Standoff Episode 4 Back On Track

The Standoff team reports that they're now picking up the pace on Episode 4: The Battle of Sirius. Progress was going fairly slowly around the time of their last update, but things appear to be in higher gear these days. New missions, in-game cutscenes and music have been coming together well over the last few weeks. Prerendered cutscenes and in-game fiction have not advanced as much, but there's somewhat less work remaining in those areas to begin with. A teaser image was also released along with the general project status update. As we get closer to the game's chapter, additional news posts should happen more regularly.

We've put up the news update. Only one new screenshot this time, and the progress page doesn't seem to have changed too much, but believe me, the past two weeks things have been going much faster than the previous three-four months, and we intend to keep it that way. So, the gaps between news updates are going to be much smaller from now on.

Eve Online Continues Strong Growth

GameSpot reports that the Chinese debut of Eve Online has set new records for the massively multiplayer space sim. The Chinese game world is separate from the universe that's existed for the last three years, but in two days it managed to recruit 200,000 beta sign-ups and tally 30,000 simultaneous players. It'll be interesting to see how many of those ultimately convert into paid subscribers. The regular game has approximately 130,000 active members. Eve is currently the second most popular sci-fi MMO game behind Star Wars Galaxies. SWG actually has a very small lead considering the popularity of the Star Wars brand. EO seems to have quite a few more subscribers than Earth & Beyond, Jumpgate or Vendetta Online have had.