We write all the time about the best games you can play on PC, but the end of the decade is an invitation to examine which games have changed PC gaming itself. This list of 25 is our memory of games that continue to matter for their themes, for their impact on the business or technology of games, for reshaping the relationship between players and developers, for having formed a new genre, or for failing spectacularly. Not all of these games released between 2010 and 2019—following one of the biggest trends of this decade, some PC games have had tectonic effects on our hobby long after their launch day.

EVE Online (2003-onward)

EVE Online is the closest we've come to that sci-fi dream of living a second life in a virtual society. At this point it's less of a game and more like an alternate reality where players can become warlords, dictators, or just another scummy pirate blowing up poor space truckers for shits and giggles. But the point is that, unlike so many other MMOs, in EVE Online is the only one courageous enough to let players define their own experience—for the most part.

Where other MMOs hem you in with authored narratives or limited player interactions, EVE Online's developers are remarkably willing to sit back and let players steer. The result is a player-driven world with a real economy and a tangible sense of consequence, which in turn gives every action a sense of weight and meaning rarely found in other games. In EVE Online, the wrong move and undo years of work.

What's really monumental, however, is the sheer scale of that collective fantasy. Because every player inhabits the same universe, EVE Online has become an enormously diverse digital society with its own recorded histories and cultures that wax and wane as player-built empires rise and fall. Those tectonic shifts in EVE Online's landscape are felt through the first-hand experiences of the players themselves, personal stories of betrayal, discovery, and camaraderie that carry the same emotional gravity as if they happened in real life. Therein lies EVE Online's lasting legacy, that uncanny ability to make a collective fiction feel real. No game other game has managed that—not at the same scale—and I'm terrified that no other game will manage it again. —Steven Messner, Senior Reporter 

Team Fortress 2 (2007) 

Between 2009 and 2012, Valve subjected its FPS to an amount of change and experimentation that would have killed a lesser game. What launched as the stylish comeback of a 1999 shooter became a guinea pig for Valve's ideas and larger initiatives. In the process, RED vs. BLU became a platform for inventive storytelling, new technology, and business models that would change Steam and PC gaming forever.

Crawl the list of 684 updates (and counting), and you notice the escalating pokes, prods, and full-body transplants Valve performed on TF2. What if we released new items for characters that transformed the meta? What if we sold those items? What if anyone could make items, sell them in our game, and make money from it? Can we put an RPG-style crafting system in a multiplayer game? What happens if we use this item economy to promote the launch of dozens of other games on Steam? 

In 2011, "going free-to-play" was an unusual move for any FPS, and for western-developed games especially. Team Fortress 2's shift from a paid game to a now-mainstream microtransaction model invited other developers to adopt the same scheme. Valve's biggest stroke of brilliance was the way that TF2 entangled narrative with all of these changes. The surprise addition of co-op to a five-year-old competitive game wasn't a desperate gimmick, it was an invasion of robots within a surprisingly intricate family feud storyline paired with its own trailer, ARG, webcomic, cosmetic items, microsite, and special set of "Machievements." A replay system wasn't just a new feature, but the debut of an annual community film festival—a handful of winners would receive one of the rarest in-game items: the Saxxy, an Oscar trophy wieldable as a melee weapon, and the golden incarnation of TF2's insane, long-running obsession with Australia.

This is the true impact of TF2: using storytelling to add meaning to game updates. We see it in every major competitive game that's followed, from Rainbow Six Siege to Overwatch. In July, PUBG introduced its Season 4 with a Story Trailer. Fortnite's ambitious brand cameos are built on TF2's playful hat tie-ins. 

Lab rats are supposed to eventually die. Instead, these mad experiments made TF2 stronger, and the entire industry learned from Valve's discoveries. —Evan Lahti, Global Editor-in-Chief 

Minecraft (2009) 

Selling a game before it's finished is practically the industry standard these days, but before Kickstarter, Steam Early Access, Fig, and other crowdfunding tools became popular, there was Minecraft. In 2009 it was in an alpha state, nowhere near feature complete with years of development still ahead. But its barebones free alpha had received a positive, excited response and developer Markus Persson decided it was time to start making the money needed to fuel the rest of its development. The alpha went on sale in June of 2009, with the promise that those who bought it for a few dollars now would get all future updates at no additional cost. There was also the promise that the price would go up in the future as more features were added, and the finished game would cost even more. Buy it now, in other words, because the price will only get higher.

It's a format we now take for granted: buying an incomplete game at a discount in the hopes it'll someday be finished and we'll have saved a few bucks—and maybe we'll also get to suggest new features that will end up in the game. It often doesn't work out that way, but it's easy to see why Minecraft's sales model became so popular for both developers and customers. The initial trickle of sales quickly became a flood, to the point where Persson's account was frozen by PayPal, which became suspicious of the massive influx of money. By 2011 Minecraft had sold a million copies. By 2013, 10 million.

In 2014 Persson sold Minecraft to Microsoft, and it's now the best-selling video game of all time, with sales somewhere around 180 million copies on just about every platform available. Minecraft's design, its procedural open worlds, and its deep crafting systems have been heavily influential to scores of other games, but it also set the stage for a decade of Early Access, paid alphas, crowdfunding, and two distinct promises that aren't always kept—for customers, you can buy in early, save money, and influence the final project, and for devs, you can fund your game's development by selling it before it's done. —Christopher Livingston, Staff Writer 

League of Legends (2009)

League of Legends isn't an esport, it's the esport. When Riot Games first started hosting world championships and investing in its competitive scene, it was also inadvertently building the template that nearly every other competitive game would follow—but none would ever fully replicate. Though esports tournaments had happened before, Riot turned League of Legends into a spectacle, investing heavily in stage productions and musical performances that turned what would've been just another nerd tournament into a mind-bending multidimensional performance. In 2017, for example, Riot used augmented reality tech to make it look like a giant dragon stormed the main stage during a musical performance. Or just this year, when musicians performed alongside 3D hologram characters. It's bonkers.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how League has shaped esports. The entire infrastructure of esports as a business was pioneered by Riot. When it created the NA and EU League Championship Series, it turned esports into a year-round event much like any other sport—in turn also legitimizing competitive gaming as a full-time job. And that shift didn't just enable players to go full time, it also created hundreds of adjacent, legitimate jobs in commentating, esports journalism, and production. With Riot's help, esports went from being a hobby to a career.

That still doesn't cover all the ways League of Legends has influenced the games industry, either. Riot was one of the first companies to adopt an aggressive update schedule that continually added to and rebalanced the game, creating a breathing meta that kept players engaged for thousands upon thousands of hours. It also was a major contributor to the growth of Twitch in its earlier years and remains one of its most-watched games, helping legitimize an entire industry of streamers. And though League of Legends isn't solely responsible for any one of these innovations, you'd be hard-pressed to find a game with a wider impact this past decade. —Steven Messner, Senior Reporter 

Arma 2 (2009) 

Arma 2 was the fertile Czech soil that produced two whole-cloth genres: survival and battle royale. It turns out that when you put high-fidelity voice, ballistics, and vehicle systems inside 225 km² of terrain, modders come up with all kinds of cool shit.

Despite a list of technical issues that took a new engine to work through, DayZ mod was groundbreaking for its sense of vulnerability, scale, and tendency to generate campfire stories. In 2012, "It was a shooter that you entered without a gun," a novel experience that lent no comforts or even a stated purpose, but that empowered players to form their own moral systems and roleplaying. Creator Dean Hall was inspired by the hardship he endured during a training exercise with the New Zealand military, when in the jungles of Brunei he lost 50 lbs and nearly died. The desperation of DayZ's wandering, scavenging, and unscripted interactions were carried forth by games like Rust, H1Z1, SCUM, ARK, and Hunt: Showdown.

A portion of what we play today is owed to Bohemia's dedication to making its game extraordinarily moddable. Not long after DayZ, no-name modder PlayerUnknown entered the 2014 Make Arma Not War contest, an official talent search meant in part to find the next DayZ. PlayerUnknown won €30,000—second place—for a spin-off of his novel Battle Royale mod, a format that took Arma's sandbox systems and focused them into an ever-shrinking deathmatch. —Evan Lahti, Global Editor-in-Chief 

Farmville (2009) 

Farmville released just before the start of the decade and peaked with an insane 80-something-million players in 2010. The early years of the 2010s were dominated by fear that Zynga, with its overnight millions of dollars, and Facebook, with its massive influence, were the future of games. "Casual" was an insult aimed at these sorts of games and the people who played them; real games were "core" or "hardcore." Social network games like Farmville were lumped in with iPhone games to prove that videogames as we knew them were doomed.

Those fears were exaggerated, but they weren't exactly unfounded. The mechanics of free-to-play games have made their way into the biggest videogames in the world. It's commonplace to pay for in-game cosmetics or items or loot boxes or convenience, the real legacy of Farmville and other pioneering social games. You can pay money to get something quickly, instead of spending many hours playing a game to "earn" it. Farmville wasn't the very first game to be designed around exploiting its players' compulsive habits for profit, but it helped write the book for the decade of F2P games that followed.

Its influence wasn't entirely negative, however. Those years of angst over casual games now seem childish, and the PC is home to a more vibrant and diverse range of games than we could've imagined a decade ago. The same goes for the people who play games. Hidden object hunts and Doom and Stardew Valley are all shelved together on Steam, and they're all bringing someone joy. Maybe even someone who got into gaming because of Farmville. —Wesley Fenlon, Features Editor 

Final Fantasy XIV (2010) 

Final Fantasy 14 was not the first game to launch in an absolutely disastrous state, but it was the first time a major studio admitted fault and then sunk considerable resources and time into rectifying its mistakes. In 2010, the original FF14 was intended to be a kind of spiritual successor to the aging Final Fantasy 11 MMO, but it ended up being a mishmash of unfun ideas and incomprehensible designs. People hated it. The wisdom of that era would've suggested Square Enix sweep it under the rug and never look back, but instead it did the exact opposite and set an industry-wide precedent in the process.

Over the course of nearly two years and with a visionary new director at the helm, Square Enix rebuilt FF14 from the ground up—an almost entirely different game but still set in the same world. It was a historic display of commitment and an enormous gamble that, ultimately, paid off. FF14 is now easily the best MMO available.

But FF14's real legacy is leading a much wider trend of increasingly common comeback stories that speaks to our increasingly complicated relationship with games as both products and experiences. Shigeru Miyamoto once said that "a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." But Final Fantasy 14 proves that isn't true. Games have always come in all shapes and sizes, but FF14 is a testament to how that shape and size is transient. —Steven Messner, Senior Reporter 

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (2010) 

The way Ubisoft's various open world games have grown and changed over the past decade has been interesting to witness. Series like Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, The Division, Watch Dogs—they all interbreed and learn from each other. If one game develops a new feature (climbing towers to discover new areas of the map in Assassin's Creed, for instance), it's not unusual to see some form of that feature appear in a game from another series (you climb similar towers in Far Cry 4 and Watch Dogs). Sometimes those features disappear, too, when players get absolutely sick of them (which is why you don't climb towers in Far Cry 5 or Watch Dogs 2, thank god). It's video game cross-pollination, and it's not limited only to Ubisoft. Plenty of other games have learned lessons from Ubisoft's endless refining of its open world games.

