Posts Tagged expansion

Incursion

Posted by Morphisat in Incursion on September 22, 2010

CCP has sent out a press release today about the upcoming expansion ‘Incursion’. You can find it here.

So what do we get:

- Sansha’s invasions, which seem to be some sort of public quest. Along with that special rewards, wealthy bounties, earning loyalty rewards and high commendation as the press release put it. Rather vague but it sounds interesting.

- New ships, most noticeably a dedicated salvage boat. Since the bpc is only sourced in Outer Ring, it will be rather expensive, especially at first. I was hoping it would be targeted towards new players, since they benefit the most from salvaging their missions and don’t have a marauder yet. But it’s nice to see that very nice hull being used again

- Improvements the CSM came up with. Not quite sure what this will be, but we’ll see. (Update: there is a devblog about these).

- Hardware and infrastructure improvement. Of course these are welcome, but to mention them as part of an expansion is a bit ridiculous. They did this before as well, and I find this as silly now as I did then

- Improvements to EveGate, forums and such. Any improvement is welcome, and forums are nice to have for newer corporations that don’t have their own yet. This makes me wonder why EveGate can’t be improved gradually. Agile is all about releasing little things a time. And since EveGate doesn’t need a client side update, why not improve it gradually. It doesn’t make sense that it’s being improved on the same pace as expansions are released.

- New character avatar builder. Don’t really care about this.

- Improvements to PI. Too little, too late I am afraid. My planets have been withering away since two weeks after the expansion. Way too much clicking for very little reward. Maybe this will be reduced, but I have pretty much already lost interest in PI.

All in all, the pve part sounds interesting, and that’s about it. Nothing to get really excited about, but it’s always nice to have more PVE stuff to do.

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Tyrannis is coming

Posted by Morphisat in Tyrannis on May 5, 2010

The trailer is now out and can be downloaded from http://www.eveonline.com/tyrannis/videos.asp. Once again the eve video creation team outdid themselves, it’s a very nice one !

Tyrannis will be out on may 18th. The current iteration of Planetary Interaction still seems a bit rudimentary, although it’s come a long way since I first tried it. I am afraid the interface will be more or less the same as it is now. Also the whole thing feels a bit disconnected from Eve, but I already stated that in my previous post.

The game play, if you can call it that, is a bit simplistic, connect the Pins and dots game. But it’s a nice side game nevertheless. It’ll take a bit of time for people to learn all the related skills and be able to harvest six planets (the max at the moment on the test server).

But once they have, most commodities like water, oxygen and various pos modules and other goods that we used to buy from NPCs will be available from players ! Since everybody can start producing and there won’t be any struggle for planets (it’s instanced so Jita IV can be harvested by the 1000s of people sitting in Jita), the competition will be quite heavy.

UPDATE : as pointed out in the comments, this won’t be the case once it goes live ! @StMistaken: Planetary resources are shared, so consumption is intended affect extractor yield

There probably won’t be much money in it, maybe the end products might be profitable, I doubt any of the lower stuff will be.

As for the other features: Evegate will be fun and handy, especially for when you can’t log in to the game and to keep in touch with in game friends. There are also Event Landmarks, which is nice, but not groundbreaking.

The fact that a new Scorpion model is being touted as a new feature is scary. This is a bit of a sign that the expansion is slightly thin on content, but I am not complaining since it’s introducing a whole new sub game that can be tinkered with almost every time you log on and that will take up a bit of playing time.

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Tyrannis

Posted by Morphisat in Tyrannis on February 19, 2010

The upcoming (summer ?) expansion was announced in a new devblog. As it was to be expected, it will mainly consists of the ‘tinkering with planets’ sub game that was mentioned at fanfest 2009. Back then we were told that it was sort of sim city like game, a side game you tinker with every time you log on for 10mins or so.

Nothing much more was revealed about the planet subgame, so it leaves more questions than answers. Will there be some sort of limit to how many planets one player can ‘own’ ? Or will the startup costs be the limiting factor ? Will there be a mad gold rush once this thing goes live and will all the ‘good planets’ be taken 30mins after Tyrannis going live ? Will losec planets be better than hisec ones ?

What will be produced on these planets ? How will it tie in with the existing game industry wise ? I hope we’ll get the answers in the upcoming devblogs on the subject.

Another part of the expansion will be Eve Gate. This is what the eve fans have been calling Spacebook. EVE Gate will allow you to interact with EVE through a regular web browser. Sounds like an interesting addition to the game, but not something that really changes or enhances the game. Why it’s agile to change a name I don’t know, but let’s just assume that’s some sort of joke ;) .

We are working on other optimizations and improvements throughout the game, as usual with our expansions. A task force is working on reducing fleet fight lag, often working deep into the night chasing action around on TQ, while another team is developing an advanced simulation environment for load testing on our local servers.

Once again something that should just be normal operations for an MMO is being touted as an expansion feature… <mumbles something about marketing speak>.

So what do I think of all this ? While interesting, just the planet subgame seems a bit thin for an expansion. I missed the T3 frigates announcement. I guess that fell by the roadside, or maybe they’re still working on them and they might be announced later.

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