat in the wider city. I'm still not convinced by the gunplay, which looks floaty, but the weapons seem fun, not least the Mandibular Rearranger. It's one of the game's science weapons, each of which has unusual effects, and when you hit someone with it their face will either shrink or swell up to twice its usual size.

We also saw the player equip a companion, Felix, with a ridiculous helmet that's basically a moon wearing a top hat. We got a glimpse of what it's like to command your followers: Felix was instructed to dropkick random civilians while Nyoka, your other companion, took a swig from a bottle and let rip with a giant machine gun that set enemies ablaze. 

At the end, the player picked up a flaw, one of the systems I'm most excited about. Repeated interactions with a particular enemy will give you the option of taking a flaw: in this case, the player was nibbled by a pet canid, which gave them a phobia that would make them worse at combat when canids were nearby. If you take the flaw, you also get to pick an extra perk.

Take a look at all the footage at the top of this story and let me know what you think in the comments. The video was uploaded by YouTube channel MrRedRivers.

The Outer Worlds is set to launch on the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store later this year—but not on Steam.

It may not seem like it but Flower is a game about explosions. 

I'm a gust of wind that picks a single petal from a flower then whooshes off with it. The petal flicks around, a toy in a puppy's mouth, as I zoom downhill, parting the grass like a meadow Moses. When I hit more clusters of flowers they spring to life and add new petals to my swirl. Color spreads through the nearby plants, glowing with life and vibrancy. It's an explosion, just a peaceful explosion of growth and natural beauty instead of propellant. Shockwaves emit from a central point, and stones tilt away as the force washes over them. It may not be a fireball, but I think Mr. Torgue would be proud all the same.

Flower is the kind of arty indie game that could easily have been hippy-dippy goop. It isn't, and one of the things that saves it is being wordless. No italicized poetry appears in the sky, at no point does the voice of Mother Earth berate humanity for inventing roads. In fact, Flower incorporates man-made constructions in its later levels. Bleak skyscrapers are bad but it's fine with windmills, streetlights, and so on. 

It's not a game that wants you to tear up the pavement, but it would like you to appreciate parks and gardens. I finished it with a powerful urge to plant something. 

When I try to leave the meadow I slow down, then get buffeted back on track. While zhuzhing down a gully I miss some pink flowers and try to turn back, but am fought by the wind all the way except that I am also a wind? Unless I'm like an invisible petal wizard or something. You have to go with the flow or it'll fight you, but when you relax into it and let the shape of the landscape guide you, Flower coaxes you into a real state of relaxation and saying "ooh" every five minutes. 

You know how great the wind blowing through trees in The Witcher 3 is? It's that, but instead of playing as Geralt following tracks from a murder scene you are the wind rattling leaves around.

Flower was originally released on PS3 in 2009, picked up a bunch of awards, and finally made it to PC 10 years later. It's available on Steam, GOG, and Epic.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a rather nice-looking game that unfortunately doesn't have a photo mode, but that hasn't stopped avid screenshotters from finding a way. Jim2point0 (recently responsible for the Resident Evil 2 camera hack) has been using Cheat Engine to take some pretty screens of Sekiro, and has shared the table he used to do it. You can toggle the HUD, alter FOV, and now he's updated it so you can freeze time, or just enemies, to line up exactly the shot you need.

Screenshotters have been doing some impressive stuff with Sekiro. For instance:

When something goes wrong in Rainbow Six Siege, it’s easy to blame the game. And sometimes it really is the game’s fault. But there are many misconceptions about the factors that we often pin our shortcomings on—stuff like server lag, “bad” hitboxes, or ping abuse. That’s where a new video explainer by former Siege developer Dominic Clement may be able to help. 

The video touches on complicated subjects like what ping really is, server vs. client side connections, and tick rate. The whole thing is a great watch, but let’s break down the biggest lessons to be learned.

Debunking "ping abuse"

Ping abuse is when a player uses their high ping to gain an advantage in-game. The idea is that a high ping player can peek around a corner (known as peeker's advantage) and shoot enemies before they have a chance to react. I regularly see angry accusations from enemies and teammates alike claiming that ping abuse is ruining the match. That would be a legit concern, if it were true.

“Ping abuse is not a thing,” Clement remarks in the video. “High ping is not an advantage. If anything, you should be mad at low-pingers.” He explains that when two players with wildly different pings enter a gunfight, their connections are essentially in a race to reach the server first. The faster connection wins the race, which means their shot will always register first. The system is designed to always favor lower pings. Siege didn’t always work this way—a 2017 update adjusted server interactions to make sure peeker's advantage isn't much of an advantage.