There's a sweet spot in the creation of a world, a line between a setting that feels too barren to make exploration or side-tracking rewarding and one that feels overstuffed with pointless, grinding activities. Ubisoft has veered back and forth over this line several times this decade, often cramming in far too much—like in Far Cry 4, with so many gatherable resources and crazed animals and hostile NPCs and other distractions—that the sheer amount of icons on the map feels exhausting.

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood had the balance just right, a vibrant, interesting world with just enough engaging side-quests and distractions but stopping short of feeling like an oppressive to-do list. You couldn't go hog-wild without gaining notoriety, meaning guards would begin recognizing you more easily, giving your actions consequences. You also had an impact on the world—taking down a tower and killing its commander revitalized the area, letting you renovate shops that would benefit you with new items and upgrades. A novel feature that let you hire, train, and dispense your own collection of assassins provided a feeling that things were happening even if you weren't there to witness them. It's easy to see the influence of Brotherhood in other open world games—and it's obvious when Ubisoft doesn't carry its lessons forward in its own. —Christopher Livingston, Staff Writer 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) 

How do you make a singleplayer game that thousands of people will still play on a daily basis almost 10 years after its release? Make it moddable. Does anyone talk about 2016's Doom these days? No, because what is there to talk about after you've finished it? But 1993's Doom is still making news regularly because it's still being modded after 26 years, and I guarantee people will still be modding Skyrim for another decade, too. No need for years of DLC, no season passes required. Just give passionate and creative players the tools and freedom they need to craft their own fun.

It helps that even vanilla Skyrim is all about freedom and creating your own adventures. Its big open world is packed with quests, stories, characters, and lore, but once the tutorial is completed there's very little pushing you in any one particular direction. You can go where you want and be who you want—you're the Dragonborn, sure, but you can play for hundreds of hours without ever kicking off the questline that introduces dragons into the world.

That same spirit of freedom applies to Skyrim's extreme moddability. Nexus Mods, a Skyrim modding hub, reports over 1.7 billion downloads of mod files, and more than 60,000 different mods. That keeps the aging RPG fresh with new adventures, companions, locations, weapons, spells, and complete overhauls of game systems long after you've completed the vanilla experience. Just this week alone, 56 new Skyrim mods appeared on Nexus Mods for the nine-year-old RPG. There's an entire lifetime of new experiences for players to discover and a way for Skyrim to endure long after Bethesda has moved on to other games. —Christopher Livingston, Staff Writer 

Mass Effect 3 (2012) 

Fallout 3's ending was so disliked Bethesda rewrote it in the Broken Steel DLC, grafting on a new epilogue and a better climax. But if you didn't buy that DLC you still have the ending where your companions refuse to help because the finale was clearly plotted before they were added.

Mass Effect 3 was different. Its original ending was honestly no worse than Fallout 3's, but unlike Bethesda, BioWare did not wait seven months and two DLCs to address fan complaints. It was 16 days after its release when BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka wrote that "out of respect to our fans, we need to accept the criticism and feedback with humility" and three months later the Extended Cut was out.

The fan rage at Mass Effect 3's ending was effective because it was organized. A campaign called Retake Mass Effect that involved donating money to Child's Play to get BioWare's attention raised $80,000, there was a flood of YouTube videos breaking down different reasons why the ending was bad, conspiracy theories about the "Indoctrination ending," and thanks to social media, the conversation fed itself. If there's one thing YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit all agree on it's that anger is the best fuel for engagement. Legitimate complaints that the ending was a bit weak were buried under the kind of hyperbolic rage that goes viral.

It provided a playbook for fan discontent that's reared up again and again, from the reaction to No Man's Sky to the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. After years of trying to explain that the stereotype of "entitled gamers" is a myth the 2010s came along to say that no, actually some people are pretty entitled and will campaign to have an ArenaNet employee fired because she was rude to a Guild Wars 2 fan on Twitter. Mass Effect 3 was just the first canary in this particular coal mine. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor 

CS:GO (2012) 

On the last day of PAX Prime 2011, I took 20 minutes to wander over to a small, half-populated booth on the show floor and check out Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. CS:GO wasn't a big priority for PC Gamer's coverage that year—a lot of the game's development had been outsourced to Hidden Path, creators of a tower defense game. CS:GO was just a better-looking CS:Source, right? 

Actually, it was mostly a port. With Microsoft and Sony's consoles getting long in the tooth, Valve didn't want to miss the business opportunity to bring one of its franchises to the Xbox and PlayStation. Sure, they'd put Global Offensive on PC too, but the focus was mostly on porting it, evidenced by the fact that CS:GO was only playable on the Xbox 360 at PAX. Valve touted cross-platform play alongside visual makeovers of beloved maps like de_dust2 and cs_office.

This afterthought release eventually became the biggest competitive FPS of the decade. 

What inspired Valve to transform CS:GO from a console port into a flagship were the lessons learned over Team Fortress 2's development. In 2013, one year after CS:GO's release, Valve introduced cosmetic weapon skins. But where TF2 merely popularized the crate-and-key system, CS:GO brought new layers of economic insanity to it. Within the player-run Steam Market, custom AWPs, M4s, and Deagles—with 13 years of meaning soaked into their metal—became massive status symbols, with towering, real-dollar price tags. The dullest pure-white MP7 skin can still fetch hundreds of dollars, simply because it's somewhat rare. 

Before weapon skins arrived, the populations of CS '99, CS '04, and CS '12 were roughly equal. But skins drew CS' most entrenched fans out of their favorite edition, and were the carrot that Global Offensive needed to absorb its older siblings. Not only could you earn limited-edition skins by watching big CS:GO tournaments, but third-party sites like CSGO Lounge let tens of thousands of players bet on esports matches with their Steam inventories. Two YouTubers exploited the black market that had emerged around CS:GO, creating their own gambling website and marketing it to their audiences on YouTube and social media without disclosing their co-ownership, a scam that eventually led to new FCC guidelines governing influencers.

CS:GO's rise coincided with Twitch's own, and as Valve discovered that it had a highly watchable, exciting spectator FPS, the studio began putting up prize money for major tournaments. The most popular pros showcased their gun and knife fashion like sneakers on LeBron. Eventually Valve produced team-specific skins and digital player signature stickers, with much of the proceeds going to those pros. With match spectating built directly into the game client itself, Valve had created a perfectly contained loop of self-promotion. 

As Finnish pro player Tomi "lurppis" Kovanen told me in 2015, “Without the item economy Counter-Strike would be smaller. … There would be less money [in esports], no Valve-sponsored majors, and no one-million-viewer grand finals. In hindsight, the addition of the skins has been the most important development in CS:GO's history, bar none.”

The broader outcome of all of this is the way that CS:GO's sky-high skill ceiling became a template for FPSes that have followed, from Rainbow Six Siege and Apex Legends to Riot's still-unnamed shooter. As CS:GO ballooned in popularity, it put pressure on Valve to raise the technical quality for Counter-Strike's decade-plus fans. CS:GO embedded once-grognardy terminology like tick rate and peeker's advantage in the consciousness of millions of FPS players. And the game's scale of CS:GO allowed Valve to pursue a new machine learning technique to combat cheaters, VACnet, an approach since duplicated in other anticheat services. —Evan Lahti, Global Editor-in-Chief 

FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) 

Though it looks strangely humble now, FTL was a pioneering game in all sorts of ways. Years before the likes of Broken Age and Pillars of Eternity, it was one of the first titles to be successfully funded through Kickstarter, earning over $200,000 dollars from eager fans – 20 times its initial $10,000 goal. Created by a tiny two-man team, its huge success and popularity helped pave the way for countless indie games to come over the course of the decade, demonstrating beyond doubt that clever design and creativity could allow tiny studios to rival the endless resources of their triple-A competitors. 

Casting you as the captain of a rebel starship on a desperate suicide mission, it challenged you to manage your vessel’s crew and systems during Star Trek-like battles as you progressed through procedurally-generated galaxies. The combination of inventive strategy with the design principles of the then-nascent roguelike genre proved instantly compelling. And in bringing that formula firmly into the mainstream, it laid the foundations for countless hits to come, including recent gems such as Slay the Spire, Darkest Dungeon, and the developer’s own Into the Breach. —Robin Valentine, Managing Editor 

Crusader Kings 2 (2012) 

Crusader Kings 2 is a singular sandbox that's unlike any other strategy game, though it's not obvious at a glance. The seemingly infinite menus and lists and popups that you think will make you glaze over are really windows into the greatest medieval soap opera, filling the last eight years with countless absurd anecdotes about murder plots, sexy scandals and occasionally black magic. This obtuse historical grand strategy game unexpectedly became a gateway drug, with all the story possibilities making the dense strategy easier to digest. A lot of people go their first taste trying to unite Ireland, once the recommended starting place for newcomers.

Previously, grand strategy had been great at conjuring up interesting scenarios, but stories not so much. They were focused on warfare and economics and all these abstract things, but Crusader Kings elevated the much more unpredictable and stimulating people (and sometimes animals) that lived in these competing kingdoms. If you enjoyed torturing people in The Sims or watching the drama unfold in Game of Thrones, suddenly there was a strategy game perfect for you—social, human and a bit silly.      

It's also stuck around throughout the decade thanks to a cavalcade of DLC and free updates that have overhauled the game several times over, flinging in more religions, cultures, vikings and just as many new systems. So many live service games have sprouted up, but Paradox Development Studio managed to do a much better job of creating a living game without a lot of the accompanying nonsense. The amount of paid DLC has ruffled some feathers, but I can think of few other games that have been given this kind of support, especially when so many of the significant additions have been free. And now the base game, which has benefited from eight years of continued development, is free, so there's nothing stopping you from usurping some thrones.   —Fraser Brown, News Editor 

XCOM (2012) 

Sometimes a game can rescue an entire genre. We enjoyed some niche turn-based strategy games before Firaxis' spectacular XCOM reboot, but this game pulled the genre closer to the mainstream with cinematic production values, a friendly art style, and—most importantly—a set of XCOM recruits that inspire tremendous empathy across the course of a long and gruelling campaign. You can build a beautiful numbers system based on gear power and chances to hit, but it's something else to translate those stats into drama. It's the drama that makes you hold your hands to your head and cry "nyoooo" when Sergeant "Balls Balls" misses a Chryssalid at point-blank range and is immediately murdered halfway through a mission.

That might seem frivolous, but that reboot has no doubt inspired many new XCOM style games in different settings. There are obvious examples like Phoenix Point, but we've also seen weirder games like Mutant Year Zero. You could even look at games like Into the Breach and claim that XCOM: Enemy Unknown opened a door to new audiences that would appreciate such a beautifully balanced tactics game. Turn-based tactics games have done surprisingly well on console, if you take into account Pokemon, Advance Wars, Shadow Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, and more. XCOM: Enemy Unknown went back to the source - an old, obtuse, but brilliant game - and modernised it perfectly, bringing tactics games back to their old home on the PC. —Tom Senior, Online Editor 

Dark Souls (2012) 

How many games can brag about birthing a genre? It's a short list. First there was Rogue. Until we all got some collective sense and christened the first-person shooter, there was the Doom Clone. Metroid and Castlevania fused into a beloved style with a hated name. And this decade, From Software gave us the Souls-like. No other game in the 2010s has more dramatically changed how we talk about games, particularly difficulty. Nothing has so quickly inspired so many knock-offs.

More importantly for us, Dark Souls is the reason I can browse Steam today and see games like Ni No Kuni, Nier: Automata and Bayonetta. It may be the only time in history an online petition changed the world. Something like 90,000 people said they wanted it, and publisher Bandai Namco made it happen.

