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CCP Games recently released a new developer blog post, this time detailing the new Character Creator feature included in the upcoming EVE Online Incursion expansion rolling out in December and January. Featuring all new art for each bloodline, race, and gender, the creator is the first step in providing station avatars for players in 2011.

The Carbon Character System was made to enable us to create characters for several projects, including Eve. It started off as a design document containing various wishlist features, ranging in complexity from the simple to the impossible. I believe most of the items on the list ended up being possible, with the possible exception of essentially being able to perform a striptease with arbitrary clothing. Hmm, do they even do that in CGI movies these days? Do I really want to know?

Anyway, the system has been seen in public before, highlighing cloth simulation and recently on the Singularity test server. So what‘s it all about? Is there anything new here?

For this blog, which I hope is the first of several, we‘re going to take a closer look at a couple of interesting features of the system you‘ll have in your hands soon. There are lots of interesting (to me, anyway) things about the system to explore, but I‘ll start with what makes the faces tick - the specs of the faces and the face sculpting feature. My vantage point is right in the middle between programming and art - I do character tech art.

EVE Online: Character Creation

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A new Legacy Interactive developer post has revealed three new screenshots from the upcoming Criminal Minds game soon to be available for Mac and Windows. Based on the themes and characters in the popular television crime drama, the casual game will feature brand new cases and hidden object gameplay.

View the new screenshots at the page below.

Criminal Minds Screenshots

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PC Gamer has posted a new article about S2 Games' upcoming version 2.0 release for the Heroes of Newerth multiplayer strategy game. The update will include a new Casual gameplay mode, a new map, an in-game store, a map editor, and a streamlined interface.

Casual Mode

The biggest change is the new gameplay mode “casual” (which is replacing the current Easy Mode). The developers describe Easy Mode as a “bastardization of the core gameplay” that was so different that it didn’t prepare players for Normal Mode. They told us that they felt that Easy Mode made heroes progress too fast, gave too much gold income per tick, and made towers insignificant. Players who focused on Easy Mode found that their skills did not translate well into the differently-paced, more competitive world of Normal Mode.

With Casual Mode, S2 Games hope to make HoN more accessible, faster to play, and less punishing, while still cultivating skills in players skills that are easily transfered over to Normal Mode. To accomplish this, Casual Mode will have the following features:

Last hit kill denials do not deny experience points.
More gold is rewarded for actions like last hit, hero kills, assists, and taking down towers (but gold ticks remain identical to Normal Mode).
No gold is lost on death. Players can try riskier tactics such as running past towers to get a last hit on a Hero and not have the reward be canceled out by dying.
Less random damage/reward ranges to make the game less reliant on luck, and more reliant on skill, to deal max damage.
Players will need less experience points to level up compared to Normal Mode, until the player reaches mid-level. Once players hit mid-level for their heroes, the experience points required to increase their level will be similar to Normal Mode.

PC Gamer: Heroes Of Newerth 2.0 Details

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Gamasutra has posted a new interview with Blizzard Entertainment's Frank Pearce about the recently released Cataclysm expansion for the company's popular MMO, World of Warcraft. The developer discussed the game's new content, the company's release schedule, and the importance of retail sales.

“We’re revamping a lot of the content from the original version of the game,” Frank Pearce, executive vice president of product development at Blizzard, tells Gamasutra.

"We call it the brown box, but a lot of the community calls it Vanilla WoW. The content was created years and years ago, before we really knew how to create the best content for the game. The level 1-60 experience really doesn’t have the best content. It’s not putting our best foot forward. This lets us do that for new players."

It also gives existing players an excuse to explore areas of the game they’ve possibly ignored for years.

“Most of the content we’ve revamped is the content people are playing to level up their characters,” says Pearce, who is also a co-founder at Blizzard. “This [and the two new race additions] gives players who have been part of the community for a while the chance to experience it from a new perspective.”

Gamasutra: WoW Cataclysm Discussion

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