TOM FRANCIS
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EVE’s Assassins And The Kill That Shocked A Galaxy

“The simultaneous ambush and galaxy-wide hangar theft inflicted financial damage upwards of 30 billion ISK – $16,500 US dollars at IGE.com’s prices. The value of the stolen assets utterly dwarfed the original fee for the job. And yet the only item the Guiding Hand’s anonymous client requested for himself was the cold, dead body of the target. It’s safe to say this was personal.”

A prompt two years after it was originally published, my story about the Guiding Hand Social Club assassins is finally (legally) online. At the time a lot of bad J-PEGs of it cropped up online, and since we didn’t actually have a website of our own then, we tolerated the ones that actually bothered to note the piece came from PC Gamer. But now it’s in actual html and – in a column of that width – about as good as I can humanly make it look.

My favourite bit of it, inevitably, is the bit I didn’t write: the responses to the heist from the Intergalactic Summit. Eve players reacted to the hit with genuine disgust or admiration, but also stayed in-character. So their comments are coloured with wonderful subtexts drawn from Eve’s backstory about the slavery of the Minmatar, and subsequent rebellion.

Coupled with Eve’s extraordinarily evocative character portraits, it gives each commentator such a strong and believable personality that, reading it, I find I can imagine exactly what kind of voice each of these people would have, how they would deliver their judgements.

Look at Zhou Yu! He looks like Jesus. Of course he’s appalled. He’d talk like Neil from the Young Ones, by the way.

Look at Nanus Parkite! He’s wearing aviator shades – of course he’s unimpressed. And if you look closely at the full-size version of his portrait, you can actually see his eyes behind the lenses: they’re keen and angry, matching his Godwin-fulfilling disdain for the Guiding Hand.

Look at Zaridin! That smarmy, crisp-lipped villain. Of course he loves it, and of course he’s reserved and eloquent in his praise.

And man, look at Eddie Gordo. Can’t you just hear his thick, exotic accent? He speaks in simple, black-and-white truths, with the weight of suffering behind them. He’s the only one who doesn’t see this as a discussion of methods: he doesn’t care how it was achieved, only that the people who enslaved his race suffered.

In fact, check out Istvaan Shogaatsu, leader of the most vicious band of contract killers in the universe:

It kind of shows, right?

It’s baffling to me that a five-year-old space game still lets you create the most human and distinctive player-designed artificial faces. Why can’t we make faces like this in games where we actually have a body and face rather than a spaceship, where we can walk around and see other people’s? Instead, three years later, we get a blockbuster character-driven RPG in which the emperor of the world looks like this:

Anyway, that other site I’m working on – this one. It’s coming. It’s remarkable just how much progress you can make, and how quickly, without even coming close to finishing. I’d add that I am close to finishing now, except that I have felt close to finishing for around three weeks. It seemed nearly done half-an-hour into the process. I suddenly have a newfound sympathy for games that miss their release dates.

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