From there, Dark Souls' influence carved three new trails. It sold and sold and sold, and so did the sequels, making From Software the most respected developer in Japan not named Nintendo. Its success on PC in the west encouraged other Japanese developers to bring their games over, too, and today it's rare for big Japanese games (or even indies) not to launch on PC, or at least get a delayed port. Finally, Dark Souls made the internet realize just how important modders are to PC gaming. Without Durante's DSFix mod, which repaired an egregiously slipshod port, the series may never have taken off on PC. The standards for quality ports are now far higher. Meanwhile, From Software got George R. R. Martin to help write its next game, Elden Ring. It'll probably be out before his next book. —Wesley Fenlon, Features Editor 

Gone Home (2013) 

The Fullbright Company had no idea that its first-person atmospheric exploration game would cause quite the cultural shift in the video game world to the interest (and anger) or many critics and fans. Gone Home's empty house opened the door to a discussion that got right to the heart of the gaming community: What exactly makes a video game a video game?

In Gone Home, you play as Katie, a young woman who has arrived at her family home to find it completely empty. The story unfolds as you walk around the house, exploring its rooms and picking up objects, and you slowly begin to learn about the circumstances surrounding the families disappearance. As you walk around the house, exploring rooms and picking up objects, Gone Home slowly reveals a compelling family drama and tells a sincere story about the struggles of being a queer teenager living in the 1990s.

Gone Home built upon the foundations of a new emerging genre—games like The Chinese Room's Dear Esther had paved before it—but it's play style and storytelling was not celebrated by all players. Due to its emphasis on exploration through walking, Gone Home was dubbed a "walking simulator," a game in which there is no gameplay and thus, not a game. 

Since 2013, we can see how Gone Home has made an important shift in the video game community. The walking simulator genre is now a place where games can focus on telling diverse narratives through top-notch writing and engaging exploration. Gone Home's design led the way for more exploration games to emerge such as Firewatch, Layers of Fear, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and What Remains of Edith Finch. Gone Home's release challenged the way in which videogames are played, experienced and defined which makes it an important game of the decade.  —Rachel Watts, Staff Writer 

Broken Age (2014) 

Kentucky Route Zero was funded on Kickstarter in 2011, as was Octodad: Dadliest Catch. The amounts were modest: $24,320 for Octodad and a mere $8,583 for Kentucky Route Zero. When Double Fine turned to Kickstarter in 2012 to fund their next adventure game and a documentary to go with it, they asked for $400,000 and received $3.3 million.

The effect was sudden. A month later Wasteland 2 raised $2,933,252, and Shadowrun Returns $1,836,447. People who'd made Kickstarter accounts to give Double Fine money were hanging around looking for other projects to back, and everyone with an intellectual property in an underserved genre was there to collect. 

Genres that had been largely abandoned—or left to the bedroom coders and Germans—were resurrected and built on. Broken Age, like a lot of the Kickstarter success stories that followed it, asked the question: "What if we never stopped making games like this? What would they look like today?" Subsequent crowdfunded games like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Project Phoenix continued providing the answers.

The last big videogame success story on Kickstarter was Subverse, which raised over $2 million. Before that it was Pillars of Eternity in 2017. The million-dollar hits still happen, but are fewer and farther apart than they were in the boom years of 2012-2015.

If you've got a board game with a lot of components, or your name's Chris Roberts, there's still big money in crowdfunding, but mostly it's more modest games being funded by fans these days, and often away from Kickstarter—like Outer Wilds, which was backed through Fig.

The influence of the Kickstarter boom isn't over, but the gold rush certainly is. There's no better sign of that than Double Fine cheerfully being acquired by Microsoft in 2019. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor 

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) 

In the 1970s, Barack Obama was Barry, a high school student with the basketball skills to help win a state championship in his senior year. By the time he transferred to Columbia University to study political science, you could probably tell he was going places—but president of the United States? President Barry was probably not on anyone's radar, back on the basketball court. Likewise, in 2007, if you'd told anyone on an internet videogame forum that a sequel to a messy RPG, made by an inexperienced Polish studio, would be the biggest and best RPG of the next decade, they'd probably laugh you off the board. Really? That game? The Witcher? Sure, it's got some good ideas, but it's barely bolted together, and who's ever heard of these Polish fantasy novels? That's never going to be big.

Anyway, what I'm saying is: Geralt is basically the President of PC games now. 

The Witcher 3 followed a pair of much smaller RPGs with a vast open world, and filled that world with writing (so much writing) that elevated standard sidequests into memorable hunts, heartbreaking stories, and wonderful adventures. With two games of practice, CD Projekt Red learned how to make Geralt a perfect vehicle for players. He's a person, not a blank slate, which enriched the impact of every decision you were forced to make. The average Witcher 3 sidequest is more creative or better presented than the main story of most RPGs, and then it went and did that part better, too. 

The Witcher 3's truly massive success entered CD Projekt into the elite ranks of the most respected game developers in the world. When was the last time a game was as hyped as Cyberpunk 2077? Maybe never. When it's finally real, it'll have remarkably high expectations to live up to: expectations that it'll be as good as The Witcher 3, the benchmark for RPGs this decade. And quite possibly the next. Way to go, Gerry. —Wesley Fenlon, Features Editor 

No Man's Sky (2016) 

Hype can be dangerous, and there's no better example this decade than No Man's Sky. Long before Hello Games' ambitious procedural galactic sandbox launched, the hype was already in orbit. Early trailers in 2014 showed off towering, graceful alien dinosaurs and sandworms the size of freight trains. A VP at Sony declared No Man's Sky as "potentially one of the biggest games in the history of our industry." The media—PC Gamer included—stirred the pot by getting swept up in the potential of an endless, infinitely varied galaxy. The game would be so big there was nearly no chance of meeting another player, but we were told they'd be out there, somewhere. We wanted to believe.

As the release date loomed, Sean Murray tried temper player expectations but it was already too late. The hype train was well off the rails. By the 2016 launch, expectations were so high there was no way any game could possibly deliver on all of them. The reality was that No Man's Sky's alien dinos weren't nearly as towering and majestic as those seen in trailers. The massive sandworm that had captured people's imaginations had been cut from the game before launch. There were plenty of beautiful planets and sights, but before long the procedurally generated features began to feel a bit predictable, like the same handful of parts used to build creatures and planets were just being assembled in slightly different configurations. 

And there was that vaguely defined multiplayer aspect—"Online Play" was even listed on the PS4 box, though it was covered by a sticker—when the reality was there no multiplayer feature at all and the two players who found each other (on the first day, no less) couldn't actually see each other. The blowback for No Man's Sky came in just as frenzied as the hype had, and from the same places: the players, the media (yes, PC Gamer too) and even from Sony.

But Hello Games demonstrated how a studio can survive both the highs of hype and the lows of backlash. It stepped back from the press that had been eager to pounce on every tiny shred of new information, it filtered out the voices of those who only wanted to pile on more grief, and it focused on the feedback of the only people who really mattered: the players who actually loved No Man's Sky despite its issues, who were actually playing the game and who saw its potential to continue to grow. And over the past several years an astounding number of new features have been added to No Man's Sky, all for free, giving players new and different ways to explore the galaxy or build a home on their favorite world. We never got our sandworm (apparently it was cut because playtesters hated it) but that vague multiplayer feature missing at launch was added and then greatly improved upon. No Man's Sky isn't just a place you can briefly meet another player, it's become a true multiplayer experience. That's a height even the initial hype never reached. —Christopher Livingston, Staff Writer 

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (2017) 

There were a few problems with Battlefront 2's planned economy, but the primary issue was that class upgrades came in loot boxes that could be obtained with both in-game and premium currency. These weren't just cosmetics: You could pay to get an advantage over those who were grinding. It wasn't the most exploitative use of randomized rewards at the time, and EA put a hold on premium currency at launch due to backlash, but that didn't matter. Battlefront 2 was a watershed moment for anti-loot box sentiment, and led to regulation in Belgium and elsewhere, as well as continued investigations and debates in the US, UK, and around the world. Overwatch, FIFA, and other games contributed, but Battlefront 2 marked a turning point. After it released, loot boxes were no longer just the subject of grumbles from dissatisfied players, but also of legislative debates over whether or not they should be classified as gambling. 

Many games, most recently Rocket League, have ditched loot boxes to focus on battle passes and other paid progression systems without randomization. While a few have held onto loot boxes—EA makes gobs of money off FIFA—they're clearly on their way out. Battlefront 2 is a good game, especially after the changes to its progression system, but unfortunately for DICE's talented developers, it will be remembered for instigating an industry-wide upheaval in how games are monetized.  —Tyler Wilde, Executive Editor

Butterfly Soup (2017) 

When the tools to make and distribute games were democratized in the 2000s, we sure did get a lot of puzzle-platformers out of it. The impact was felt further afield in subsequent years, and one genre where that impact was felt was the English-language visual novel. 

Visual novels have always been about relationships, whether in the classic dating sim sense or the deepening characters even something as superficially silly as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has. Among the flood of visual novels in the 2010s were a batch made by a generation of LGBTQ+ game designers and informed by their own experience of relationships games rarely dealt with. Games like Ladykiller in a Bind, Coming Out on Top, Extreme Meatpunks Forever, Genderwrecked, and Dream Daddy (highly recommended: The episode of Tone Control where Dream Daddy co-writer Leighton Gray talks about its creation and the realization if she went ahead with it she'd need to come out to her parents). 

Butterfly Soup is about teenagers questioning their sexuality (it's also about baseball and dogs but mainly it's the sexuality thing), and like a lot of those other examples it's largely wholesome. It touches on familial abuse, but it's a very light touch and it's not the kind of game where you'll have to choose between your lesbian girlfriend and the lives of an entire town at the end. It's radically positive in a way a lot of games about LGBTQ+ characters are when made by LGBTQ+ people.

It's also free. That's important because Butterfly Soup, with its examples of teenagers learning about their queerness in a way that's framed as a positive experience, is exactly the kind of game a certain kind of teenager needs to play—and they also need it to not show up on their parent's credit card. The significance of that, both for what videogames can meaningfully achieve and what Butterfly Soup means for the kids it's perfect for, can't be overstated. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor 

PUBG (2017) 

Like Dota and Team Fortress before it, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds began life as a mod—for DayZ. There had been other Battle Royale-inspired mods before it, including a Hunger Games Minecraft mod in 2012. But creator Brendan Greene refined the concept with innovations including weapons being randomly scattered around the map. When Battlegrounds eventually became a standalone game in 2017 its popularity exploded, legitimising the genre and ultimately paving the way for Fortnite.

In a group Battlegrounds is a thrilling, tactical squad shooter; solo it’s like a big-scale stealth game where the ‘guards’ are all unpredictable human players. Both are valid ways to play, each with its own unique rhythm and feel. There are some similarities to DayZ: a large map with a bleak aesthetic, permadeath, player interaction, and a constant feeling of tension. But the rapidly shrinking play space in PUBG makes for a much more immediate, action-packed game, which made it particularly fun to watch on Twitch—another reason the game became so popular. It was simply more fun to watch on a stream than DayZ.