You probably just missed

Although Siege is rife with legitimate bugs, Clement points out that players often complain about hit registration (or hitreg) when there is often a much simpler explanation: you missed, or your ping spiked. He plays several clips toward the end of the video to demonstrate this.

I can definitely back up this one with personal experience. It’s common to be spectating a teammate when they lose a fight and immediately protest. Even though I was watching as they missed almost every shot, they’ll still insist that they shot them in the head. Other times what looks like bad hitreg is really a brief connection interruption on your end.

Siege hitboxes are brutal

Source: Coreross on YouTube

Perception problems are exacerbated by Siege’s ultra precise hitboxes. Clement explains that since 2017’s Operation Health, hitboxes are now defined by the body inside of the armor and clothing. Most shooters have much larger hitboxes that often expand past the body itself. In the gif below, you can see just how much you can “miss” in Overwatch and still hit your mark. The difference is staggering.

Source: Nateson on YouTube

In Siege, shooting through the top of a helmet, earmuff cups, or external pouches on an operator will miss. This is the system working. I regularly encounter players who don’t know this, so it’s easy to see how it causes confusion and misguided hitreg woes.

Clement told me via email that he consulted with Siege community manager UbiNoty to confirm everything in the video is accurate, so it’s safe to take the info at face value. He isn’t trying to insist that the player is always wrong, but it’s worth knowing what a fake problem looks like to better identify real ones when they happen.

We didn't know how lucky we were. "Hey, that's a decent improvement on the original," we thought back when Borderlands 2 came out in 2012. Great class system. Tons of guns. It was a lot of fun. We didn't realize Borderlands 2 would end up being a framework so many games would build on, and yet fail to live up to. We didn't realize it was quite so special.

Borderlands 2 took stuff from MMOs, like color-coded rarity levels and raids, but reduced the boredom of traveling by adding bouncy vehicles right out of Halo. It worked both as a co-op experience for friends who wanted an excuse to hang out online, and a solo game. It had a long tail of DLC, timed events like the $100,000 Loot Hunt, and endgame challenges like Digistruct Peak, as well as Overpower levels for players who'd maxed out everything else. Though it predated "games as a service" it was, in its own way, a forever game. There are still at least 5,000 people playing it at any given time on Steam, even today.

At the same time, Borderlands 2 is very 2012. When the siren-class character, Maya, spots an elite enemy she shouts "We got a badass over here!" like the Neil deGrasse Tyson reaction. Axton, the soldier-class character, sometimes says "You get a bullet, and you get a bullet!" like Oprah but for murders. There's a double rainbow easter egg, and the pirate-themed DLC features ninja pirates for god's sake. Borderlands 2 is a museum of memes from the early 2010s. 

It's also heavy with pop culture references, but there's a line between the two. The vehicles added in the Captain Scarlett & Her Pirate's Booty DLC are designed to look like the skiff from Return of the Jedi. That's just a reference. When Gaige, the mechromancer-class character, shouts "Unlimited power!" like a million image macros of Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith, that's a meme.

Now, several years later, I find the dated-ness of those memes weirdly charming. I haven't heard anyone say "Garbage Day!" or reference trap cards in ages, but here they are in Borderlands 2, frozen in meme amber.

Neverending story 

It wasn't all memes, of course. We wouldn't have cared about departing NPCs saying "I must go, my people need me" if they weren't in a game that kept us around with an eternal cascade of sweet loot. The sniper rifle that shoots acid bullets in three-round bursts when zoomed. The pistol that reloads almost instantly and is stable as a rock. Those kept us playing through True Vault Hunter difficulty, through multiple DLC packs, across hundreds of hours. 

Play a loot game for that long and builds inevitably degenerate. One example of that was The Bee, a shield with a decent chance of dropping from a propaganda radio host in the Boneyard area of the Arid Nexus. Named for Muhammad Ali's famous quote (a reference, not a meme), The Bee gave bonus damage per shot and was massively overpowered if combined with guns that had a high rate of fire. Which is what everyone did once they figured out how to farm it. Borderlands developers Gearbox treated the exploit like an MMO developer would and nerfed it, rather than just letting it slide like devs might in a more typical first-person shooter that wasn't meant to be played for years.

