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.
It’s an interesting little feature but I don’t see this having a big impact on the gameplay.
It just seems to be mostly a way to intergrate dust into eve.
how can you see what impact it will make when we know 0 about it lol, maybe the next time you warp to a planet planetary defenses will kick on and melt your titan lol, we dont know enough to call something a “little feature” CCP rarely releases something “little” and calls it an expansion pack.
But i do agree to the fact of “WHERE THE F*CK ARE THE T3 FRIGATES!!?!?!?”
Kinda underwhelmed by it right now, waiting to hear more that relates to my preferred play style.
What they showed at Fanfest about planetary interaction sounded quite neat. Looking forward to more details and SiSi testing with anticipation.
Don’t be thinking this is all that will be in the expansion, Dominion was a lot more than just a sov revamp as well for example.
Uh, for me as a from time to time eve addict all this is good news. Interacting with my corp from my workplace is perfect for the jobs i am doing. Reading and writing evemail from the web? 😉 would be awesome.
And the “Planetgame”, hey as long as it’s only bringing havoc to the market place, good 😉
I think the mention of lag reduction and so forth got included to calm down the nullbears who scream about all development needing to stop until CCP has taken care of their (admittedly legitimate) concerns.
It didn’t work, since most of the folks screaming ignorantly appear to have the mentality of petulant 6-year-olds.
Im actually looking forward to the new planetary interaction features that have been planned. I was out of the game for a while so missed out on the WH’s being released. Hopefully this will give those of us who couldnt manage to get on the WH bandwagon something to play with…
While it doesn’t sound like a massive update, I’m sure CCP have some other features to add in to the latest expansion.