There’s something wonderfully simple about the battle royale concept. A hundred players enter, one player leaves. Perfect for an online shooter. Brendan Greene was by no means the first person to try and turn the premise of the cult Japanese film into a game; he just refined it, laying the groundwork for an entire genre in the process, whether he meant to or not. The popularity of battle royale can’t be understated, and it’s wild to think that it’s reached a level of cultural saturation where a clip from a new Star Wars is being screened exclusively in Fortnite. But it all started with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. —Andy Kelly, Section Editor 

Fortnite (2017) 

Who said it? Who at Epic Games—during whatever meeting about the questionable outlook of its cooperative base building game finally entering early access after nearly seven years in development, announced in 2011 and delayed multiple times since—who said, "Maybe we could turn it into PUBG?" There's never been such a rapid, derivative, and successful pivot as this: Fortnite's barebones battle royale mode was made in two months. And it wasn't even good. 

But, unlike the then-phenom PUBG, Fortnite: Battle Royale was and still is free-to-play. It didn't matter that the building system wasn't made for twitch shooting in a 100-person free-for-all or that the map began as a featureless wasteland. What mattered is that when kids with no money logged into PSN, Xbox Live, or Googled "free PC games," Fortnite was there, with its colorful island, smiling cartoon combatants, and potent arsenal of dance emotes. Raise your hand if you saw someone floss this year. 

Fortnite was poised to be a temporary craze, but Epic kept it growing with an unprecedented update schedule, introducing new weapons, items, vehicles, and major balance changes on a near-weekly basis. In-game events like the meteor impact or epic mecha vs. kaiju battle took Team Fortress 2's narrative and update integration to a new damn dimension. Within months, a derivative game became one of the most exciting shooters ever, a game whose meta mattered as much as its living mythology. 

Fortnite was already massive, but then Ninja streamed with Drake. Suddenly, Fortnite wasn't just how you became a successful Twitch streamer, it was how you became a star. In just a few years, Fortnite legitimized a new kind of celebrity, changed what we expect from F2P and service-based games, and, most miraculously, made flossing cool. All because of a last-second design pivot. What the hell. —James Davenport, Staff Writer 

Devotion (2019) 

In another life Devotion would have been an enjoyable but otherwise unremarkable Taiwanese horror game. But when players discovered some hidden text that compared the president of China, Xi Jinping, to Winnie the Pooh (an outlawed meme in China), Devotion became the unexpected casualty of communist censorship and Taiwan's tumultuous relationship with mainland China. Initially Devotion was review-bombed by Chinese users upset at the perceived insult to their nation and its government, but then the controversy drew the ire of the Chinese communist party itself.

Though censorship has always been an issue in gaming, Devotion's sudden disappearance set a chilling precedent. The Chinese government erased its existence from Chinese social media and search results in a matter of days and later revoked the business license of its Chinese publisher. Meanwhile, the developers at Red Candle Games voluntarily pulled the game from Steam and went radio silent—presumably to escape the tidal wave of outrage and risk of further retribution.

The incident is a reminder of how much influence Chinese gamers, and by extension their government, can have over the videogame industry. More importantly, Devotion highlights how Steam has unexpectedly become a bridge in the firewall between China and the rest of the world—and how quickly that bridge can turn into a battleground. —Steven Messner, Senior Reporter 

Artifact (2019) 

In retrospect, I should have suspected that there was something wrong with Artifact. My first exposure to the game, during the reveal at Valve's Bellevue HQ, left me with a splitting headache, but otherwise enthusiastic about such a deep, polished entry to the card battler genre. After all, there was plenty to be confident about. This was Valve's first game proper in five years, something akin to Willy Wonka announcing he was resuming production because he had a particularly delicious nougat to share. And this CCG was being made not just by Valve's own braintrust, but also Richard Garfield, legendary creator of Magic: The Gathering. Artifact was his new baby, it couldn't fail. 

But it did in such spectcaular, flameout style that it has secured Artifact a place here, among the decade's most noteworthy games. Prior to Artifact, even if you suspected that Valve, the closest thing to a platform holder we have on PC, was capable of making a bad game, nobody imagined it releasing such a catastrophic one. But just six months after Artifact's launch, the game had been abandoned so entirely that its Twitch directory was being overrun by people streaming obscure African war movies, anime, and actual pornos. Incredibly, it took some time for anyone to even notice. 

The failure seem almost unfairly easy to analyse with hindsight. The three-lane structure borrowed from Dota made board states inherently taxing to remember, and was a poor fit for stream viewership. More problematically, as card game pro Andrey "Reynad" Yanyuk noted in his firm but fair evaluation, the game just wasn't much fun. Too much of the combat revolved around stacking multiple arithmetical effects, rather than delivering the kind of one-off flashy moments that Hearthstone specializes in. Artifact's player population soon dropped to embarrassing numbers, and in March Valve effectively mothballed Artifact, citing "deep-rooted issues" with the game but promising to get back to us once it had a plan. Since then recriminations have been made by Garfield, who's no longer attached to the project. I'd be amazed if we ever see Artifact rebooted meaningfully. Instead, it will serve as a reminder that just as no-one is too big to fail in modern PC gaming, nor can they be too talented. —Tim Clark, Brand Director 

EVE Online's free-to-play mobile spin-off, EVE Echoes, has hit open beta today, so you can download it and flit around New Eden in your ship right now.

Though it's set in an alternate universe and developed by NetEase, at first glance it shares a lot with with its PC progenitor. The broad strokes and basics are much the same, letting you fly around New Eden, warping between worlds and stations as you trade and fight.

So, unlike the shelved Dust 514, EVE Echoes is still a sandbox MMO, using a lot of the same systems but adapted for phones and tablets. Even the UI is familiar, and while I'd probably prefer to use a larger screen than I've got with my phone. The touchscreen interface is fine, but the icons are sometimes a touch too small. There are also, as you'd expect, lots of menus, making me miss my lovely PC monitor, but so far it's been serviceable.

If you've not been in the previous testing phases, you should start with the new tutorial, which will teach you the basics and get you in a better ship, but after that you can go your own way. You can also skip the tutorial if you're feeling bold.

The beta also introduces drones, more advanced ships and additional modules. Storyline missions have been thrown into the mix, too, and if you're more interested in making a buck you can focus instead on getting rich in the new Interstellar Trading Centre.

I can't see many EVE Online players drifting over to its mobile cousin for very long, but I do quite like the concept of EVE on my phone. Given that so much of EVE involves waiting to reach a destination and staring at lists—I wrote this while my ship flew to a space station—being able to do that from the sofa or on the train is pretty tempting offer.

You can download EVE Echoes on Android and iOS now.

EVE Online's Invasion World Tour, which saw CCP hit the road and host a series of smaller conventions instead of the now traditional EVE Fanfest in Iceland, hits its last stop this weekend. It will quickly be followed by the launch of Invasion Chapter 2, the second part of the MMO's latest expansion. 

Invasion Chapter 2 kicks off on November 23, but before that CCP will be in London's Indigo at the O2 Arena to end the tour. If you've not got your hands on a ticket, which can be purchased here, you'll still be able to watch the livestream on Twitch, starting at 2.30 pm GMT/6.30 am PST.

The event will begin with the EVE Invasion World Tournament, followed by a keynote speech, a discussion of EVE and the tour, and an AMA with the developers. 

One of the stops on the tour was a fan's house on a Finnish island, the perfect place for a slasher movie—naturally we sent Steven. EVE Online will one day be sentient, the devs told him during a naked hot tub session. I'm happy to report he's alive and well. 

Invasion Chapter 2 will heat up the conflict between players and the Triglavian invaders, let pilots get their hands on a new enemy ship and introduces bookmark sharing. The new players experience is being freshened up, too, so it might be a good time to dip back in if the galaxy seemed too intimidating before. 

The most famous people in EVE Online are often the most violent. If they aren't emperors or warlords, they're most likely scammers, pirates, or thieves. Each is a thread in a bloody tapestry of galactic conflict spanning 16 years—players immortalized by heroic feats, dastardly schemes, or just sheer stupidity. But Katia Sae is different. In a world full of tyrants and usurpers, she's a pacifist and an explorer.

Earlier this year, Katia Sae quietly made history (and earned a Guinness World Record) when they became the first player to visit every single one of EVE Online's 7,805 solar systems. It's a monumental quest that took over nine years to complete with the help of hundreds of other explorers, a proprietary AI database tool named Allison, and unfathomable persistence. And Sae did it all without losing a single ship. Though, as Sae told me during EVE Vegas last month, the journey around the galaxy was anything but smooth sailing. 

Around the galaxy in 3,385 days 

Ethan Richards, the actual person behind the Katia Sae character, is far from the first player to have the wild idea to visit every solar system in EVE. Others had toured "known space" before—the static systems that make up the virtual galaxy of New Eden—but those pilots typically raced from one to the next and lost plenty of ships along the way. When developer CCP Games released EVE Online's Dominion expansion on December 1, 2009, which included a visual overhaul of EVE Online's planets and moons, Sae decided it was the perfect time to do some sightseeing. But he was going to do it his way. "I didn't just want to blast through like everyone else had," Sae tells me. "So I decided that I'd roleplay it and tell this character's story. I'd visit every planet and take a picture of each one in every system."

Unlike other space sims, like Elite: Dangerous, New Eden is almost entirely colonized by players, so Sae was rarely ever alone—especially in the beginning. The journey started in the civilized sector known as high-sec, where unlawful player conduct (like shooting one another without due cause) is swiftly punished by an omnipotent police force called CONCORD.

Almost every system in EVE is connected by stargates, and while some solar systems might have a dozen stargates, others might have only one or two. Each is a small part in a vast and intricate web of the 5,201 systems that comprise known space. 

Most solar systems are indistinguishable from one another, Sae tells me. After a while, you can only see so many volcanic or oceanic planets before they start to blend together. But EVE does have its tourist destinations. During his journey, Sae visited unique locations like the Molea Cemetery, where a small group of gravekeepers protect and maintain tributes to people both real and fictional.

To keep track of where he'd been and maximize efficiency, Sae created—you guessed it—a spreadsheet. "Whenever I entered a new region, I'd look at the region map and kind of figure out what the best route to work my way through that region," Sae says. "I tried to have minimal backtracking but it's inevitable. You're going to backtrack because of the dead ends and stuff like that. But I always tried to work it to my advantage."

In those early days, Sae was averaging about six systems a night over the course of an hour or so. It was a meticulous process to not only map the best route but also stop at every planet in each system and catalogue it. Sae also kept a blog that chronicled his adventures with frequent updates and short stories written entirely in-character.

Of the all the known space systems, only a fraction are policed by CONCORD. Low-sec space, for example, lies on the fringes of high-sec and is home to tribes of ruthless pirates who prowl about, killing other players and stealing their cargo. Beyond low-sec things get even more dangerous. There lies a vast periphery where EVE Online's player-built empires battle for sovereignty and resources. Most of these 3,000 systems are divided up between just over 150 different alliances, many of which are, in turn, vassals of bigger, scarier alliances. And Katia Sae was going to have to sneak into every single one of their fortified systems to complete his mission.

Out for blood 

"In the beginning, I never had the goal of doing this all without losing a ship," Sae admits. "My goal was to just visit all of known space and that was it." But in the five years that it took him to visit every single system in both high- and low-sec space, Sae was painfully aware of how lucky he was.

Sae explains that by the time he began venturing into null-sec, word began to spread of his mission and amazing streak of not having lost a ship. EVE Online's community had taken notice, and some EVE players wanted nothing more than to ruin Sae's fun.

