EVE:Online may not be a new title, but the award-winning massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (or MMORPG) is about to receive a very large content addition, The Empyrean Age, which sees the four major empires of New Eden, who have maintained an uneasy peace for the last five years, declaring open war.

The escalation towards hostilities bears more than a passing resemblance to the events that sparked the First World War.  The Scope, EVE's news service reporting on galactic events, has been buzzing for months with news of the assassination of leaders, border disputes, denials, counter-claims and threats as the factions move inexorably towards an epic climax that has been hinted at since the game's release in 2003.  Players can choose to join a militia aligned with one of the four stellar factions and fight it out against other pilots, use the galactic confusion to grab their own systems, or ignore the war entirely and profit from trade – or piracy.  

EVE has always had a rich and mature backstory, drawing inspiration from Earth’s history – from nationalism, slavery, Catholicism, the Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain, African tribalism – to create a believable universe.  Some players have drawn parallels between the Minmatar hatred for their former enslavers, the dogmatic Amarr, and Mugabe's hatred of white settlers, or the growth of xenophobia in the Caldari State and the birth of fascism in Germany.

Players take the role of "pod captains", the elite, each one considered a celebrity by space’s untold trillions of lesser beings.  Effectively immortal through cloning, these pilots can fly solo and make their own fortune, or join vast alliances, independent of the factions, seeking their own destiny in the uncharted stars. Fighting out in the unpoliced regions of space between these rival alliances of mercenaries, pirates, miners, traders, and industrialists is vicious – turf wars for outposts or systems can last weeks, and players are free to make or break treaties as they choose.

With the introduction of Empyrean Age, and the kicking off of full-scale galactic war, players become more involved in the background story that has been developing over the last five years. Alignment to one of the factions has grown in importance, compared to the previous centrality of alliance allegiances. This shift has various knock-on effects, like the fights caused when inter-faction battles encroach into the space of an alliance. Also, players that pledge themselves to a faction are able to progress up through the ranks, leading to extra privileges and the ability to acquire rare items, but also putting them at risk from enemy factions, war profiteers, and pirates waiting to pick off stragglers.

With over 200,000 subscribers and regular peaks of 30,000 concurrent players, the unsharded universe of EVE is an incredibly dense virtual “sandbox” – requiring its own economist, Dr. Eyjólfur "Eyjo" Guðmundsson, to monitor the player-driven market.  Every item in the game is built by players, from the millions of rounds of ammunition expended daily to vast capital ships to outposts, allowing players to learn as much about being an entrepreneur as a combat pilot.  Empyrean Age also offers unscrupulous players the chance to make money through trading indiscriminately, regardless of faction.

Unlike many competitor MMORPGs which also require players to advance by doing activities to gain experience points – a process known as "grinding" for its dreary sequence of finding and completing repetitive tasks to "level up" – EVE works on a time-based skill system, where characters learn skills even if the player is offline.  To learn all the skills in EVE would still, however, take approximately nine years, meaning that no one can do everything and so ensuring specialisation and interaction amongst players.  This also means new players have a chance against much longer-playing pilots, as they can learn to specialize in particular types of craft relatively easily, and longer-running players are benefitted in that they have many more specializations – and therefore ship types – to swap between, increasing their use to factions and alliances.  Game balancing means that even the most devastating ships can be rendered useless by opponents who bring the right vessels, so the game is not dominated by experienced players to the same extent as many competitor titles.

All in all the new expansion looks set to bring even more depth to the game.  Empyrean Age is released on June 10th, and a one month subscription is approximately £10.  You can get a 14-day trial account too - visit http://www.eveonline.com/empyreanage/index.html for details.