In recent weeks there has been an upwelling of community based projects around sharing stories from all over New Eden. Kicking off with the New Eden Chronicles announced by Rixx Javix and team earlier in the week. Another project has also been recently announced – New Eden Fables.
Unlike Chronicles, which will be published in a written format and contain a mix of purely fictional stories and in game player stories in a written format, Fables intends to bring you just in game player inspired stories in an animated video format. The main purpose of these stories is to share individual players experiences in EVE.
The project as a result is pulling together a wide number of disciplines from a wide number of media. Writers, editors, artists, voice actors, and animators bring the stories to life. Currently the team includes around 20 people working on the first release.
I spoke to the mastermind behind the project, John Drees, to find out more. John has been playing EVE Online since 2008. In the last 7 months he has created or been involved with over 27 EVE related videos which have amassed nearly 600,000 views on his YouTube page. Most notable of which has been his Honorable Third Party series focusing on Black Ops operations being conducted in Providence.
The original inspiration was actually a good friend of mine who I showed my black ops videos and he said to me “more than a black ops pilot or FC, you are a story teller”. For whatever reason that struck a cord with me and I thought about ways to really tell a story in the eve universe. This was the result.
The stories are going to be fiction in the sense that they aren’t necessarily following a particular real person. But they aren’t necessarily going to be fully lore driven either. [We hope] these fables should teach some kind of a lesson or moral. So for instance, could be something like a jaunt into hostile space from the perspective of a pilot in any of the existing or historical conflicts that are, or have been, in the game. The ideas are short, concise, and entirely wrapped up in one sitting. Character driven, but not necessarily focused on the lore. Something anyone in the game could experience and do.
You would be amazed at the abundance of stories and narratives that people have already submitted.
John has been pulling in stories over the last few weeks to use for this project and work has already begun on the first video with plans to release the first episode around the middle of December, with production of the second episode to begin in January. All episodes will be available via YouTube at John Drees page.
If you would like to get involved in the project you can join the ‘New Eden Fables’ in game channel or the ‘new-eden-fables’ slack channel on the tweetfleet Slack, which you can sign up for here.
Artwork by Dillon Kuester for the New Eden Fables Project.