It was these encounters that Sae frequently omitted from his blog. "I didn't want to cast a spotlight on someone that I escaped from. I didn't want it to look like I was bragging about it. And so my whole strategy was to keep it low key and vague."

But that didn't stop Sae from drawing the wrong kind of attention. Dozens of players had put bounties on his head just so they would be notified if someone happened to kill him. Others were even creepier. "Obsessive is a good word for it," Sae laughs. "One of the guys who put a bounty on me would message me every once in a while saying 'I'm going to know when you die. I'm going to know when you die. I'm going to know when you die.' And like, okay, there's the fun side of it. But that's a little weird. You're taking this a little too seriously."

But talk is cheap. Catching and killing Sae was another matter entirely. During the voyage through null-sec Sae piloted a Tengu strategic cruiser, one of EVE Online's most versatile ships. Fitted with warp core stabilizers, an interdiction nullifier, and a covert operations-grade cloaking device, Sae was nearly impossible to pin down long enough for any targeting computer to get a lock.

Sae also had some clever tools at his disposal. Websites like Zkillboard, for example, log every player death that happens anywhere in New Eden while Dotlan tracks every time a stargate is used. With these two sources of intel, Sae could reasonably deduce how dangerous a given star system was before risking his neck. "I would use any and all tools out there that could pull up information on my area of space," Sae says. "I always knew where I was at, who was in the neighborhood, and what was their activity. Were they early morning folks, evening folks, or weekend folks? A lot of the reason why it took me so long was because I was spending a lot of time just going 'where am I, and how active are they?'"

Even the most educated guesses, though, are still a gamble.

Nowhere to run 

Sae doesn't remember the system where he almost died. He doesn't even remember the name of the players or their corporation. All Sae remembers is the intense adrenaline rush of realizing he was trapped at the tail end of a string of null-sec systems with only one stargate leading out—and 12 players were sitting on it, patiently waiting for Sae to make his move.

"I was sweating because I thought, okay, these guys are really after me and so this is probably where I'm going to lose a ship," Sae explains. "I'm gonna play my damn hardest to get out of here. I'm not just gonna sit here let them take me out."

Though death can be disastrous in EVE, Sae says he mostly didn't want to break his record and deal with the inconvenience that comes with being blown up. Losing a ship would mean a lengthy and perilous trek in a defenseless escape pod to the nearest trade hub to buy a replacement. Deep in null-sec, that could mean hours of flying just to get back to civilization.

Losing his escape pod would be even worse. Sae would wake up as a clone all the way back in high-sec, several dozen jumps from where he needed to be. "I was thinking of the nightmare of trying to get back there to keep going or having to come in from a different spot and backtrack and I just didn't want to do that. So I said, you know, if they catch me, kill me, fine. I'll have to deal with it. But I'm going to get out of here." 

Sae thought he had one advantage: "I had patience on my side," he says. "I figured I would win because they probably wanted to go do something else after a while."

But he was wrong. For three days, he logged in to find the stargate locked down by the same small gang of assassins. Sae started logging in during the early morning or late at night, hoping that he'd catch his trappers when they weren't playing. But every time he logged in, at least a few of them were prowling around the stargate waiting. And then one day they weren't.

"I honestly figured they were on the other side waiting for me," Sae says. "But I decided to make a run for it anyway." Since he was at the tail end of a branch of solar systems, Sae would have to make three separate jumps before he would finally arrive at an intersection and could hopefully shake whatever pursuers were chasing him.

So Sae warped to the stargate and engaged his jumpdrive. No one was on the other side. "I thought it was a trick," he says. "The tension just kept building up, you know? You get through the first gate going, okay, but I got two more to go. They're going to get me. They have to be there. They've been this dedicated for this long…"

But no one was there. Katia Sae slipped away unscathed and unnerved. To this day, he doesn't even know why they wanted him dead—they never once tried to taunt or mock him. No contact, just the quiet threat of annihilation.

Into the great unknown

On November 26, 2015—over six years after he first started—Sae finally finished his tour through the last solar systems of null-sec. He was now the only pilot to have visited every system in known space without losing a ship. But Katia Sae wasn't done yet.

After a short break over the holidays, Sae decided to continue the expedition into the most dangerous and impossible part of EVE Online: Wormhole space. Unlike known space, wormhole space doesn't have stargates linking each of its 2,604 systems together. Instead, each is bridged by transient wormholes that randomly spawn and then slowly collapse. Though there's some loose logic to where these wormholes go, there's no way of knowing for sure without sticking your head in. 

Originally, developer CCP Games designed wormholes as a terrifying challenge for EVE Online's most hardcore players. The idea was that pilots would go on short excursions into wormhole space, battle the powerful NPC aliens that lurk inside, and retreat home at the end of the day. Instead, EVE Online players colonized wormholes permanently. And if Katia Sae was going to explore each of its randomly connected systems, he would need more than a spreadsheet.

For the first two years, Sae had no other option than to jump into every wormhole he could and hope it would lead to a system he hadn't yet visited. It worked reasonably well for the first 2,000 wormhole systems, but the final 600 were a demoralizing gamble.

Because the wormholes that lead into and out of each system are randomly spawning, Sae was having to manually scan them down one at a time to see where they might lead. The more wormhole systems he visited, the smaller Sae's chances of finding one he hadn't been to before. That extra effort was eating up so much time that Sae could no longer afford to take photos of every planet in each system he was visiting, so he settled for snapping a single picture of each solar system instead. Entire weeks passed without finding a new wormhole system.

"I wasn't going to kill myself doing this," Sae explained. "So I had to spend my time trying to find more new systems per day. And when I had to start doing that is when I started feeling the burnout. I didn't think I could make it. At that rate, it felt like it was going to take me another ten years. And that is when I said, you know, either I'm going to have to get help or I'm just going to have to give up."

Back during his null-sec pilgrimage, Sae fell in with a renowned player named Mynxee who became famous for leading EVE Online's first all-female pirate gang. When Katia Sae met her, Mynxee had reformed and was now launching a new corporation for explorers. Sae was a natural fit.

Called Signal Cartel, this new organization quickly exploded in popularity and became expert navigators of wormhole space. More humanitarian aid organization than explorer's guild, Signal Cartel became famous for their search and rescue task force whose hundreds of members have seeded more than 90 percent of wormhole space with special rescue caches that contain the necessary items for stranded players to scan their way out of a wormhole. A program called Allison helps coordinate it all.

Like many of EVE Online's third-party plugins, Allison is a player-built program Signal Cartel explorers use while flying through wormhole space. Allison tracks their location and provides relevant information about whatever system they're in, like the location and status of any rescue caches. But Allison was just what Sae needed to complete his mission.

Mynxee and Signal Cartel's other leaders agreed to help Sae by modifying Allison so that whenever a Signal Cartel pilot entered a wormhole system Sae hadn't yet visited, Sae and a small team of trusted allies would immediately be notified. When the alarm sounded, one of them would retrace the path that pilot had taken and get inside the wormhole as quickly as they could. As long as someone was in the wormhole, they could always map a way back to known space that Sae could use to get in.

But with a corporation as big as Signal Cartel, there was an enormous risk that a spy might use this as an opportunity to ambush Sae and ruin his no-death streak. Because Signal Cartel is mostly home to roleplayers, it was decided that the corporation would create a fictitious community event, a false story for why these 600 wormholes had to be mapped out. Signal Cartel members eagerly began mapping the location of these remaining wormholes having no idea they were actually helping Sae. And it was working. "I went from averaging two systems a day to averaging like 15 systems a day in that first week," Sae laughs. "In that first month, we had already found 300 of the 600 wormhole systems that I needed."

Journey's end 

On March 9, 2019, Sae's nine year journey came to an end when he entered the final wormhole system. After months of keeping Signal Cartel in the dark, Mynxee and other members of Katia's inner circle finally revealed the truth. No one seemed upset. In fact, they were ecstatic that they had played a part in helping Katia Sae become the first player to visit every single solar system in EVE Online. That he didn't die once was just icing on the cake.

To celebrate Sae's success, Signal Cartel issued a press release to the EVE community. The big question was whether anyone at CCP Games would acknowledge Katia Sae's monumental achievement. 

The following day, Sae was contacted by CCP's community manager at the time, Paul 'CCP Falcon' Elsy. "I got the nod from Falcon," Sae explains. "And he said, that's a great achievement, but you missed something."

It turns out that there was one system Katia Sae hadn't yet visited: Polaris. This special solar system is only accessible to developers from CCP Games. To celebrate the end of Sae's journey, Elsy offered to personally tour him through Polaris. When Sae arrived, CCP surprised him with a welcoming party of dozens of developers.

Later that month CCP Games prepared a much bigger surprise. Announced during the EVEsterdam fan gathering in Amsterdam, CCP unveiled an enormous in-game monument of Katia Sae that would be placed in his home system of Saiso III. It is the first time that a player has ever been officially canonized in EVE Online's lore.

"To see your character transcend that boundary and become a part of the lore, to be an official part of the game is just... I couldn't ask for anything more after that," Katia Sae tells me. "I mean, I didn't even ask for that. It's just, like, holy cow. It's surreal."

Now that his journey is complete, the character of Katia Sae is officially retired. She is now permanently stationed in Saiso III, next to her monument. "It's still really difficult to put into words," Sae explains. "If you're not a roleplayer it might not make sense, but you spend all this time with the character—I kind of think of it as an author, you write characters and build their story and their adventures. I spent nine years in Katia Sae's head and here she was at the end. Her story is complete. It's bittersweet."

I couldn't help but wonder if Sae's nine-year voyage revealed any profound truths. If travelling the real world makes you more worldly, what does traveling EVE Online's galaxy make you? "It's funny because a lot of folks ask me what was my favorite area of space, or what was my favorite sight," Sae says. "But it really came down to the people. After everything I'd seen, the planets all looked the same and the stars all looked the same. But what really gave the shape to the world was the people. The people make the landscape."

The second chapter of EVE Online's Invasion expansion is coming next month. Pilots have had their hands full recently with multiple invasions and a communications blackout, and it looks like they won't have much time to rest before the next crisis. 

The Triglavians—it sounds like a whisky but is, in fact, a dangerous and enigmatic faction of invaders—will continue their war against New Eden, but pilots will also be able to get their hands on a new enemy ship and use their weapons against them. CCP says the Triglavian Zirnitra dreadnought will be a tricky fight, but the prize will be worth it. 

Chapter 2 also brings with it changes to bookmark sharing. It's not as flashy as a new ship, but it's apparently been something players have been eagerly awaiting. The current system lets you share location bookmarks with your corporation buds, but with the update you'll be able to share them with anyone, while also getting more control over how long the bookmark lasts and how they're accessed.

The new player experience is also being tweaked to make rookie pilots better prepared for the spacer's life; veterans, meanwhile, can apparently look forward to more "additions and adjustments" aiming to keep them challenged in the future. 

Instead of doing a regular EVE Fanfest this year, CCP went on the road, doing smaller Fanfests around the world, including inside a Finnish EVE fan's house. EVE Fanfest will be back in Iceland in 2020, however, and you can get more details on tickets and dates here. 

EVE Online: Invasion Chapter 2 will be available for all players on November 26.

