SKIN Job

It has been interesting times for people who like ship skins in EVE Online.

I am a fan of ship skins myself.  At least the good ones.  Unfortunately, there have been precious few of those, especially for Minmatar.  Even Johnny Bench can’t get paint to stick to that much rust I guess.

But things have been getting better, and look to be improving greatly going forward.

We had the Purity of the Throne event, which provided a clean white paint job for every Amarr hull.  I wear that on my Guardian for a medical white logi look.

My Guardian with the white skin

And then there was the Crimson Harvest event, which had its own set of skins.  But then EVE Vegas came along and a whole bright new future of skins opened before us.

At the keynote they announced a new skin, the Star Captain, for the Amarr Confessor hull.

Expected to be popular in USTZ

Then there was also something about skins that would work across multiple hulls, a hint about new skin technology coming “soon,” as well as the announcement that current skins would be seeing a massive price drop come the Ascension expansion.  Examples given were:

• Astero Sanctuary for 400 AUR (~75% down from 1540)
• Hulk ORE development for 250 AUR (~90% down from 2390)
• Revelation EoM for 400 AUR (~90% down from 3445)

Cheap skins for everybody!  As EVE Hermit succinctly put it, stop buying skins!  They will soon be much more affordable.

With the talk of skins up front, I decided to go to the Art & Visual Effects Update presentation, though it was not an easy choice.  There were gaps of time with just a single presentation, and then during that one hour there were three I wanted to attend.  CCPlease… schedule better.  But with the skins, and my general joy in the visual aspects of the game, that panel won out.

And while some of it was review of what had already been put in the game, there was plenty to look forward to in the talk as well, including new explosions.

But on the skin front, the big item was “Pattern Projection Technology.”

If you want to see that part of the panel, it is part of the day two stream recording on Twitch.tv and starts at 2:09:25.

This involved a demonstration of how, with the current set of models, CCP is able to more easily apply decals, patterns, and colors to ships.

Apocalypse battleship with some pattern and color variations

Up on Imagur somebody posted a gallery of the ships shown from that part of the presentation, though unfortunately the gallery starts with a possible new model for the Chimera carrier, which was unrelated to the skins segment.  The pattern projection tech begins on image two and goes through some stages showing more and more complex patterns, along with some test skins they were able to quickly create with this.

EveVegas Art Skins Presentation, PPT/WIP everything

Further on they showed some skins that they plan to have available around the Ascension launch, including the Versus set, which looks perfect thing for Red vs. Blue to use to rally people to their cause.

Red vs. Blue, each with a seed of the other

There was not much in the way of details when it came to when we might see some of these new skins.  However, the fact that skins will suddenly be much, much cheaper come Ascension indicates to me that we will see some pretty quickly after launch.

Of course, the pattern projection technology led to people projecting their own wishes and dreams on the future of skins.  I heard one person assume that players would be able to work with patterns, something that one might have been able to loosely infer from the keynote (there was a passing mention of patterns for fleets), but which was never said explicitly.  And then, of course, any number of people took the club symbol used in the demo and mentally put their corp or alliance logo in its place and said, “I want that!”  I didn’t see anything that said we were getting anything like that, but we can dream I suppose.

It has been a long time since we first started talking about decorating ships.

I’m pretty sure this has been around since ~2007

CCP has been through a couple of false starts along the way.  But I think with the tech in place to make skin creation easier along with better pricing come Ascension means we will see more skins in space… at least on the undock or in fleets.  It is still tough to see other people’s ships when passing in space, but you can see your own.  And I want my ship to be colorful.