A global storyline and dynamic world.

Well I made that post about the quote in the Earth and Beyond video, and the last few days I've been playing the Emulator and had forgotten how amazing a game it was...

Anyway for those who don't know, its a space MMO, but not like EVE, it's more like WoW, or better yet classic Everquest in space. The story is not far in the future, it revolves around finding a gate in the outer edges of our solar system that went to another solar system, then finding a network of these. We learned how to duplicate the technology and made smaller gates for travel in between the planets in our and other solar systems...There were wars and all that, corporations fighting for the contract to build these gates, and everything has settled down now with 3 factions, Terrans on Earth all about business/money, Progen on Mars colonies (genetically engineered warriors, kind of like the Nietzschean on the show Andromeda) and Jenquai on Europa colonies (Jupiter's moon...hippie scientist philosophers)...as well there were many NPC factions.

Anyway now, onto the topic...Shortly after the game had come out, these aliens started appearing in certain areas who called themselves defenders of the ancients (assumed ancients are those who built the gates). At first they were neutral to everyone (the game has a very in depth faction system where you can go so far to become enemies with your own faction, friendly to pirate faction, and get all the benefits of that, like smuggler's gates and special gear/station, but you will be attacked by your own original faction NPC's, you could even become friendly with the aliens and get certain jobs and rewards from them), anyway naturally those aliens became aggressive with the Progen (warrior faction), and the world (galaxy) started changing because of this, the aliens actually started to invade territory and planets controlled by the Progen...the territories were changing, and this was even happening in popular areas, ones where players used to do safe trade runs (buy a good in 1 part of the galaxy, bring it to the other where it's in more demand and make profit/trade experience (you had to level up in 3 ways, combat, exploration, and trading, each with their own exp bars)...

Anyway all servers were getting the same storyline change, but it was just something special to actually go through and experience a global storyline, not like most games where quests are your storyline and the world/zones remain largely unchanged after years of gameplay. Playing this game the last few days has been great, and it's a painful realization that MMO's since then have gone backwards in development...There are so many other great/groundbreaking features about this game but I don't have time to list them all, unfortunately it was shortlived, EA bought Westwood (the developers), for it would seem the Command&Conquer series, they didn't understand the MMO model, back then the game only had between 50-100k subscribers and wasn't going, so EA simply decided to shut down the game a little less than 2 years into it's existence...Finally 7 years later some great people have been working hard to get an emulator running after EA's refusal to relaunch the game or sell the game code to someone that will use it.

Anyway here are some screenshots of one of the alien invasions to a planet sector in the game:

That area used to be just a regular zone, like an Eltnen Forest of WoW, then the Aliens attacked and took it over after that.

And here's a couple SS of my ship