Two months ago things started getting really scary in EVE Online. First, the player-controlled territories of null-sec fell victim to an unprecedented alien invasion. Soon after, CCP Games disabled a key feature of EVE Online's in-game chat interface, leaving players in a much more dangerous world. Now the changes, which CCP says were "planned as a temporary event," are being reversed.

Before the "Blackout" went into effect, most star systems in EVE Online would show you a list of players who were currently in the same solar system as you. Given that space is really big and mostly empty, it was a useful way of knowing who might be nearby.

For those players who brave the lawless regions of EVE Online's null-sec space, where there are no rules in place to protect you, knowing who was nearby was invaluable. Miners could tell when enemy pilots had slipped into the system and knew to run for safety, or alliances could muster a defense if a scout spotted a large number of enemy players entering or exiting a star system.

On July 12, developer CCP Games removed that feature, making it impossible to know who was in a system with you unless they actually spoke in the local system chat. It made the null-sec regions of EVE (which heavily outnumber safer star systems) way more dangerous. To survive, players were going to have to adapt.

It was all part of a larger experiment in what EVE Online's developers are calling The Chaos Era. During the Blackout, I traveled to Finland to participate in a very naked version of its annual Fanfest—only this one was held inside of a random Finnish player's house. It was during that strange weekend that CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told me that after 16 years EVE Online was beginning to feel a bit stale and CCP were looking to mix things up with bold new experiments—alien invasions and Blackouts being the first of presumably many more.

But now the Blackout has ended and, understandably, many players aren't sad to see it go. Announced earlier this week in a blog post, CCP Games said the Blackout gave it "an incredible amount of insight in terms of player behavior, sentiment and ability to adapt to rapid short notice changes."

"This will help to better inform us on where to take the direction of New Eden in future," the blog post concluded.

As one can imagine, such a radical change to EVE was contentious among its playerbase. While the Blackout initially seemed to be positively received, many of the big alliances affected by it quickly began to bemoan the change. The Blackout also coincided with EVE Online's lowest concurrent player levels since 2006, according to EVE-Offline, which reports on EVE's active player populations.

Though it's not clear if the two are related (but the causation seems likely), that led many to believe that CCP Games was capitulating to players upset over the change. But, as Pétursson explained on Twitter, the Blackout was always intended as a short-term experiment.

Regardless, EVE Online players are breathing a little easier now that they know what threats might be nearby.

You don't really know EVE Online until you're crammed into a hot tub full of drunk, naked Finnish players and two developers chatting excitedly about chaos and wormholes. I've traveled thousands of miles to end up here, in a stranger's house on an island called Kemiönsaari in mid-August, the boondocks of Finland. My journey to this county of some 6,000 Swedes and Finns isn't just for pleasure. I'm here to cover a historic event: EVE Online's first-ever Fanfest held inside a player's house.

Normally these events are held in developer CCP Games' home of Reykjavík, Iceland, and thousands of players from all over the world fly to party with the developers and learn about what's next for EVE Online. Last year, though, CCP Games decided to take their show on the road and also solicit invitations from players to host a Fanfest from their very own home.

Fanfest Kemiönsaari (or, more simply, Fanfest Home) is a surreal combination of a traditional gaming convention and a house party—keynote speeches and Q&A sessions spliced with barbecue burgers and vodka shots. When I told my parents about this trip, they were convinced it was an elaborate murder plot that would end with me flayed in a torture den somewhere. They did not predict the pale parade of nude, drunk EVE players shuffling to and from the sauna and hot tub. It's a fitting opening ceremony for this next chapter of EVE Online, one that its developers promise will bring mayhem to its hundreds of thousands of players and their precious empires.

Destination Kemiönsaari 

The winner of Fanfest Home's contest was a player named Lilianah, a construction worker and member of a Finnish-only wormhole corporation called Avanto. As a serious EVE player who often hosts parties for his corporation, Lilianah has all the necessities: good internet, plenty of space, booze, and the all-important sauna and hot tub (a staple of Finland, I'm told).

"When I heard that six developers were on their way here, I was [confounded]," Lilianah says, laughing. "Here. Six devs. But I thought, what the hell. The sauna is warm, this is what we do." That spirit is shared among the dozen of Lilianah's corp-mates here, a rowdy group of Finnish men ranging from their mid-20s to late-50s. They had a lot to say about saunas.

Like any EVE Fanfest, the event started with a parade, only this one was composed of about a dozen people and only lasted the length of Lilianah's driveway. Everyone then piled inside Lilianah's house where his wife had generously prepared snacks and drinks. Slipping through the back to look at the hot tub, I stumble across his two children—one deeply engrossed in a round of Fortnite on his PC. Lilianah's family cleared out later that evening once the sauna and hot tub were fired up.

Instead of a normal keynote presentation, CCP Games creative director Bergur Finnbogason and CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson livestreamed a three-hour fireside chat, talking everything from EVE Online's sci-fi inspirations, original designs, to vague plans for the future. But the most relevant part of that chat had to with the nature of chaos, EVE Online's inherent inability to create it, and why CCP Games is now stepping in to make some of its own.

Agents of anarchy 

EVE Online has officially entered what CCP Games is calling The Chaos Era. It's a time of significant upheaval, CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson tells me. On June 26, 2019, that chaos took the form of a surprise alien invasion that all but paralyzed the massive player empires found in null-sec space. Entire wars were called off as invading armies retreated home to save their precious starbases, jump gates, and industrial facilities from what many feared would be complete annihilation.

Then CCP Games announced a communications blackout across all in-game chat channels in null-sec space. Now when you venture into null-sec, the in-game chat interface no longer lists what other players are in a solar system with you. Now players or roving armies can move from system to system without having their presence immediately given away.

These surprise invasions and changes serve a greater purpose than just upsetting EVE Online's delicate political and industrial machines, however. It's a radical experiment to save EVE Online. "If you look at the game from the vantage point that we look at the game every day, the game starts to speak to you," says Finnbogason. "You follow the economy, you follow the meta, and you start to understand that there is pain, the game is in pain. It needs hand holding because we don't have the systems to automatically regulate it."

"Most things in life go through a period of disruption," Pétursson tells me. "You have an established paradigm, then it disrupts, and then you end up in another stable paradigm. This renews—it is often a form of creative destruction: It breaks up monopolies, it topples industrial giants, it creates new space for things to bloom."

Pétursson references cell phones and the internet as two real-world examples of these earth-shaking disruptions. But there's just one problem: "The conditions of EVE Online are not perfect," Pétursson explains, "and EVE Online lacks a good ability to renew itself in this way."

"Right now the situation in the game is such that the stagnation has been setting slowly over a few years and there is no end in sight," Pétursson says. "It's just going to stagnate. You don't want your sandbox to turn into cement, so it needs to be moved around a bit. And we, as the caretakers of the universe, have to step in. We want the game to be built, owned, and operated by its playerbase. But right now we have to."

Masters of control 

Though EVE Online has expanded significantly over 16 years, players have largely been playing and mastering the same game—consistently smashing hypothetical boundaries along the way. Player-made alliances like The Imperium boast 40,000 characters. Supercapital ships, once the prize of only a few players, now number in the thousands like an ever-increasing nuclear stockpile. Even wormholes, the transient network of hostile, isolated systems were designed only to be temporarily explored. Players started colonizing them permanently instead.

"The conceit of EVE is that it's a chaotic sandbox for you to reign and to order, and we give people the tools to organize themselves," Pétursson explains. "The amazing alliance leadership of EVE has leveraged their ability to organize people at scale, and now the world is too orderly and not chaotic."

Unlike most other features in EVE, which are often announced months ahead of time, The Chaos Era represents a new, terrifying standard where sweeping changes can come and go at a moment's notice. Pétursson wouldn't commit to defining what will happen next or how long The Chaos Era will last, but it's clear this is just the beginning.

Right now, CCP Games is manually injecting chaos to disrupt its own players' ability to organize and create order. But Pétursson says the company is investigating options with procedural generation and artificial intelligence to empower EVE Online to create its own kind of chaos.

In the same way that the destructive effects of global warming are a consequence of industrialization and consumerism, EVE Online could one day possess a kind of sentience that allows it to counteract the will of its players. Dynamically generated cosmic disasters, more surprise alien invasions—anything could be possible. "If there were environmental effects in EVE from all this industrialization and order, that would be a great thing," Pétursson says. "Then the system could balance itself out and oscillate between order and chaos."

You'd think that this kind of chaos would be scary to EVE's players, but many welcome it. The members of Avanto, in particular, are eager to see "chaos come to wormholes".

After Finnbogason and Pétursson finished their fireside chat, the stream stayed on with cameras set up in different rooms of Lilianah's house to film the Fanfest Home attendees as they mingled and chatted. Meanwhile, Finnbogason grilled burgers (his nickname of CCP Burger is well-earned) to feed everyone.

I spoke with several members of Avanto who were eager to see how CCP could shake up their way of life. To date, The Chaos Era has only affected the large empires found in EVE Online's null-sec region of space, but they're just one quarter of EVE Online's four major player groups, each which has its own needs and preferred playstyle.

Wormhole corporations like Avanto, for example, are a fearless bunch who have colonized the treacherous, uncharted solar systems known as Anoikis. When wormholes were first introduced in 2009, CCP never imagined that players would actually live inside of Anoikis star systems. The wormholes that connect them to the known parts of EVE's universe are constantly moving. Every day you wake up with new—and potentially hostile—neighbors. It was too chaotic, CCP thought.

But in the decade since wormholes have come out, players have cracked the code of how these connections work and built an entire science around manipulating them. They can estimate with alarming accuracy just how long a given wormhole will last, where it'll go, and how much mass can pass through it before it collapses. Though there are inherently greater risks to living in wormhole space, players like Lilianah have learned how to minimize them. 

"Wormhole mechanics are pretty much used up," Lilianah says. "New winds would be a nice addition to the game. If chaos reaches wormholes, that's just a good thing. In general, wormholers are a really resourceful group. We shouldn't even be able to live there. So let the chaos come, we are looking forward to it."

Hot tub space-time machine 

That desire for chaos was reflected again and again as the night went on and, inevitably, clothes were shed. Being from Canada, I had no idea what a sacred ritual saunas were—or that there were so many different philosophies about how best to use one. "The Germans," one Finnish man tells me, wiping sweat from his face as he dumps another cup of water on the coals, "they are very strict about sauna. They have rules, like you have to stay for at least five minutes and you cannot sauna if you are too old or too young. But us? Not so much."

Pestered about chaos coming to wormholes, Pétursson and Finnbogason already had a growing list of ways to make life in Anoikis space scary again. Whether those features actually end up in a future version of EVE Online is uncertain.

During the car ride back to Helsinki the next day, it became clear that Finnbogason and Pétursson have some ambitions ideas about what shape EVE Online is going to take as it begins to enter its third decade of life. After so many years of working on the same MMO, their connection to it borders on supernatural, at least the way they describe it, and their expectations of what EVE can become are borderline science fiction.

"Think about it like EVE is an organism. EVE does not like where it's going. It's no longer limber. It's lost its stamina and mobility. It feels a little stiff. EVE comes to me in a dream and says, Hilmar, release the hounds of war," Pétursson tells me, referencing his decision to implement The Chaos Era. "That's how it happened. It came to me in a dream and it said, 'This cannot go on. I do not like this, this is not what I was meant to be.' The game has a purpose. It wants to finish its mission, and its mission is much larger than what it has executed in the last 16 years."

