News

By: Jarno Kokko May 29, 2008

EVE Online Free Expansion in June

CCP announced today that the latest free mega patch / content addon / expansion to EVE Online, "Empyrean Age", is confirmed for release on June 10. Empyrean Age concentrates mostly on adding features to support the most unique aspect of EVE Online - the ongoing war for territory across the known EVE space.

Until now, all the wars have been fought only over resources and access to different 0.0 (completely unregulated PvP) areas. Empyrean Age brings the major NPC factions into the conflict, and the stated goal is to allow less experienced pilots to participate in large scale warfare through the new Faction Warfare system.

The features page at http://www.eveonline.com/empyreanage/ highlights the expansion's contents: the introduction of a faction ranking system, new militias being mustered, fresh agents pertaining to the massive conflicts, a dynamic new structure of system occupancy, details on hidden deadspace complexes and a whole new region in space, "Black Rise."

Personally I have some serious reservations about the whole system. The new Factional Warfare takes place mostly in low security (<0.5) space, which is known as the most dangerous space in EVE - even for seasoned 0.0 alliance veterans.

Low security space (0.1-0.5) tends to be hazardous because large player alliances are not interested in these areas, as they can't be conquered or held - so they tend to be infested by small gank squads camping gates at obvious bottlenecks or roaming around, seeking easy kills and running at the first sight of even remotely fair fight. When flying in safe empire space (>0.5) or in alliance-controlled 0.0 space, you almost never run into random gankers or "pirates", but low security space is where they hang out, preying on any ships not flying as part of a large fleet.

Now CCP is setting up new PvP objectives right into these gank grounds - and at the same time signups are limited to individual pilots and corporations. Alliances are, by design, left out. I'm sure the ship and module manufacturers will be pleased, as lot of "newbies" will be floating home in a pod... Oh, I'm quite sure, it'll stimulate PvP - just not the type of PvP CCP probably has in mind. Let's just hope this won't turn out to be another fancy EVE Online feature that gets added in, then almost never used either due to poor risk/reward ratio, astronomical cost in ingame resources or being completely pointless.