New EVE Online Expansion Detailed

Eurogamer reports on the EVE Online Fanfest, at which developer CCP revealed details on the game's next expansion, due out in March. It will be the biggest expansion yet for EVE, and it will "introduce 'Tech 3' modular ship designs, branching epic mission arcs, further improvements to the new player experience, and exploration of uncharted space through unstable wormholes. ... The focus of the expansion will be 'true exploration,' with players using new skills and modules to travel through wormholes into all-new, unconnected space." CCP also hinted that further graphical upgrades would be coming, and a standalone first-person shooter based on EVE may be in development for a console release.

Comments

Will it be enough?

[lordsid]

Will it be enough to bait old players to come back? I doubt it. I certainly won't be.

I must say this:

[iamwhoiamtoday]

How hard Eve Online is: http://www.sgnonline.com/vb3/showthread.php?p=127720 It's insanely hard to learn... even when you have friends helping you through every stage of it. I much prefer WoW over Eve, because at least I can learn how to play WoW without consulting someone else every 5 minutes.

Re:I must say this:

[lordsid]

That is more a reflection on you then it is on the game. It is utterly simple if you follow the tutorials. They actually already have a pretty decent new player experience. But then again it doesn't sound like you have been playing mmorpgs for that long. Personally I started with Ultima Online over 10 years ago.

Re:I must say this:

[Like2Byte]

True enough. I tried EVE for the 14 day trial period. I loved the idea of EVE; however, it was a pain in the ass to get anything accomplished. If you wanted to get new quests you had to be referred to the next quest giver or else they wouldn't even talk to you. Then, some of the quest lines were cryptic at best and I couldn't figure out where/who to turn the quest in to. I gave up but not for a lack of trying.

EVE is a very intelligent game, one requiring patience and perseverance. The problem is, at the end of the day, I've used up all remaining patience and just didn't have enough for those frustrating quest lines you inevitably will run into.

Space fantasy game where you can get your own super-destro-death-star warship: +5 points.
Poor playability: -5 point
Help Forum FULL of too many people for an overtaxed support agent: -3 points.

I'm sad that I feel this way. EVE holds so much promise.

Re:I must say this:

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly misunderstood the mission system since what you are describing is only storyline missions and not regular agent missions.

You need a couple of tools to survive in eve.

1) eveinfo.com/missions Google for more support sites.

2) A friend that has played. Message me in game if you don't know anyone else My player name is Locke DieDrake or Chloe DieDrake.

3) a general introduction to missions. Read the FAQ and the Forums sticky guides. They will tell you exactly how it works.

Missions require that you have standing with agents, but even on your first day, you have standing with your faction agents and can grind missions for weeks no problem.

The problem new players have is that they aren't at all prepared for EVE to be as complex and deep as it is. WOW is a shallow stream next to the ocean of EVE.

Start a new character (or whatever) and open your bio. Go to the standings tab and select the highest ranked corp, then hit the agents tab. Pick a security, or internal security or whatever agent (those two are combat type) and select an agent, his/her location will be listed, right click, set destination, and go fly there. When you get there, dock and ask the agent for a new mission. Do the mission, and then come back to the same agent. Rarely you'll be expected to drop something off at a different location, this will be clearly marked in the mission journal and a hyperlink bookmark to the location will be provided.

It's simple, really. ;)

Re:I must say this:

[KDR_11k]

Those three things ARE bad design, a well designed game would teach you that by itself.

Re:I must say this:

[tukkayoot]

I can go out and buy a car and learn to drive it in a few minutes... at most an hour if it were a REALLY complicated car. Sure you may not be an expert at it, but you CAN drive it. Maybe the future makes all ships so different from each other that it requires special degrees from a major university to teach you how to drive each one. The same applies to weapons, and pretty much everything in the game.

I can understand your frustration from the game-play side of things, but in terms of game lore, this makes a fair amount of sense. Comparing an automobile to a space ship is pretty silly. Consumer autos are designed with a fairly standard set of controls and features, and don't vary to a huge degree in terms of capability. And I think it might take more than an hour to learn how to safely drive, say, an F1 racer.