When I ask what EVE Online's purpose is, Pétursson is silent for a minute. "I think its mission is world domination," he finally says. "I think it wants to establish a new invention. At some point we didn't have countries and now we have countries. We didn't have companies, now we have companies. At some point we didn't have Facebook and now we have Facebook. At some point we didn't understand what a virtual world that's more meaningful than real life was, but EVE is on a mission to make that happen."

But before EVE Online can become the metaverse so many nerds have spent years dreaming of, Pétursson says, it needs to better simulate the conditions of our own reality. EVE needs to learn how to make its own chaos. And before it can do that, CCP has to understand what chaos really is. 

"If you're trying to figure out how the universe works, you put two atoms into a particle accelerator, you smash them together, and you look at the debris," says Pétursson. "The Chaos Era is a little bit like that. We are not smart enough—nobody is smart enough—to understand what we might find. It's not even the exercise of trying to predict what it is. You just have to have the courage to walk into the chaos."

EVE Online is a notoriously tough game to get into. It's so tough, in fact, that of the 600,000 new players that tried to play it last year, only around 10 percent of them played it for longer than seven days.

Two weeks ago, developer CCP Games held its annual Fanfest convention at a Finnish player's house (I was there to cover the whole, sordid affair and have a feature coming soon). During the keynote presentation, CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson revealed that, contrary to most other MMOs and despite its age, EVE Online attracts more new players each year. Few of them, however, play longer than seven days. And to fix that, CCP Games is trying everything, including an upcoming feature that will provide a kind of grief counselling for new players who lose their first ship.

This feature, Pétursson explains, is part of a company-wide initiative to solve the greatest threat to the virtual galaxy of New Eden: Getting new players to actually hang out. "We're dedicating serious resources to this, which we have not done before," Pétursson says. "We have not done this level of investment, but we're doing it now because we've seen from our own numbers it is the biggest opportunity for the game."

Sorry for your loss 

That EVE Online is an unapproachable MMO should surprise no one—even if you've never played it yourself. It's reputation for cruel betrayals and dastardly plots spreads far beyond the confines of its own community. But the only thing scarier than the players-turned-pirates waiting to blow you up is EVE's dense user interface and indomitable layering of complex sandbox systems. It's an intimidating game to learn, and one that takes years to master.

"If we were an endurance sport, EVE would be the Ironman Triathlon," Pétursson said. "Because EVE is such a legendary gaming experience with insane depth and complexity, onboarding you into that domain is like any extreme activity—like doing an Ironman race."

Of course, EVE doesn't require incredible mental or physical stamina to play, and its reputation as a merciless game where everyone is an asshole is mostly manufactured (the EVE community has just as many heroes as villains). But even so, it's an enormously challenging game to get into—in part because there's so much to learn and not an intuitive way to learn it.

Enter systems like the improved Agency, an interactive guide that shows players how to get involved with various PVE-driven activities found in New Eden like mining and exploration. This comes alongside out-of-game improvements like a more refined account management system and proactive customer support. There's even a new meet and greet program where volunteers and in-game moderators will message new players who just logged in for their first time to say hello and answer any questions they have.

That's where the idea to do grief counselling for new players started. Of all the most frustrating hurdles a new EVE Online player most overcome, losing your first ship is often the most devastating. Unlike other MMOs, death in EVE has serious consequences: You lose your ship, its equipped modules (like guns), whatever was in the cargo hold, and several other potentially expensive things. It's why the first rule of EVE Online is never fly what you can't afford to lose.

Right now, Pétursson said it's common for new players to die and, thanks to EVE's abstract depiction of combat and UI, have no understanding of what led to their precious ship going up in flames. Sometimes they'll email customer support (which will often give them a ship as a gift), but players are also just as likely to throw their hands up in frustration and quit, like I did the first few times I started playing.

But right now CCP Games is building the tools necessary to alert its in-game moderators whenever a new player loses its first ship. That moderator can then message the player and help them understand what went wrong and possibly reimburse their ship. "We're going to start by doing it manually, so we can cover all the cases," Pétursson explains. "But once we've done it manually [for awhile], we can start to automate the process of grief counselling when you lose your ship for the first time."

That might sound like CCP Games is going too soft on its players, but the idea is to simulate what Pétursson calls EVE Online's "magic moment"—that turning point where a person goes from being a noob to a true EVE player. "If you lose your ship and you understand the context of why you lost it and it makes you come back stronger, that is the moment," Pétursson says.

Ideally these moments should happen organically with other players. "What happens a lot in EVE is that a veteran player kills you and if your reaction is a certain way—not just crying about it but asking why—usually what happens is that the veteran player gives you money to buy a new spaceship, and if you show that [you're willing to learn], they'll even invite you to [fly with them]," Pétursson says. But EVE Online is a big sandbox with tens of thousands of different players—and not everyone is that generous. That's why CCP Games is hoping this "proactive grief counselling" will help new players overcome one of the biggest obstacles to learning what makes EVE special.

It's been six days since every major alliance in EVE Online fell victim to an unprecedented alien invasion. Attacking out of nowhere, the non-player faction known as the Drifters laid siege to thousands of citadel starbases and destroyed more than 5,000 player ships—obliterating hundreds of billions of ISK (EVE's in-game currency) and initially crippling many of EVE's biggest alliances as they scrambled to respond. If there was ever a day EVE Online stood still, it was the 26th of June.

That didn't last. And now the EVE community is mostly just annoyed.

When I first talked to EVE Online players last week, the chaos of the invasion was palpable. On Wednesday afternoon, players all across the galaxy of New Eden began receiving automated messages stating that their citadel starbases, jump gates, cynosural beacons, and other player-created structures were being assaulted by an unknown force. But even after they identified the assailants as Drifters and began marshalling defense fleets, there was little concrete information. All anyone knew was the attacks were widespread, unrelenting, and, at the time, dangerous. For a brief moment, it felt like EVE was on the verge of an apocalypse.

"The lack of forewarning that normally precludes an event like this took a lot of the playerbase by surprise," Seraph Padecain tells me. He's a fleet commander in TEST Alliance, one of the many player factions that has been repelling Drifter invasions for nearly a week—a coordinated effort that requires dozens of TEST Alliance pilots working at all hours to protect their space. Elsewhere in New Eden, every other alliance is working to do the same.

But as Seraph and other pilots close to the situation have told me, EVE Online's first alien invasion seems to be more of a boring grind and frustrating nuisance than anything.

I'm told an "unprecedented" meeting of nearly every major alliance is now in the works, with the aim of collectively firing back at developer CCP Games by "trying to ruin other parts of the game," one source says. In an attempt to shake EVE up in an exciting way, CCP Games might've just started a war with its own playerbase instead.

Invasion Frustration

Part of what made the Drifter invasion so terrifying was the lack of information. Seraph was one of the first pilots to make contact with the Drifters on Wednesday, shortly after they besieged several TEST citadels. As he tells me, that initial engagement was unnerving. Though Drifters aren't a new enemy to EVE Online, no NPC faction had ever staged an assault like this. In our original report, TEST Alliance's head diplomat stated he thought someone was exploiting unknown game mechanics while others thought this was a glitch—a belief shared by many EVE pilots that day.

Seraph didn't have time to speculate. Some of the first citadels hit were critical to TEST's infrastructure and he needed to figure out just how dangerous this enemy was. "We had to stop them," he says. "Especially when you know how powerful the Drifters are against standard sub-capital ships. They are faster, do a lot more damage, and can take quite a beating."

The real problem, however, was that Drifter battlecruisers normally pack a Doomsday weapon capable of obliterating all but the biggest ships in EVE Online. Having a few dozen of those going off at once could've been catastrophic for an unprepared defensive fleet. Seraph, with his leadership's blessing, wanted to test if these Drifters were packing their usual doomsdays. 

"I engaged the Drifters and realized that while they had [some of the same mechanics] that the Drifter battleships do in their [normal] fleets, they didn't use their doomsdays—slight sigh of relief there," he says.

Though Seraph didn't realize it, this was the first sign that the Drifter invasion was compromised to prevent them from causing truly serious damage. A few hours later, major alliances had already come up with their own methods for battling the Drifters. TEST was relying on its extensive network of fleet commanders to coordinate supercapital defense fleets, while other alliances had pilots manually wield citadels' defensive weapons to fight off Drifters.

Of all the pilots I spoke with representing some of EVE Online's biggest alliances, there was one common theme: They very quickly figured out how to effectively and efficiently defend their space from Drifter fleets. And though new Drifter fleets would spawn sometimes every minute—on June 29, The Imperium leadership said they weathered 170 individual Drifter attacks in a six hour period—it quickly became clear that they weren't all that interested in causing serious damage.

Above: A 2015 trailer first introducing the Drifters.

Though a few smaller player-built structures have been destroyed, so far the Drifters have yet to seriously damage even a single citadel—the key piece of infrastructure of any null-sec alliance. 

As I explained in my original report, citadels can't be destroyed during a single assault. To help balance the complicated playing field of EVE Online's player-versus-player wars, citadel sieges are broken up into three phases that can be days apart to give both sides adequate time to muster their armies. To fully destroy a citadel, you have to win those three separate battles. But the Drifters seemingly have no interest in following up on weakened citadels. They'll win the first phase but won't come back when the citadel is ready to be attacked again, making the whole assault kind of pointless.

But because nothing like this had ever happened in EVE Online before, players aren't about to risk an expensive citadel on that assumption. "Since none of the mechanics were announced, nor tested publicly, the precedent was set for things to change at any time for any reason without any warning," explains Dran, TEST's head diplomat. "Even though we knew [the Drifters] were not a threat, we had to treat every one like it was because it could have been. It was the worst of both worlds."

Since Wednesday, TEST has been hit anywhere between 20 to 40 times a day by different Drifter invasions. Each one requires a coordinated response by upwards of 20 players—but TEST is also one of the most well-equipped and organized groups in the game. "TEST has a pretty big [fleet commander] team and we have a lot of citadel gunners," explains Seraph. "So, while it has been a lot of attacks, it has been more of an inconvenience to us as we have had to send gunners out all over our space."

Other alliances echo that annoyance. Asher Elias, a fleet commander in charge of one of the largest military forces in EVE called Goonswarm, was in the middle of one of the most destructive eviction campaigns of the past year—a concerted effort to uproot Goonswarm's two biggest enemies, Northern Coalition and Pandemic Legion. Though that campaign was largely over, Asher tells me Goonswarm leadership was in the middle of some final missions and considering new war campaigns when the Drifter invasion forced them to retreat home. "I don't mind adapting during a campaign—the amount of times we've had one of our enemies deploy to attack our home space while we've hit another is very high," Asher says. "I disliked being compelled to go home by CCP design decisions involving NPCs, especially without warning. It's the antithesis of player-driven sandbox content."

"Campaigns this size take months to plan and the work of hundreds of people, so it's not trivial. I wonder if CCP is cognizant of that," Asher adds.

Over the weekend, EVE Online saw an unprecedented drop in player-versus-player hostilities between rival alliances as each focused on defending their own space. But the Drifters are a poor substitute for human opponents, especially given their reluctance to actually hit an alliance where it hurts. "I feel like now we've adapted to the point where it's more a developer mandated chore than it is dynamic content," says Asher. He likens the event to a mini-game that takes money from your in-game wallet unless you log in each day.

