Tag: Incursion

Incursion 1.2

Incursion 1.2 will be released on feb. 15th. It involves a whole bunch of fixes / improvements to the ui and other little things that will make life in Eve a bit more easier.

Just two examples from the Incursion’s feature page.

Drag and Drop Into Closed Containers
You can now drag and drop items into closed containers without having to open them first

Character Portrait Saves Return
Say “Cheese!” It is now again possible to capture portraits of characters in-game.

There is more in the ccp_soundwave blog post.

Sounds good to me :).

The New Me

The Incursion expansion brings us the new character creator. I was planning on recreating Morphisat, but that didn’t quite work out. The new hairdo, I am not a big fan off, and I couldn’t seem to get the color darker. Also a bit too much beard, the ‘facial hair intensity’ slidebar didn’t seem to do anything.

Anyways, you can watch him from various angles in the youtube video below. I frapsed the whole thing, but I doubt anyone would be interested in that !

November Bugfix Release

As we can read in yet another new devblog Incursion will be released in parts. The first part that will be released in November will contain mainly balance and bug fixes it seems :

  • 80 new story line courier missions
  • Rocket balancing
  • Tech 2 ammo balancing
  • Adding faction ships to the market
  • Fighter bomber missile visual effects changes
  • Anti-aliasing support
  • Window resizing, camera offset
  • Meta-item indicator icons
  • UI optimization to contract delivery filtering
  • Cargo can now be dragged to hangar by dropping on Neocom
  • Toggling probes in overview
  • POS gunners now receive notifications about control towers under attack
  • Sorting deliveries according to distance in jumps or regional locations
  • Unique icons for Microwarpdrives and Afterburners

Mind you, this isn’t written in stone, so some things might not be in it. To be honest, although it is a bit disappointing to not see real new stuff until January when the second part is supposed to be released, it’s better that the new stuff actually works ;). Wonder how the CCP PR machine will spin this though. The lack of a trailer so far makes me think they will start promoting the January release rather than the November one.

Public Quests In Eve

In the latest blogpost, called the nation strikes back, CCP Ytterbium explains a bit how the Sansha Invasions in the upcoming Incursion expansion will work. It looks somewhat interesting and it reminds me a lot of Warhammer’s public quests. Only there is one big exception:

To players in the fleet that participated the most in the site in question; if there is more than one fleet in a site, others won’t be paid. CONCORD only rewards the most effective capsuleers. If you are not ready to face the competition, we recommend you either merge your fleets together, or spread out to other unchecked sites.

The fun of the public quests in warhammer (if I remember correctly, it’s been a while) was that you could just join in and everybody got rewarded according to some sort of formula of who did the most damage and a random draw. In the Eve system, the fleet that did the most damage will be rewarded, other people who happened to join won’t get anything. So basically your fleet has to be there first, other wise there is no point to participate. I don’t really like that design descision.

On the other hand, I never thought an experience in Warhammer Online would be relevant to Eve. The rewards will likely be interesting, a Concorde LP store ! Only capital mod blueprints are mentioned in the blogpost.

This was one of the first blogposts that actually dealt with incursion gameplay. I assume more will follow as the release is getting closer (soon ?).

Incursion

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.