A Look at the History of Expansions - Part Eleven

A Look at the History of Expansions - The Series

Previous Post: Revelations in Pieces

Spring is in the air and along with it comes to promise of Revelations II's launch in June. But, it is not yet June of 2007 and we have just worked our way out of a winter fraught with scandals that will follow Eve into its next decade.

Eve has 160,000 subscribers. Faction Warfare is one of the big promises on the horizon but it has not yet been released. Eve Voice is active and still going through its release pains and a major mission overhaul and expansion is underway. There is a very interesting statistic tossed casually into this developers blog by CCP Oveur:

We're also overhauling the top 70 mission encounters in the first Need for Speed agent initiative. It might not sound as much, but if you think that 1 encounter might have itself spawned 5000 times over a day, there's considerable "bang for the bucks" in making them more fun, challenging and perform better on the server and client.

That was early in 2007 and a mission might be run 5000 times a day. I suspect that the player base is doing an even better job at running those missions today. We may need to appreciate that there are so many distressed damsels out there.



The Revelations 1.4 patch notes came with some useful goodies. Carrier pilots could access their own hangars. This was back when a carriers bay was broken into multiple divisions that mirrored the corporate office. You can also fit rigs in space and you no longer have to repackage your ship to destroy rigs! Success! You can also write loans to other people and now sell faction ammo on the market.

PvE was added. NPCs were tweaked and cleaned up.  Interceptors, Logistic Ships, Recon Ships and Stealth bombers now leave wrecks. POS towers have started to cry when their fuel is low, informing all of the corporate directors. Also your CSPA fee caps at 100k. It is a million now so sometime in the future CCP will turn that up. Drones/Fighters can not be launched and fighters cannot be delegated while inside a control tower force field. Some new music has been added, some asteroids fixed, and Revelations 1.4 is out the door.

But with Revelations 1.4 out the door CCP was following up with Revelations 1.4.2 with a few more goodies. Such as wrecks! Wrecks are being introduced into the game. Earlier, I noted that some ships now leave wrecks. This seems to be because:

Prior to Rev 1.4 all containers in a ships hold (ships and cargo containers) were jettisoned into space. Due to the introduction of wrecks, this system changed.

This means people had to adapt. No more jumping into ships that dropped directly into space when a freighter died.

This might correspond to a rather big change for some people; if your ship carries a smaller ship in its hold then the smaller ship will not be directly usable if it survives the pop. To make it usable another ship needs to pick it up and jettison it.

Freighters will also be able to loot wrecks and interact with POS. Only recently, I heard someone say that super capital construction was made easier when freighters were able to interact with POS. Well, this is when it happened with the soon to come launch of Revelations 1.4.2.

April 2007 is only two months away from Revelations II's launch. The dev blogs are being published left and right. In case anyone wondered there was a time when players were mad at CCP for adding content and not fixing things.

Before you start screaming about "fix first, then add stuff", which is perfectly valid mind you, hear this first. Revelations 2 has already been cut in half in favor of optimizations, fixes and now focuses on improvements to features already in EVE.

The alliance tournament once gave a cash reward. Or, it was suggested that it would.

The on board scanner, which in 2013 with the release of Eve Online: Odyssey will be renamed to the discovery scanner, is added. This also brings with it the start of the exploration sites that we now know as anomalies.

Onboard Scanner...
...which will be used for finding Encounters. This will, when it arrives, be a built-in scanning device, present on all ships, that will let you search for exploration sites without any additional equipment. It won’t be particularly powerful, and it won’t let you scan for anything other than cosmic signatures, but it will be enough to find common sites like Encounters. It’ll also be needed before we can

And maybe, while they are at it...

Remove Asteroid Belts...
...and replace them with exploration content. This is a big deal and will not be happening in the immediate future. We know it’s a big, sweeping change that will affect most of you in one way or another, but we think it’s a good idea if it’s done properly.

Close to my heart, however is...

Static to Exploration...
...which is of course the long-discussed move of existing static complexes into the exploration system, eliminating the majority of fixed-position complexes from the game.

That, however, isn't something that is fully completed until December of 2012.

Corporations get wallet divisions. CCP also decides to change War Dec fees to have multipliers based off of members and number of wars a player is in.

For anyone interested in capital warfare and its start this dev blog is one that I cannot summarize well enough and simply suggest that you read. It discusses what CCP wants to do with capitals at this time. Bubbles are being changed to stop jump drives. Bombs are introduced to break apart fleets. Carriers get the ability to triage.

CCP is also working to bring API keys to Eve. Revelations II will also introduce overheating of modules for a more better fight. Faction POS are being introduced as well. But all of Revelations future goodies do not appease some players. There is a focused effort to discredit CCP with petitions filed against Devs, GMs and ISDs. The Internal Affairs team attacks the problem clearly and publicly.

It is June, 2007 and Eve Online: Revelations II is about to be launched. I will bring with it many small, but significant gameplay changes that we depend upon in current times. It will change war, both its cost and its affects across the field of Sov Warfare space.

Eve has changed a lot since its launch. This review says:

It is my opinion that CCP has simply created a masterpiece on their first try. While even a master work of art may have flaws, here the good completely negates the bad. The release of Revelations is currently still in only stage one of three, but players can already clearly see the influence it is taking on New Eden. I highly recommend that players that once tried and dropped Eve navigate their way to www.eve-online.com and give it a shot. And, for the prospective players, let me say this: the world that awaits you in Eve is nothing compared to what you can add to it. Every player adds a story to Eve, creating the largest framework that you can imagine. There is no place for nobodies in Eve - only heroes and legends.

Next: Eve Online Revelations II

A mini fact that I believe I missed the first time around: The ability to self destruct pods were not an intended feature.


Resources:
Eve Online Dev Blogs 2007
Eve Online Patch Notes
Game Vortex