If you play EVE and don’t actually live in a W-space gravimetrically inactive asteroid, you must know by now about the announcement of the EVE expansion named Tyrannis. CCP has fully and publicly acknowledged the power of the Dark Side. As if we ever doubted that T0rfifrans ascended to the rank of Sith Lord aeons ago, his corporeal existence held together with the willpower of one who accepts only the death of others to feed his ravenous belly, following the teachings of his master, Darth Oveur.
I freely admit that the dev blog doesn’t actually tell us much we didn’t already know. CCP announced back at Fanfest 2009 that the spring 2010 expansion would center around “planetary interaction“, but they now have confirmed that their nefarious schemings have not deviated from the pernicious path laid out in the runic Powerpoints displayed in Reyjavik. And they gave us a few more assorted bits about what that means for the playerbase:
That‘s right, you will finally be able to survey for juicy deposits of minerals and other goodies, build infrastructure to harvest them, store them, process them and launch them into space. Build complex networks of facilities and fine tune them for optimal production. All in a very massive single shard sandboxy way as only EVE can provide. And it‘s not just the terran planets. It‘s ALL OF THEM. The gas giants, the lava planets, the ice worlds, the water worlds and even the elusive plasma planets. Each type with their unique properties. Maintaining facilities on gruesomely hostile planets will be tougher and more demanding, but the rewards may be so much more “onturning.”
In addition to this, my eyes alighted upon the following sequence of most inspired words: “This expansion is about exploration and industry.” That fills my heart, pancreas, and kidneys with the sort of overflowing joy usually experienced by rapturously affectionate angels, arahants who have finally achieved that most perfect nirvana, and nerds who get a consequence-free night with a Gallente chick.
I do not play EVE for the lulz, though not exactly for srs bznz, either. And I state with complete certainty that do not play for the killmails, nor (strictly speaking) for the ISK. I play for the immersion and the exploration. That extends further than just the astrometric sense: understanding new subgames within the larger construct, mechanics and worlds I’ve yet to experience, dark grungy nooks of our post-cyberpunk space opera universe, and yeah, sweet sweet screenies too. Exploration (in that Apocryphal astrometric sense) and the science & industry sense, taken together with immersive gameplay and character development, fulfill those needs perfectly.
A few meandering neural firings centered on this tyrannical nexus:
- Factional warfare should tie into this system in some way, giving occupancy actual significance.
- What new ships will we see? For the sandbox market to function, new resource supplies must balance with new market demand. Stuff needs to get blown up, in other words.
- Security regions should each have unique advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage model already exists (see player-owned starbases), but nullsec versus lowsec versus highsec should each have necessary and desired items.
- In the demonstrations last fall, we saw planets divided into districts and resources allocated from there. Will we still see this model — an EVE-ified Risk, as it were?
- Perhaps the infrastructure itself may not suffer from the hands of those who would destroy it — but the transports plying the spacelanes with their sundry wares certainly have all the vulnerabilities of their brethren in our present time.
- Tech III frigates.
Share with us your scrying visions of what Darth T0rfifrans and his apprentices will unleash upon us in the comments!
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