General Discussion

Why did NetDevil choose to create a new, updated Jumpgate? How did the project come together. These are two of the questions that Jumpgate: Evolution Developer, Steve "Istvan" Hartmeyer answers in this new MMORPG.com Dev Log.

In the middle of 2006, NetDevil's plans for Jumpgate changed substantially. Scott Brown, NetDevil's president, approached me with the news that he'd decided the company was at last in a position to once again put significant resources into the game. Returning to Jumpgate had never left the minds of the company founders, who are in fact all members of the original Jumpgate development team. Until 2006, however, NetDevil's efforts had perforce been focused on other projects necessary to building the company.

Scott's proposals were welcome news to me. Part of the team since 2002 and in charge of maintaining the game since 2004, I'd been battling Jumpgate's gradual decline for years. The biggest problem Jumpgate had was modernity - a lack of it. After its 2001 release, there hadn't been a large enough team maintaining Jumpgate to truly keep pace with general MMO developments. Features and systems that are taken for granted in newer online games just weren't present in Jumpgate, or weren't as polished as the average player now expects. We were well aware of these problems, but the rate at which a tiny team could solve them was far too slow. Despite my efforts and those of my predecessors on the Jumpgate team, by 2006 nearly everything about the game had become dated and demanded improvement. Usually, games in this condition are abandoned by their publisher. NetDevil is in the unusual position, for a game developer, of still being in direct control of its product. Scott and the other company officers had the power to decide that Jumpgate will have a fresh chance at success.

Read the whole journal here.

I'm intrigued. Non-hardcore space mmo? Am i reading it right?

Its hardcore in that its twitch (some people think that’s hardcore), but yea, sounds great. Good principles.

oh that's very nice.  best of luck to them.

I had looked at this game a few times but had not ever tried. Sounds like might be worth trying when everything is brought up to what they want.

Jumpgate was one of those really rare games in its time. It wasn't about lvl'ing as fast as you could. It wasn't even about who was epic'd out with the best weapons. It came down to pure skill on the joystick, teamwork and a little grinding if you reallllly wanted to. Sure you could log on and mine some asteroids for an hour, dock and sell your goods to make some money. But when you were part of a team (and there weren't many bad ones) you could plan out and execute a raid into enemy territory that actually had your heart racing. To give you an idea exactly how hardcore this game could be, when you docked into a station, there were NO autopilots or nice tractor beams to do it all for you. If you hit the side of a station, you were toast. Might seem like a really bad idea at first glance, but the way the gameplay was implemented was nothing short of awesome.

When the next evolution comes out, do yourself a favour, and try it.

It's really cool that they get to do this.

It shows a commitment to their player base.
It's nice to see not all aging MMOs need to go down the drain and get to go 2.0

Best of luck to the Jumpgate team  Looks like it could be pretty cool.

Finally! A sci-fi game worth a look at. I haven't found anything that has come close to Earth and Beyond. This looks promising. I will keep my eye on it for sure.

Hell, I'm not gonna wait, downloading now. Since I know new stuff is coming, I can deal with the old, and get a headstart...

Edit: Damn. It doesn't work with vista. The game freezes whenever I try to launch into space...I did a google search, a lot of people have the same problem, something about direct x 10 vs. the dx 8(8.1?) that the current jumpgate runs on..guess I'll have to wait