Eve Online Discards Classic Graphics for Premium and Premium Lite
CCP Games, the company behind the immensely popular space role-playing MMO (massively multiplayer online) game EVE Online, has recently come out and confirmed the rumors regarding their ending support for the classic visual version of the game. This will be replaced by the Premium and Premium Lite modes which first saw the day of light back in 2007.
The reasoning behind this course of action is a simple one: as time has gone by. technology has gotten better and better. As a direct consequence CCP can now provide a better visual interface for EVE Online, and the users that are stuck with the technology from a few years back would better upgrade if they still want to play the game in a very shiny, eye-catchy manner. There is one other motive why CCP decided to go with Premium and Premium Lite – the company no longer has to come up with two separate versions of in-game art (one for Classic and one for Premium), meaning that it can focus all its resources on the evolution of EVE Online.
“Currently we have two content packs, Classic and Premium. Classic has the low barrier of entry, and Premium requires modern ShaderModel 3.0 hardware. To accommodate older PCs and those who prefer to run twenty clients of EVE while they run SETI@Home and ray trace while compressing HD movies, we will deliver what we refer to as "Premium Lite." Premium Lite will only require ShaderModel 2.0 hardware, and far less texture memory than the current Premium, ensuring good framerates on older hardware. We won't stop there - we are providing two flavors of ShaderModel 2.0 compatible shaders, currently named "lo" and "hi", explains the EVE Online Dev Blog.
To put it simply, from now on you will still be able to play Eve Online on your machine, even if you have an older configuration; just do not expect everything to look very well while doing so.
The reasoning behind this course of action is a simple one: as time has gone by. technology has gotten better and better. As a direct consequence CCP can now provide a better visual interface for EVE Online, and the users that are stuck with the technology from a few years back would better upgrade if they still want to play the game in a very shiny, eye-catchy manner. There is one other motive why CCP decided to go with Premium and Premium Lite – the company no longer has to come up with two separate versions of in-game art (one for Classic and one for Premium), meaning that it can focus all its resources on the evolution of EVE Online.
“Currently we have two content packs, Classic and Premium. Classic has the low barrier of entry, and Premium requires modern ShaderModel 3.0 hardware. To accommodate older PCs and those who prefer to run twenty clients of EVE while they run SETI@Home and ray trace while compressing HD movies, we will deliver what we refer to as "Premium Lite." Premium Lite will only require ShaderModel 2.0 hardware, and far less texture memory than the current Premium, ensuring good framerates on older hardware. We won't stop there - we are providing two flavors of ShaderModel 2.0 compatible shaders, currently named "lo" and "hi", explains the EVE Online Dev Blog.
To put it simply, from now on you will still be able to play Eve Online on your machine, even if you have an older configuration; just do not expect everything to look very well while doing so.
