Jumpgate Evolution - Hands On @ Gamespot

Another of Gamespot's GDC articles, this one covering Jumpgate.

Brown graciously walked us through the game's basic features, pointing out how Evolution will retain all the core elements that defined the original game--space dogfighting along the lines of classic PC games like X-Wingand Wing Commander, with the trappings of massively multiplayer online games (such as missions, in-game economies, and player-versus-player battles). To that end, we were shown flythroughs of a handful of different deep-space zones which are being built to be huge, but to look interesting, full of colorful nebulas and star systems, as well as shattered planets and asteroid fields that house hidden space stations and alien infestations. In the game's current friends-and-family beta state (an extremely small, internal beta state that usually precedes closed betas), there are about 50 star maps, each about 10-15 cubic kilometers in size. Brown pointed out that in a recent beta session, about 100 player ships were in the same zone, but because of the vast size of the area, there wasn't any crowding at all. The same was true of several of the zones we saw today--the current version of the beta lets you toggle flags for all friendly and hostile ships in the zone to appear onscreen with colored markers in the distance. This sense of space should stay constant throughout the game, even though, as Brown pointed out, enemies will constantly respawn and the universe will house anywhere from 25,000-30,000 computer-controlled enemyentities at any time.