In EVE we are talking about talking about ships far more sophisticated than the space shuttle and are generally built with very specialized functions in mind. Pretty much all of the ships are larger than the Eiffel tower (even the lowly frigate) and most are bigger the the Enterprise-D. Also keep in mind that the pod pilot replaces the entire bridge crew.

Add that to the fact that you can never "catch up" seems to remove the skill of advancing your character faster/slower than someone else.

While it's essentially impossible to "catch up" to someone who's been playing longer than you (providing that he is good about remembering to have a skill in training at all times) it's not necessary to have an equal number of skill points to effectively compete with him in different circumstances. A manufacturing-focused character may have no advantage over you in combat, and the opposite is also true. Also, skills are subject to diminishing returns compared to the amount of time that is invested in them. Achieving Level V in a skill may yield a 5% improvement in one area, but take months to train. Most people don't bother. If you have the skills to fly the same type of ship and the same type of modules, generally speaking you can stand toe-to-toe with someone who's been playing for years longer than you.

Also, the advantage to this style of skill advancement is that your character's capabilities isn't connected so directly with how much time you can spend playing the game. It's more casual-friendly, in that sense.

Oh, and it feels like they already plotted out how much money (real life) it is going to take for anyone to play the game. They know exactly how much time you've invested in the game and how much money you've given them. It just feels like it's "on rails" too much.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. EVE-Online is probably the most open-ended MMO out there. More than any other game, it is left up to the player to decide what his goals will be, and how best to fulfill them. The game gives you relatively direction, but there are many directions that you can decide to take. Yes, you will need to play for a certain minimum length of time before certain aspects of the game become fully available to you, but that's no different from other MMOs -- in EVE, at least you don't have to run on the treadmill for hours on end to get there.

Re:I must say this:

[kv9]

it teaches you that by itself. just dont skip the damn tutorial and initial mission.

eve upgrade?

[jollyreaper]

Did they ever get station ambulation up and running yet? They'd bought White Wolf a few months before I quit playing and the talk of a World of Darkness MMO made it sound like the dev pool was about to suffer a major drain.

I love space combat games and if any MMORPG was going to suck me in, it would have been this one. But it just required way too much grinding. What finally got me, I had finally worked my way up to a battleship and was doing the hard missions that made the battleship worthwhile and the NPC frigates warp-scrambled me. They're so damn fast, you're scrambled before the fight even begins and if you realize you're overmatched, you can no longer escape as you could with cheaper ships in easier missions. A battleship represents the product of more game time than I'd care to consider and it can be destroyed in seconds.

The other thing that made it so awful is that the loot tables kept getting tweaked so less good stuff would drop, the addition of salvage meant that you now had to run your missions in a warship and then run through those same stupid rooms with a salvage ship, doubling the grind time without doubling the revenue...

All of that finally hit me upside the head and made me say "Self, what are you doing with your time here?" I won't even go into the devs cheating and shit, that'd take all night.

Re:eve upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were "just" getting into BSs and you thought "hey I can run level 4 missions now" you are sadly mistaken.

The problem with eve isn't that it's hard, it's that it's harder than most people think it is.

However, lots of players have been around since the start and this makes it nearly impossible for new players to compete on an even field. In fact, there is no such thing as a fair fight in eve. You either get smeared, or you smear the other guy.

I've got 2 accounts since day one. They are both ELITE. I never go anywhere alone. EVER. I've got a corp, and if I'm flying outside empire, I've got friends with me, lots of them most of the time.

The good thing about eve is that it's the only online game that allows players to build and hold an empire. It means something to do this, and it means something to hold on to it. And it opens the door for some EPIC level fighting and intrigue.

I'm an on again off again player, in fact I have probably spent more months not playing, than I have actually playing, but it's still the only MMO I've ever liked at all.

There is a major problem, actually several. One is BOB and their empire founded on developer cheating. Another is massive imbalance between new and old players. Another is that there is no such thing as a fair fight. But I don't seem them fixing any of that anytime soon.

Re:eve upgrade?

[bigstrat2003]

I love space combat games and if any MMORPG was going to suck me in, it would have been this one.