While Borderlands 2 is definitely an FPS, judging it by those standards misses its appeal. Its enemies possess only rudimentary tactics, throwing grenades at players behind cover but otherwise not doing much to coordinate. The spaces you fight them in are deliberately samey, with exploding barrels keyed to different elemental damage types placed throughout every bandit stronghold. The point isn't to outsmart the AI, but to transform your character into an effective mathematical engine to munch them with.

Shielded enemies are susceptible to electrical attacks, while armored enemies can be melted by corrosive ones. Fire attacks are best against enemies who have no special defences but plenty of regular health, and Borderlands 2 has no shortage of meaty bullet sponges. Anyone who takes damage from slag will take bonus damage from any non-slag attack that follows. Juggling all these things, working with other players or swapping between guns, grenades, and powers with different damage types, it can feel more like playing Final Fantasy or Pokemon than Half-Life. "Maya uses pistol that shoots rockets. It's super-effective!" (That's both a meme and a reference for you).

Which is not to say that it's bad at being a shooter. Borderlands 2 doesn't do the RPG thing of having the numbers invalidate your ability to aim. If you land a shot on someone it doesn't matter what your gun's stats are, you landed that shot. Enemies take bonus damage if you hit them where they're weakest, and goliaths will frenzy and attack their allies if you pop off their dopey bucket heads. The expectations of FPS players are catered to, with the dopamine hit of RPG progression layered on top.

Just shloot me 

Other looter shooters are still struggling to recreate what Borderlands 2 did right. The Division games have boring loot, all kneepads and guns that don't even explode like grenades when thrown. Warframe's a completely different game for its opening hours before it gets good, and Anthem never does. Destiny's NPCs keep obnoxiously trying to remind you of their personalities every time they pop up, but most of them are forgettable. The Ghost is just Claptrap for boring people.

The Gearbox of today isn't the Gearbox of 2012, however. Borderlands 2's lead writer, Anthony Burch, is not writing Borderlands 3. The second game's creative director, Mikey Neumann, has also left the studio (though he did come back to help make Borderlands 3's trailer). And between the release of Borderlands 2 and now Gearbox has been responsible for Aliens: Colonial Marines and Battleborn. It's tempting to lower our expectations a little. 

That trailer really does look like classic flavor Borderlands, though. Some have expressed disappointment with that familiarity, but a game that sticks to the template would be preferable to one that's beholden to all the worst trends of modern looter shooters. A Borderlands game with battle passes, microtransactions, and a confusing variety of different currencies? No, thanks. I'd rather they stick to their guns.

And what about the memes? What's 2019 got to contribute—jokes about whether unused items in your inventory "spark joy"? Bandits impersonating Powerful Shaggy instead of quoting Hamlet? I wrote that as a joke but now I think about it, that would rule. Still, memes aren't the same carefree internet japes they were when Borderlands 2 came out and the idea of someone at Gearbox having to sift out the ones that have been appropriated by bigots is a depressing thought.

When Borderlands 2 was new I played it with friends. We had a blast, and to my surprise I realized I was interested in the story, not just the shooting. I made a second character just to go through it solo, hunting down audio logs and hanging on Handsome Jack's every word.  

That's what stands out when I compare it to the looter shooters that followed. I can't imagine doing the same thing in The Division 2, a game where even fans don't care about the plot. If Borderlands 2 did adopt some of the trappings of modern looter-shooters I wouldn't mind too much, so long as it kept the idea that it's worth having an arc, a villain you love to hate and a plot that feels like it's building to something.

Also the song that plays over the opening credits has to rule, but that's a given.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a brilliant game, and Tom awarded it 92/100 in his review. But if there's one thing it lacks, it's Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage.

Thankfully, modder kasaiji has buckled to overwhelming pressure from fans and created a new mod that blesses you with Cage's face every time you die. It even has two variants: a grey face when you can still revive, and a blood red one for when you're finally, properly dead.

To install it, follow the instructions on the mod's Nexus page—you'll need to grab the Sekiro mod engine first.

It's not the first time Cage has invaded one of FromSoftware's games. A 2016 mod replaced every texture with pictures of both Cage and...er...Shrek. The result was utterly bizarre, and needs to be seen to be believed.

You have to play Unheard with headphones. A new detective game from Next Studios, Unheard drops you into the aural soundscapes of crimes-in-progress. In each case you're a fly on the wall, and you have to suss out the truth using only what you can hear. 

