The heat in Gen Con's main exhibition room can be oppressive on the first day when the place is stuffed to the walls with people gawking at the latest in polyhedral dice, stuffed Cthulus and builds of the latest and greatest video games coming down the pike. It's with some sense of relief then that I come to the CCP booth to talk about EVE Online. The EVE Online booth actually has a second-floor lounge area with a full bar and somewhat cooler air along with a great view of the crowd stuffing the show floor. In a way, it's not surprising that the company behind the successful online space trading MMO would do things a little differently. They've managed to create one of the stickiest under-the-radar games out there by not conforming to trends.

"Nobody ever leaves EVE Online." The words would sound sinister if they weren't coming from the smiling face of Reynir Hardarson, the creative director for CCP, the Icelandic company responsible for EVE Online. According to Hardarson, the three-year-old MMO now boasts an active player base of approximately 140,000. What's unusual about that, however, is that number doesn't reflect the usual rise and fall of MMO subscriptions, but a slow and steady rise without a single significant falloff in subscribers since the game launched in 2003. Hardarson's not kidding when he says that no one ever leaves EVE Online. It's not a game, it's a lifestyle.


Hardarson attributes this to the team's dedication to their original creative vision -- allowing the players themselves to write their own stories. "Players are the content in EVE Online," Hardarson says. He then goes on to relate a number of stories of political maneuvering between enormous player-alliances and corporations involving trade and commodity manipulations, lying, betrayal, deceit, and enough interpersonal drama to fuel a dozen Shakespeare plays, including the now infamous story of the Guiding Hand Social Club. The GHSC is a semi-secret corporation of assassins-for-hire who, over the course of a year, infiltrated one of the largest player-corporations in the game and in one fell swoop robbed it of billions in in-game assets, destroyed billions more and assassinated the corporation's CEO. "It was brilliant!" Hardarson exclaims with a smile.

Just because the players create their own content, though, doesn't mean that the creators can rest on their laurels. According to Hardarson, it's the developer's job to keep the game from straying from its original creative vision while continuing to create new tools for players to utilize and, perhaps most importantly, to keep the universe moving forward. "The universe of EVE must never be static," Hardarson says. "The Path to Kali is our way of allowing the universe to evolve and respond to players."

The Path to Kali is a huge multi-patch expansion that will be incorporated into the game over the next year. While many of the technical upgrades in Kali are massive (including rebuilding of the entire game engine for Windows Vista), it's really the new game dynamics that make this a wild time for players both old and new. Kali will introduce a whole bunch of new professions and player tracks for EVE Online pilots to follow, such as exploration, invention and salvage expert. It's important to note, however, that these aren't "classes" in the traditional MMO sense, but rather the natural outgrowth of player activity from developer-introduced content.