Blog Banter: EVE Mobile
Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!
EVE Mobile is coming, and it’s called COSMOS.
I don’t doubt that there are a hundred imaginative ways to use the mobile gaming platform to extend EVE. At first thought, there could be real-time ways to implement the projected RTS aspects of DUST 514—a way infantry commanders could communicate strategic moves to the troops by playing a mini-map game from the comfort of their office on a Tuesday morning (not that I’d do that or anything).
It could be an extension of Incarna, taking CCP’s aformentioned “risk like” table game (shown halfway through this video) out of the station and into your hand, letting you gamble your ISK away on the morning commute.
It could be any number of mini-game iterations that take a single aspect of EVE and blow it out into the next Peggle—save the unicorns—and I have no doubt that it’d be a hell of an addictive addition to the EVE’verse. But I don’t think any of these ideas would be doing us, as capsuleers, the biggest favors quite yet.
In a recent interview with CCP’s Nathan Richardsson, the discussion about COSMOS took a surprising turn with this statement about its long-term future goals:
To be able to go there and establish a voice connection to corporation chat. It really means that you can communicate and interact through any medium. Imagine somewhere down the road you can just pick up your iPhone and dial in to your corporation chat or you could simply manage your market orders.
That, my fellow pilots, is the ultimate EVE Mobile. It’s the final iteration of COSMOS, packaged into an iPhone/Web app and delivered to our fingers, allowing for true meta-interaction with life in New Eden.
As addressed in the Dev Blog yesterday, we know that there is no shortage of things-to-come when COSMOS is finally released this winter: profiles, status updates, calendars, EVE mail, contact lists, security status changes. To have the capabilities of just this first projected release plan is already more interaction than Capsuleer—as beautifully-made of an iPhone app it is—has been able to offer us with the limitations of the current EVE API. COSMOS vanilla is already going to be a game-changer.
But imagine a winter expansion two years from now: Pyjama Sam has been swooped up by the talons of an Icelandic gryphon and is taken to CCP headquarters to colaborate on bringing EVE Voice to the iPhone through Capsuleer 6.0. James Harrison is visited by Santa Claus, who leaves a beautifully wrapped API under his Christmas tree, begging to bring EVE Metrics 6 full market manipulation capabilities.
By that time, I’m sending fleet orders to Kirith Kodachi on a touchscreen while walking through the park on a Sunday afternoon (Yes, two years from now I am Kirith’s FC. Hey, CK told us to use our imaginations, alright?). Mynxee is organizing an Incarna-risk gambling tournament via COSMOS calendar on her Blackberry. 00Sage00 is putting together a ship fitting on his Palm Pre while flying to Iceland for another CSM meeting (he is elected in a landslide), and sends it directly to a corp member flying through Providence. War Childe is monitoring Ushra’Khan’s real-time sovereignty updates while Dillon is barking orders to their DUST squadron from his Google phone (he has quite an angry voice when dealing with dusties).
And cut—
We’re back in 2009, wondering how the little Dominion patch is going to affect our corps’ sovereignty. (Do I hear a fog horn?)
I think EVE Mobile is coming, and it might just meet the wildest imaginings any of us banterer’s can muster. Life in New Eden is entirely about communication with others, and I think the most relevant extention that a mobile device can provide to the game is greater means to do that: through voice chat, market orders, corp discussion, mail, calendars, killboards, maps, and general networking.
So that’s my answer. EVE on our monitors, DUST on our televisions, and COSMOS in our hands.
List of Participants in Blog Banter 12 can be found here.