So, okay, you could use your computer speakers and get by just fine. But that’s like blasting Dark Side Of The Moon on phone speakers; headphones are the much better option. Unheard makes use of binaural and proximity-based audio to place you in the midst of ongoing scenes. It’s reminiscent of live plays like Sleep No More or found-footage mysteries like Her Story, only your sole input is audio. You can scrub back and forth along the timeline like a YouTube video and move your virtual avatar between different areas, following different characters or just exploring.

Unheard’s five cases start off slowly with a crime of stolen identity, but they quickly ramp up in density. Multiple rooms, speakers, and background noise complicate things. I found it easiest to start with the names; much like last year’s Return of the Obra Dinn, you’re left to your own devices to uncover who's who using a list of known persons present. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find two people alone in a room, but other times, you might need to rely on character traits. A character constantly referred to by his glasses, for example, is probably “Four Eyes.”

Each environment adds its own quirks. In some, you might just be seeking an admission of identity or guilt. But in others, you have to identify key items and track them, a difficult prospect in a world with extremely limited vision. Given only a barebones floorplan and the position of each speaker, audio cues are used to great effect to communicate critical non-verbal exchanges. 

In the second case, you’re tasked with finding a stolen painting and figuring out who nabbed it. Or rather, who stole it first, and who ultimately stole it, because as it turns out, that might be two different people. You can follow around a buyer, the owner, the painter and his assistant, or any number of shady characters, but the key becomes tracking the movement of one—or possibly several—copies of a painting you can’t see. Without handing you the solution, I’ll just say that I had to double-check my assumptions a few times as I repeatedly scrubbed through the logs. 

The excellent use of audio is what elevates Unheard’s mysteries. Hearing speakers move around you, whispered conversations in the corners of rooms, and muffled noises or ringtones through walls helps you start to establish the timeline of events. A comment tool lets you add short quips that will fly across the map at points you designate, which was immensely helpful in tracking when someone picked up the phone or sent a text. When I was trying to suss out who was calling who, the comments let me tail suspects and time the moment someone picks up a call with the moment another dials them.

Due to its sensory-dependent nature, it’s helpful that Unheard’s voice actors provide just the  right amount of personality and inflection. The delivery can seem cheesy to start, but over time the emphatic performances really helped me pick voices out of a crowd. In the art gallery, as a commotion stirred in the crowd when the star painting was stolen, art collector Greene’s distinct accent and delivery was discernible enough for me to pinpoint as he was having a clandestine conversation in the back corner of the room.

As the story progresses, the voices begin to play an even greater role. The framing between each individual case poses the player as a detective, participating in a groundbreaking new auditory investigation unit meant to solve cold cases. But as you unveil the hidden identities of the Keyser Söze-esque kingpins and culprits behind accidental tragedies, your situation grows more sinister. Where are you? Are you here of your own volition? Is this really what my handler is telling me it is?

Unheard is short. My own playthrough only took about three hours. But in the span of those three hours, I filled three college-ruled notebook pages with notes and charts. The auditory enigma of each new disaster pushed me to construct logic puzzle charts, crossing off who would be unable—or unlikely—to send ghost texts from a former cast member’s phone or detonate a remote explosive. The high bar for mystery games is to inspire the “a-ha” moment, where one contradiction or overlooked fact sheds new light on the entire case, and Unheard revels in these moments, taking you through each one after you’ve correctly solved the case. (Thankfully, it also informs you when you’re wrong, and how many correct answers you submitted.)

Taking away a critical sense works in Unheard’s favor, adding an extra layer of intrigue to each of its cold-case crimes. Every discussion is met with that much more skepticism, and as I listen in on one exchange in one room, I’m already peering at the names moving around like ants inside the glass. I’m marking off suspects and taking notes, all the while picking who to spy on next, knowing every question can be answered if I just listen closely.

Things have not gone well for Valve's much-publicized CCG Artifact since its November 2018 release. The player count began tumbling almost immediately, from a peak of more than 60,000 players to a concurrent count, according to Steam Charts, of just over 200. It's a remarkable decline, particularly for Valve, which had positioned Artifact as the vanguard of its return to game development. 

Today it acknowledged that things have gone very, very wrong, and said that it's effectively putting the game on hold while it figures out where to go from here. 

"When we launched Artifact, we expected it would be the beginning of a long journey, that it would lay the foundation for years to come. Our plan was to immediately dive into our normal strategy of shipping a series of updates driven by the dialogue community members were having with each other and with us," Valve's Jeep Barnett wrote. 

