Eve Online’s fanfest is ongoing right now, and the EVE keynote for the event has just finished. During the address, CCP revealed detailed the features of 4 June’s Odyssey expansion, the core feature of the Winter 2013 expansion (thing space colonisation), and a little experiment called EVR.
Here’s what’s coming, in neat bullet point form. We’ll have more details and explanation as soon as we’ve extracted Julian, who’s over in Iceland right now, from the bar.
- Starbases – we covered this changes in details earlier this month
- Over 20 ships rebalanced – all faction frigates, faction cruisers, Faction battleships and battlecruisers
- Ore mining changes – adjusting mineral composition and new varieties of asteroid clusters
- Moon mining and tech 2 materials – looking at the r64s and the bottlenecks in Tech 2 production
- Ice belts are being moved into anomalies – this got a cheer from the crowd. There’ll be two new dev blogs detailing the changes posted over the weekend. We’ll post our own update when those go live.
- New in-flight controls that use a radial menu
- Jump transitions are now prettier and have a newly animated jump gate – replacing the old loading bar that would appear when activating jump gate. The animation looks a little like a cross between the wormhole in Stargate and the reality tube in Sliders.
- Station hangers have been redesigned – they look much prettier
- New music for nullsec and warp gates
- Redesigned the Apocalypse
- Better ship sounds
- New pod and death transitions
- Security status changes for tags
- Updated career agent missions for exploration
- Probe formations – you can now launch up to seven probes in formation at the drop of a hat
- New system scanner – really this is just a visual change but a nice one: when you undock from a station a fancy radar sweep-style effect goes across your screen.
- New data and relic sites – there’s now a crypto challenge minigame to bypass the locks on relic sites. It’s a little naff: essentially you click link on a chain of nodes and if you’re lucky the lock opens, scattering loot into space for you to grab
What happens after Odyssey? CCP were vague, saying that the focus will be on space colonisation: making New Eden your home. “Think about building things, think about destroying things,” say CCP. the big reveal was that they’ll be adding player-built stargates to EVE.
There are consequences to that: players will be able to remap their routes through New Eden at will. This could have a staggering knock on effect on faction warfare and PvP.
More details to come.
Additional reporting by Nick Wilson