Jumpgate Evolution is what I'm hoping will deliver a quality space combat MMO, but if you prefer the more tactical (from what I've seen) combat that Eve has, JGE may not be your cup of tea. It looks like it's going to be more like an MMO version of something like X-Wing or Freespace.

It's going down the toilet

[johno.ie]

I've been playing for 2 years, and loved playing it for most of that time. Recently there was a staff reshuffle and things have gone downhill since then. So-called "game re-balancing" is nerfing months of skill training in gunnery and speed modules to make it completely useless. That means 100 euros worth of subscription money paid for training which is worthless now. Players have tested the changes on the test server and given feedback to the new CCP dev team, but it was completely ignored.

On top of that insult, they have nerfed the old feature that allowed you to continue training 1 level in 1 skill when your account expired. Apparently they think it's unfair to them if people get any training for free! This change was made with 2 days notice and resulted in the largest discussion thread ever on the forums. Also completely ignored by the CCP dev team.

I'm still playing a bit at the moment because I like talking to the friends I've made in the game, but I'll be quitting when the current months subscription expires. It's not the same game it was when I started playing, server population has been declining for the last 6 months. I think it's going to die off in a few years.

Pity, it had so much potential.

Re:It's going down the toilet

[Drakin020]

Declining? I'm showing 21 thousand on right now, and that seems about right for this time of day.

I haven't seen any major change in population status in some time, so I think obvious troll is obvious.

Re:It's going down the toilet

[johno.ie]

Not trolling.
http://eve.coldfront.net/status/tranquility

Re:It's going down the toilet

[ChinggisK]

I don't think it's fair to accuse them of not listening to players about the speed nerfs without mentioning that most of the players complaining about it were flying ships that could go so fast that they were pretty much invincible, something that CCP never intended to be possible. Also, IIRC, they did delay the rebalancing a few times because they were listening to player input coming in from the test servers and making adjustments. I haven't been following it that closely but apparently the finalized plan is quite different from what they originally intended to do.

Re:It's going down the toilet

[MindlessAutomata]

If anyone laughs at your complaining, or rolls their eyes, they have no idea just how big of an effect such a nerf is.

For those who haven't played EVE for any appreciable amount of time, here is how skills are trained:

Skills are trained over real-world time. Some skills can take over a week, month, or longer to train. You can only train one skill at a time.

That means over a month or more can be wasted on your skill-ups, and training skills in EVE is not a trivial thing. EVE is built around players staying for the long term, and to do anything you need to train up skills for a long period of time. There's not a real comparison situation in other MMOs. This type of thing is a real kick in the balls to those people who spent training that skill. It's not like a nerf to some "epic loot".

I haven't played EVE in a long time, and I didn't even play very long, but I understand enough to know that's a real big safety pin through the testicles.

Re:It's going down the toilet

[tibman]

Your skills are NOT useless, why would they become useless? The fact that you can fit & use T2 large blasters is fantastic. Do you understand why people are saying blasters will become uselsess? It doesn't have much to do with blasters.. it's the weakened webifier and MWD stuff. Blaster Megathrons won't be able to zoom up tackle and kill any ship in the game anymore. You certainly will be able to refit an Afterburner instead of MicroWarpDrive and focus your attacks on other Battleships and slow vessels. This is good news for the rest of EVE, frigates will become very useful again.

Gallente have been THE pvp race for a while, it was Amarr once and Amarr are pretty balanced now. It looks like Minmatar will be a much better option after this next patch. Caldari are still pretty much the same since the birth of eve. The changes that you are worried about will affect everyone in EVE, not just Gallente.

Re:So with this round of "enhancements"...

[BenLeeImp]

Personally, I would think that having developers that actually like to play the game they are developing would be a big benefit to the playerbase, albeit indirectly. Speaking personally, I am much more likely to put extra effort into a project I have affinity for. In addition, having the developers playing the game allows them to get firsthand looks at how things are going out there, and get ideas for how things should be improved. Getting this information through analysts, of one kind or another, is rarely as useful - in my experience, that is. YMMV.