EVE Online dev CCP's blockchain "survival experience" Project Awakening is getting a closed playtest in May

rockpapershotgun.com:

CCP Games have shared a few more details about Project Awakening, a new game or at least, "survival experience" set in the Eve Online universe, which is getting a closed playtest from 21st May 2024. Project Awakening is a single-shard affair - that is, one in which all players inhabit the same world, rather than being split up across servers or instances. It's "built upon the principles of freedom, consequence, and mastery within a living universe", and "represents the next step in CCP Games' journey to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life", which, you know, wind your neck in.

The project is set in a region of space where civilization has collapsed. It tasks players with exploring and rebuilding a "broken world". As you might guess from the extremely high-on-their-own-supply language above, it's also a blockchain and cryptography-based affair, which the developers have broadly presented as a bid to ensure that the EVE universe outlives CCP. Our Jeremy Peel interviewed CCP about all this in October last year.

You can register for the Project Awakening closed playtest here. The playtest "will allow players to engage with programmable game systems and build their own features and functionality within the world". CCP are also hosting an "online hackathon" for Project Awakening builders, with the winning teams given the chance to visit CCP's Iceland HQ, though what exactly you'll be building remains a matter of guesswork.

Project Awakening runs on CCP's in-house Carbon Development Platform and MUD by Lattice - MUD being a kind of blockchain technology used by Op Craft and Primordium, among other games. Alongside all this, CCP Games are also announcing that they will make their Carbon Development Platform open source, allowing programmers and game developers to access the framework and additional components for free.

Further details as to what you do in Project Awakening are scarce, but we at least now have the reassuringly familiar words