"Obviously, things didn't turn out how we hoped. Artifact represents the largest discrepancy between our expectations for how one of our games would be received and the actual outcome. But we don't think that players misunderstand our game, or that they're playing it wrong. Artifact now represents an opportunity for us to improve our craft and use that knowledge to build better games." 

Barnett said that it's clear that there are "deep-rooted" issues with Artifact that can't be addressed through the original strategy of updating with new features and cards. Instead, Valve believes that it needs to re-examine everything about it, including "game design, the economy, the social experience of playing, and more." And that's going to take awhile. 

"Moving forward, we'll be heads-down focusing on addressing these larger issues instead of shipping updates," Barnett wrote. "While we expect this process of experimentation and development to take a significant amount of time, we’re excited to tackle this challenge and will get back to you as soon as we are ready." 

The man who instigated a 2017 swatting that resulted in the death of a bystander at the hands of police has been sentenced to 20 years in prison. The sentence is double that of the ten years recommended by guidelines, according to this AP report, but was handed down as part of a deal in which 26-year-old Tyler Barriss pleaded guilty to 51 federal charges related to fake calls and threats. 

The charges against Barriss followed the death of 28-year-old Andrew Finch, who was shot by police responding to a call claiming that someone at Finch's address had killed one person and was holding others hostage. That call was placed by Barriss, allegedly at the behest of 19-year-old Casey Viner, who was embroiled in a dispute over a Call of Duty: WW2 match with 20-year-old Shane Gaskill. When Gaskill discovered that Barriss was trying to track him down, he provided an old address—Finch's—and dared him to do something. 

"We hope that this will send a strong message about swatting, which is a juvenile and senseless practice," U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister said after sentencing. "We’d like to put an end to it within the gaming community and in any other contact. Swatting, as I’ve said before, is not a prank."

Viner and Gaskill initially pleaded not guilty to charges related to the swatting, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and wire fraud, but Viner has notified the court that he wants to change his plea and Gaskill is also engaged in plea-related talks with prosecutors. The officer who actually shot and killed Finch as he exited his house as ordered by police was not charged; Finch's family has filed a lawsuit against the city of Wichita and the officers involved in the killing.

Last year, 6,142 EVE Online pilots flooded into the solar system of 9-4RP2 and participated in its biggest single battle ever—setting a Guinness World Record for most participants in a multiplayer battle in the process. But that record-breaking fight also illustrated how parts of EVE Online are aging much worse than others. The crippling lag created by 6,000 players smashing as many ships together was devastating to both sides. Everything slowed to a crawl, and the biggest threat became the random disconnects that pulled players from the fight.

This May, EVE will turn 16 years old. To keep its promise to make EVE Online live forever, developer CCP Games is experimenting with ambitious networking and simulation technology that could radically change (and improve) its aging infrastructure, unlocking all sorts of new possibilities.

During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, EVE Online partnered with Hadean, the makers of an innovative game engine called Aether, for a grand experiment: Could they run a 10,000-player multiplayer tech demo that didn't immediately slow to a crawl?

And, more importantly, how could that technology be used to keep EVE Online relevant?

Death to latency 

On March 20, 3,852 human players and 10,422 AI pilots participated in the first public tech demo of Aether Wars—a barebones space combat sim using EVE Online's art assets. The idea wasn't to perfectly recreate EVE Online's fleet combat, but to see if Hadean's Aether engine could handle ten thousand ships and hundreds of thousands of torpedoes in one area without crippling lag. As you can see from the various livestreams of the event (like the one below), it was far from perfect. But it did work. Players could fly around and fire weapons with hiccups of lag that were much more tolerable than the crawl EVE Online's real battles turn into. 

It worked better than both CCP and Hadean had hoped for. A day before the tech demo, I caught up with CCP Games CEO Hilmar Pétursson to talk about the project and what it could mean for the future of EVE Online. 

"There are pretty good odds of it just crashing and burning," he told me. "EVE players are known for tearing apart whatever we throw at them. Either outcome is a good one, though, because this is such cutting edge technology we just have to learn the boundaries and the opportunities through these kinds of experiments."

The gist of what Hadean's tech does differently is in how it seamlessly scales to match the complexity of a game world without tons of bloat or middleware. Using cloud technology (not to be confused with the cloud tech powering Google's Stadia streaming service) and its proprietary operating system, Hadean's Aether engine will supposedly be able to handle complex simulations—like 10,000 ships launching missiles at each other—without skipping a beat. That could change a great deal about how EVE Online's battles play out.

