The Vulture Venture

This actually started up before I left on vacation and, honestly, I thought it would lose steam and fade away in a day or so.

But this involved Star Citizen, so drama blew up everywhere and proved once again that if you complain aggressively about some perceived slight you can get everybody to focus on it for a week or more.

I am, of course, referring to the Venture/Vulture design thing.

More than a week back Star Citizen announced a new ship called the Vulture from Drake Industries.

From Star Citizen, the Vulture

As images spread out on the web, those familiar with EVE Online noticed a decided similarity between that ship and the ORE industrial frigate in the game call the Venture.

From ORE the Venture

This led to some immediate poking of fun at Star Citizen, kicking off a couple dozen threads on /r/eve about the similarities of the ship (starting with this one I believe) as well as a tweak from CCP on Twitter.

This led to some rage from some parts of the Star Citizen community who protested that it was CCP that copied from some past Chris Roberts game, producing screen shots from the 1990s of something of a vaguely similar configuration while also tossing out any ship model they could find that featured twin booms out front to prove that the concept hasn’t been original for ages.

However, that barely had any impact as the EVE Online community made more memes and bad puns and pointed out more strange coincidences.

The Prospect is also the name of an ORE industrial ship in EVE Online, based off of the Venture, so Prospector is hitting close to home as well.

Meanwhile, on Reddit the two communities were… well… like this:

Smug versus Rage

The Star Citizen moderators on Reddit began banning people who brought up anything about the two ships, which only encouraged the EVE Online players.  The Star Citizen mods complained to the EVE Online mods and were said to have reported the /r/eve subreddit for vote brigading in an attempt to get it banned outright.  More fuel for the fire, more attention drawn to the issue, more memes.

Meanwhile CCP, never shy about poking some fun at other games, had another arrow in its quiver, putting up the Venture Capitalist SKIN Bundle in the New Eden Store.  The copy made pointed reference to the Venture which, in its cheapest form, will run you $120.

Head on over to the New Eden Store and pick up the “Venture Capitalist” SKIN bundle, which contains three Venture SKINs that are ideal for mining below the belt. Just beware of sneaky vultures attempting to swoop in and loot your assets!

The best part about this SKIN bundle is that it won’t cost you $120 – You can get all three of these SKINs for just 120 PLEX – that’s more than 50% off their total value when they’re sold separately!

Score a direct hit with that.  There is more in the post, but that is probably the bit most requiring AN application of burn cream.

However, CCP Falcon also posted a statement over in the Star Citizen subreddit to try and bring a little peace to the situation.  That seemed to be appreciated by the crew there and the whole things seemed to finally be receding from the forefront in both forums.  Of course, this spread everywhere, including the forums of other games in the genre like Elite: Dangerous.

Yes, this is all last week’s news, but I was away last week so I am catching up.  And no, I do not think RSI deliberately or directly copied a ship from EVE Online.  It would be dumb to lift a design from a game in the same space, so to speak, and it is too much to ask that every design be completely new and unique.  And, in any case, we know where this design really originated from:

Space Forklift Simulator 2009

More recently there has even been a LEGO version of the Venture… Vulture… one of them over on Reddit.

Other sites that dug in on this while I was away:



from The Ancient Gaming Noob https://ift.tt/2yMJKgw

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