"I play for the players, for the players in my alliance, and together we play to compete against other players," says Hedliner. He's the leader of Pandemic Legion, one of EVE Online's most notorious alliances. "We choose to exist within the predominantly player-driven dimension of the game and PvE is largely a means to an end, to obtain ISK to allow us to continue to compete against other players. For me, those I play with and those we play against we seek that human element and interaction. That is what has kept me playing for well over a decade. I would question whether it is right for NPC or PvE elements to encroach upon that to the extent that they appear to be at this time."

Fighting back

It's clear that the leaders of the biggest alliances aren't a fan of this new chapter in EVE Online, but they might not have to worry for too much longer. Though accounts vary, many of those I spoke with said that the Drifter invasions stopped at some point yesterday or Sunday evening. Because CCP Games is refusing to openly comment on the entire ordeal, no one knows whether this ceasefire is temporary or merely the calm before a new storm, but given that this invasion is closely tied to an in-game narrative that CCP has been spinning for years now, it's plausible that a new phase of the invasion could begin soon.

But if it does, the null-sec alliances it will inevitably affect are ready to fight back—not just against the Drifters, but CCP and EVE Online itself. During my conversations with different alliance leaders, I learned that many of the biggest player empires in New Eden have decided to temporarily set aside their differences to figure out how they can make a coordinated protest to voice their displeasure over these recent events.

I'm told that this "cabal" of leaders hasn't yet decided on a single course of action, but already some of the biggest groups in EVE are taking their own measures. Both The Imperium (a coalition of alliances headed by Goonswarm) and Fraternity, EVE Online's first Chinese alliance, have decided to "localize" their economies, effectively starting a trade war that they believe will weaken all of EVE Online.

Normally, empires like The Imperium ferry some of the valuable materials they harvest out in dangerous null-sec space back to the safety of high-sec, where EVE Online is a lot less dangerous and a lot more friendly. High-sec is also home to EVE's largest markets, like Jita, which keeps its player-driven economy turning. But by placing embargoes on high-sec markets and localizing its own economy, The Imperium and any other nations hoping to join in the protest are hoping to send EVE's economy into a tailspin that will, eventually, negatively affect the overall game.

Because EVE Online has historically struggled to attract and keep players, the idea is that by making EVE worse for everyone and hurting CCP Games' bottom line, null-sec empires can influence changes that they feel are more conducive to their PvP playstyle. 

It's not the first time that null-sec players have protested unpopular changes by blowing up EVE's vital in-game marketplaces. Every few years events like Burn Jita encourage players to create blockades around EVE's biggest markets, destroying anyone who happens to be hauling goods for sale. These events create enormous economic damage that can be felt throughout New Eden. Whether that's enough to cause CCP Games to sweat is impossible to tell, though I think unlikely.

But, from what I'm told, this new alliance between EVE's biggest empires is a first. Assuming infighting doesn't pull it apart, it will represent the biggest unification of EVE Online's disparate alliances since its launch in 2003—all with the express purpose of punching back at CCP Games for daring to interfere in their player-driven politics by forcing pilots to shoot NPC aliens instead of real players. For now, nothing is certain. Though the Drifter invasion has seemingly ceased, only CCP Games knows what lies ahead for the pilots of EVE Online. And even CCP doesn't know how its players will strike back.

The virtual galaxy of New Eden is under siege, and no one knows why.

On Wednesday afternoon, thousands of players across the lawless regions of null-sec space, where EVE Online's fabled player-created empires battle for supremacy, were ambushed by fleets belonging to a mysterious non-player faction known as Drifters. While hostile NPC factions have always been in EVE Online, they've never posed a collective threat to its entire playerbase. Until now.

I've reached out to several sources, but the full extent of the Drifter invasion is still unclear—as is the extent of the damage so far. What we do know is that almost all of EVE Online's biggest factions, like The Imperium and TEST Alliance, have had their home stations sieged by Drifter fleets, each numbering in the hundreds, while smaller Drifter squads are ambushing anyone travelling through nearby systems. It's chaos, and EVE Online pilots are scrambling to respond.

"It very much caught everyone by surprise," an EVE player named Rhivre tells me. "There was no warning or hint that it was going to happen, then suddenly reports came in from all across null-sec about structures being shot at."

Not alone

At 2:44 pm EST, members of TEST Alliance, one of EVE Online's largest and most storied player empires, received an automated warning message:

"BOTmadmin: via notifybot Structure attacked: unknown 1029248651499 [Pharolux Cyno Beacon 94.60/100.00/100.00][B0RT] in BY-MSY Esoteria by [ ](Vigilant Tyrannos) Artemis Tyrannos @ 2019-06-26T18:43:00Z [a minute ago]"

This message was the first sign that something was very wrong, TEST's head diplomat tells me. His name is Dran, and he was logged in when the invasion first begun. As he explains, some of the automated warnings that began pouring in were "undocumented garbage" that couldn't be deciphered because TEST's player-programmed tools weren't designed to respond to attacks from computer-controlled forces. But one thing was clear: One of TEST's massive starbases was under attack.

But from who?

Players in the vicinity of the BY-MSY star system in TEST's home region of Esoteria were quickly able to confirm what was happening. As they warped to the besieged citadel starbase, a fleet of nearly 100 Drifter battleships unleashed volley after volley against its shields. Dran's first suspicion was sabotage.

As TEST scrambled to muster its pilots into action, reports quickly spread that attacks were happening elsewhere in the null-sec regions of New Eden. Chinese alliance Fraternity had at least one of their own starbases sieged, while The Imperium had to prematurely end a war campaign against a rival empire so it could quickly retreat home and mount a defense of its own stations. Meanwhile, Pandemic Horde had a special structure known as a jump bridge outright destroyed. More and more reports are coming in by the hour, leading to an unprecedented ceasefire between all of EVE Online's warring alliances as they focus on defense.

Until yesterday, Drifters behaved like most of EVE Online's non-player factions—but with a few improvements that make them significantly more deadly. For one, Drifters will follow you through a star system if you provoke them and try to run away. As Dran explains, players quickly learned to exploit this behavior by attacking a group of Drifters and running for the safety of a nearby starbase. The Drifters would give chase and effectively walk into an ambush as the player could then use the starbase's defenses to easily tear them to shreds.

It was possible to "farm" the Drifters this way, but that also came at a risk. If you drew the Drifters to a starbase and left them there, they'd slowly chew through its shields—though it would theoretically take hours given how small Drifter fleets typically are.

So when Dran saw a fleet of a hundred Drifters obliterating their citadel starbase in BY-MSY, he immediately suspected someone was trying to sabotage TEST from the inside using some kind of unknown strategy to gather such an enormous Drifter fleet. "I wasted at least an hour going through all our gunner [access lists] to find a spy that didn't exist," he says.

As more and more red alerts came in from TEST starbases throughout the region, it quickly became clear that this was beyond the scope of a saboteur exploiting a game mechanic. Dran tells me that within a period of 12 hours, over 38 TEST starbases were hit by Drifter fleets, though none were outright destroyed because EVE Online's complex siege systems are broken into separate phases. 

Large player-created structures effectively have three health bars, and each time one is depleted there is an invulnerability window to give each side a chance to regroup and plan for the next battle. That ended up being the saving grace for TEST—and every other major alliance in EVE.

Even though TEST's fleet commanders were eventually able to marshall defensive fleets capable of destroying the Drifters, Dran says there were simply too many battles happening at once to defend everything. "How do you recognize the threat, ping an alliance, get a fleet of 30 to 50 dudes, ship up, undock, fly even two to three systems over, and engage a fleet in 14 minutes?" he says. "And that's assuming you get the notification instantly. We got ours a minute after it started, and then did that for 12 hours straight."

And what's worse, no one knows when this will end, or even why this is happening—except the developers at CCP Games, and they aren't talking.

But the Drifters are striking so hard and fast, starbases are frequently being put into their invulnerability windows far more quickly than thought possible. Normally, sieges in EVE Online can take up to 12 hours or more, but these Drifters are so powerful they're tearing through defenses in a matter of minutes.

Meanwhile, players travelling through null-sec space are frequently being waylaid by smaller gangs of Drifters who quickly obliterate their ships and everything in its cargo bay. One particularly painful loss was a Hel supercarrier, costing its pilot more than 16 billion ISK, EVE's in-game currency (this roughly translated to $150 since you can buy ISK in-game). 

The Drifters are even attacking pilots' escape pods, which are automatically jettisoned from a destroyed ship so that players can retreat to safety. Losing your pod means respawning at a medical bay that could be on the other side of the galaxy. Until yesterday, Drifters would only target and destroy your pod if provoked, but now they're destroying them regardless—breaking all of EVE Online's rules.

Apocalypse now

While writing this, all of null-sec space in New Eden is still under constant assault. For TEST and Dran, it's been all hands on deck. He's only managed to get a bit of sleep in between helping coordinate defenses and his regular diplomatic duties—not to mention juggling a full-time job. "It's stressful, man."

While the EVE Online subreddit seems to be soaking in the chaos and carnage, those in leadership positions like Dran are understandably at the end of their rope. "Don't get me wrong, the balls it would have taken to set this mechanic on the game intentionally, I applaud it," he says. "The game needs more snowglobe shaking."

But at the same time, years of effort by tens of thousands of players is collectively at risk.

"If another player comes by and knocks down our sandcastle that's one thing," Dran adds. "Those risks are understood and part of the sandbox. We set up full well knowing the risks, and are prepared to fight anyone for our right to be here. We didn't set anything up knowing that at any point with no warning NPCs would materialize and blow everything up. NPCs don't sleep, they don't get tired, they don't have to wake people up or take off work to show up for a timer. They just exist one second, shoot, and then despawn. EVE is supposed to be a sandbox driven by human interaction and intrigue. This just feels contrived."

The leader of The Imperium, a man known as The Mittani, is especially annoyed with the invasion. "The Imperium was in the midst of prosecuting a war involving tens of thousands of real players," he says. "We are annoyed that we have had to stop our player vs player warfare and grind through what amounts to World of Warcraft-style raid content, but we have already broken down how the Drifter AI works and have successfully defended all of our structures thus far. I look forward to going back to real player vs player content, which is why I quit WoW for EVE in the first place."

But right now there is no end in sight, and CCP Games is refusing to acknowledge or explain anything. "We reached out to CCP employees, anyone we thought might know what was going on," Dran explains. "We couldn't even get confirmation that this wasn't a bug, or that it was a player or that there was some intended counterplay. Nothing. Silence."

At the time of publishing this story, CCP Games hasn't even acknowledged that half of EVE Online is actively on fire. That initially led many to believe this was all some kind of horrific accident or bug, but now the consensus is that this invasion was planned. After all, EVE Online's current expansion is called, well, Invasion. But because major shifts in EVE Online's delicate ecosystem have always been communicated months or years in advance, no one expected this.

I reached out to CCP Games personally, and a spokesperson said they "reached out to the Drifters for comment, but they rejected our hailing frequencies."

CCP did say, however, that it "intercepted" the above image, which is a map of EVE Online's different player-alliances. It hints that the Drifters (and, by extension, CCP Games) might not stop until all of EVE Online's null-sec territory has been wrested from the hands of its players.

If that's the case, EVE Online could be headed for its most dramatic upheaval in the 16 years since it was first launched. It's nearly been a full day since the invasion started, and Dran and the other players I've spoken to are confused, frustrated, and shaken. They've spent years building and protecting their empires, and now CCP seems poised to burn everything down.

What will happen next is anyone's guess.