CCP has just announced that a new boxed edition of EVE Online will be hitting stores October 19. The EVE Online: Commissioned Officer Edition is available now for preorder and will include the exclusive Cerebral Excelerator. This in-game item boosts nearly all abilities and enhances a new pilot's skill developement up to level 30.

The new pack also comes with a 30-day paid membership which can be used to convert a free trial membership into a full account. The pack is made to help new players get a running start and also includes an EVE poster with helpful hints and tips on the reverse side.

Will you be placing your pre-order soon?

EVE Online. DUST 514. World of Darkness. CCP is developing all of these games, and GameBreaker TV's Gary Gannon got the chance to discuss them all with Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson at GDC Online. ZAM's own Mike B. aka Fony also asked a few questions, and the duo ended up getting some interesting answers regarding CCP's impressive lineup.

EVE Online

As far as EVE Online is concerned, Richardsson focused his discussion on the new character creator that is currently available for testing on the Singularity server. He said that more customization options will be added to the character creator and recommended that players check out the videos of the creator that are currently on YouTube to see it in action.

Richardsson confirmed that the technology used in the new character creator will be used in DUST 514 and World of Darkness, so it should give players an idea of what the graphics will look like in both games.

Keep reading after the jump for Richardsson's comments on DUST 514 and World of Darkness. You can also watch the entire interview below.

Even for a partially complete character creator, CCP has really outdone themselves in their latest addition to their test server, Singularity. We noted earlier this week that EVE Online would be getting a new character creation system in preparation for the launch of Incarna in summer 2011, and already the first videos for this character creator have hit the internet! You can watch the female character creator and the male character creator in action after the jump.

All in all, the character creation system looks fairly stunning in its current stage - many of the things shown in the video, where players can "drag and drop" their character's physical features as they see fit (less experimentation with sliders may be a good thing!) will definitely make character creation a fun process, without forcing you to spend years and years getting that perfect cheekbone in place.

Of course, like many players have noted, while this looks fantastic for EVE Online players, can you imagine this in CCP's World of Darkness MMO? Yeah. Think about it. Click through the jump for the male and female character creator videos.

Source: Massively

It looks like you might need to update your graphics card if you plan on playing EVE Online next year. CCP Zulu just announced in a dev blog that graphics cards with ShaderModel 3.0 support will become the minimum required graphics cards to run the game in the second quarter of 2011. The change is being made to boost EVE's appearance and performance.

So which graphics card will you need to play EVE Online? You can choose between Nvidia GeForce series 6 or higher; Ati Radeon X1300 (Radeon R520 chips) or higher; Intel GMA X3000 or higher; or Intel G965 or higher. If you're not sure which card you have, CCP suggests that you download and run this small app to see if your card supports ShaderModel 3.0.

The winners of the inaugural Game Developers Choice Online Awards have been announced, and Riot Games took home five awards for League of Legends! The game earned awards for Best Online Game Design, Best Online Visual Arts, Best Online Technology, Best New Online Game, and the Audience Award!

To celebrate, Riot Games will be making all Champions free-to-play this weekend in League of Legends. Also, all summoners will receive a 4 Win IP boost by Oct. 13. Congratulations, Riot!

In other award news, Blizzard took home the Best Community Relations Award for World of Warcraft, and EVE Online won the Best Live Game Award. Aion earned Best Audio for an Online Game, and Social City was named the Best Social Network Game.

Ultima Online was inducted into the GDC Online Awards Hall of Fame. "I am thankful to be part of an amazing team, but more importantly I’m humbled by the experience and force that helped shape an industry … before there WAS an industry," Producer Calvin Crowner said on the Ultima Online site.

CCP will be hosting a mass test of the Incursion dungeons on EVE Online's Singularity test server this week, and as CCP Manticore puts it, they "need a few good pilots to do their worst!"

The test will begin on Singularity on Thursday, Oct. 7 at 14:00 UTC. There will be three systems that will have the dungeons set for 5-10 pilots, 10-20 pilots, and 20-40 pilots. Manticore's blog contains all the details on how to submit your data for testing, so be sure to check it out if you'd like to help fix any bugs that may be lurking in the Incursion dungeons.

You've got to admit... that's a pretty big graphical update. In their latest bundle of content that CCP plans to release on their test server (Singularity), it seems that EVE's new character creator will be at the forefront of their playerbase's attention. This new character creator is part of CCP's plan to integrate various technical upgrades into EVE in preparation for their Incarna expansion, set to launch in the Summer of 2011.

With this new character creator, players will be able to create "more hyperrealistic, less cartoony, and of course, higher fidelity" characters that, much like their predecessors, will appear in chat, character sheets, on EVE Gate and on the forums. It will only be within the first release of Incarna that players will be able to enjoy their full bodies, but the upgrade is still quite significant.

If you're curious about reading up on the details behind this character creator upgrade, as well as CCP's various musings on this update, feel free to make your way to the EVE Online website. It's definitely worth a read.

EVE Online's upcoming winter expansion has been unveiled as Incursion, and the Incarna expansion is expected to launch in summer 2011. With all these upcoming features to look forward to, it's easy to forget that CCP is also updating the current game!

Tyrannis 1.1 is scheduled to launch on Sept. 30. The patch "features updates to the backend changes to the user interface and Planetary Interaction, and several Mac client issues have been resolved." You can read the full patch notes after the jump.

In a reveal according to Eurogamer.net, EVE Online's Incarna expansion finally has a release date set. Sort of. Apparently Creative Director Torfi Frans Olafsson has confirmed that CCP is aiming to release EVE's highly anticipated expansion in the summer of 2011, and he further re-confirms that the expansion is, in fact, in development. Apparently the team is currently focusing more on creating the back-end technology to make Incarna a possibility.

Of course, EVE Online fans won't have to wait until summer of next year to get some new EVE content, as CCP plans to "progressively" rolling out portions of Incarna, like their "Incursion" expansion, coming this winter. Olafsson points to their new planet graphics that were released prior to launching planetary interaction as an example of their staggered development and release project. Incursion's character assets and character creator will be a solid stepping stone towards Incarna's promised "walking around on the planets" feature.

So EVE captains and pilots, I suppose you can plan to actually "see" each other in the summer of 2011!

Something new and interesting is coming for EVE Online fans: group PvE content! In a new developer post from CCP, the team notes that they miss the group PvE aspect of the old "static 10/10 complexes," which appear to be little group PvE encounters that spawned randomly around the system. Unfortunately, CCP needed to rework the static 10/10 complexes because they gave entirely too much reward for too little time, and so group PvE in EVE Online was largely left alone.

Until now.

Today, the team notes that they really want to focus on creating content for groups of players across security bands, and they want to do it right. Detailed in the post, CCP Soundwave says that they want to introduce the large scale PvP that EVE is known for, and try to integrate that sort of scale into PvE, so the "amount of content will be massive and we're [CCP] going to supplement it with a load of new systems and functionality." Keep reading after the jump for more details!