While the Volition Project (VPRO) began as an industrial enterprise in EVE Online's New Eden star cluster in 2012 we have also been active in the Milky Way of Elite: Dangerous since 2014.
Elite: Dangerous started as a promising kickstarter in 2012 and being fans of the original 1986 Elite game it was only natural to have a peek into this "new old mother of sci-fi games". We started as a small team of so-called couriers in the relatively quiet area of the Alrai Sector, taking on small scale jobs of delivering goods and data packages to a variety of clients throughout the area. For all you astronomy fans out there: Alrai is the old Arabic name of the star Gamma Cephei in the namesake constellation of Cepheus.
When the Federation of Star Systems began to aggressively lobby the worlds of the Alrai Sector into joining their ranks VPRO relocated to the more liberal Alliance of Independent Systems near Alioth (Epsilon Ursae Maioris) and also expanded their operations. Due to the Alliance's decentralized nature data courier missions became the majority of our daily business - and a very lucrative one.
It was also the Alliance that issued VPRO's first major survey assignments:
- the exploration and mapping of the Corona Australis sector and
- the investigation of an obscure region of space dubbed the 'Formidine Rift' among explorers
Of course we accepted both, split up and went our ways out into what independent explorers unceremoniously call "the Black". That was in late 2015 and both endeavours took several months to complete.
Three pilots of the original VPRO team then took part in the great Distant Worlds expedition in January 2016, a bold dash across the galaxy towards the legendary Ceekia region and the final waypoint of 'Beagle Point', a lonely star system more than 65,000 light years away from Sol.
At the destination of the journey, in April 2016, there was an unforgettable meeting not far from the designated landing site that changed everything for VPRO. Very likely, it also changed the course of history for Mankind and Human inhabited space.
After that? Well, let's just say VPRO intensified their investigation of the Formidine Rift. I leave the rest to you to figure it all out, because in hindsight that's what she wanted...