"The [infrastructure] of EVE was largely set in place about 17 or 18 years ago," Pétursson said. "Just for perspective, we had dual-CPU pentium 3 servers. Since then the world has moved on many cycles and computing architectures are vastly different, especially when it comes to the number of CPUs and cores in a machine. And EVE cannot properly take advantage of that change because it was architected for a very different environment. It's held up nicely, but there are limits to where we can take it because of this initial condition."

That's why CCP is experimenting with Hadean's Aether engine. "The main difference is that Hadean allows the simulation to scale across multiple cores, multiple CPUs and multiple machines, and they have a very elegant way of managing that scale as it happens. And that is something that is hard to do with the architecture that we have for EVE," Pétursson explained.

A new kind of war 

Though Pétursson said it was impossible to predict when EVE players could benefit from this technology ("It's just so much speculation on so little data, it's just not productive"), the implications are game changing.

For one, it would mean no more Time Dilation (TiDi). Introduced back in 2011, TiDi is CCP's only way to combat the massive lag of its player battles. Since its servers struggled to keep up with the millions of processes happening at once as players fired weapons, launched fleets of attack drones, or repositioned ships, TiDi slows everything down so the servers can catch up. It's like bullet-time from The Matrix, which sounds cool until you're stuck in a battle that has been going on for eight hours because everything is moving so slowly. Under full TiDi, any action that should only take one second actually takes ten, stretching EVE battles into gruelling 14-hour-long conflicts.

But using technology like the Aether engine could also expand EVE Online's physics simulation, allowing for more diverse ship designs and more realistic battles. "There are limits to the variables that are managed by the physics engine," Pétursson told me. "One of them, particularly, has to do with rotation."

One of the corners CCP Games had to cut to get EVE Online running smoothly back in 2003 has profoundly shaped its fleet tactics: The EVE servers have no idea which direction any ship is facing at a given time. That little detail has big consequences on EVE's fleet tactics and ship design. "Not knowing the orientation of the ship means you cannot build a ship with guns on one side and not the other side," Pétursson said. "That's why all the weapon systems of EVE are mirrored."

"One thing that the Hadean solution will enable is that once [the server] knows a ship's orientation, we can start to make asymmetrical ships for real. You can imagine a fleet fight under those conditions would be very different. We can start to make ships that are shield ships that protect ships that are behind them."

Another big change would be proper simulation of line of sight. Right now, there's no such thing as "taking cover" in EVE Online. If an enemy ship can lock onto you, they can shoot you no matter what might be in the way. But if EVE Online's servers had the processing power to calculate line of sight at a massive scale, EVE's fleet battles would look completely different. 

"When you look at a typical fleet fight, often the tactic is to make a big ball of spaceships which is what you'd do if there was no line of sight occlusion," Pétursson said. "When you have line of sight then you have formations because it's important that everyone has a clear line of sight to the target. You go from being a giant ball to having a shape to the battlefield. This will massively change tactics of engaging in fleet fights." 

But change is scary. Assuming that the Aether engine does one day power EVE Online, it's likely that major changes to EVE's combat would be gradually rolled out in a contained way. Much like its Abyssal Deadspace expansion, which added dungeon-like encounters instanced from the open universe of New Eden, this new form of ship combat would be localized to a small portion of EVE instead of just rolled out to the entire universe all at once. "Obviously we don't want to overly disrupt the current gameplay, which people engage with on a daily basis," Pétursson said.

None of this is guaranteed to happen, either. Though the Aether Wars tech demo was a success, it could be years before EVE players see tangible changes to their game. Pétursson told me it's one of CCP Games' few long-term projects that are being offset by more immediate changes, like the upcoming 64-bit client and DirectX 12 support. "The Hadean thing is more like a leap into the extreme future of what could be done. But these incremental and revolutionary initiatives inform each other."

It's exciting stuff that could see EVE Online keep pace with the new wave of combat space sims like Elite: Dangerous and the upcoming Star Citizen—but with EVE's massive, player-driven universe behind it all. But at what point is CCP just developing an entirely different kind of space game?

"At some point we are developing a different space game," Pétursson laughed. "But if we're going to stay true to EVE Online going on forever, then at some point the current gameplay of EVE is just not going to be as relevant as it was. As we have more space games coming online, the gameplay and the simulation dynamics also need to evolve. But we have to be very careful about doing that."