CCP Games reveals new expansion details during EVE PvP Tournament
It's been quite a week in EVE Online with player-driven events. We've reported on espionage breaking apart New Eden's most powerful alliance, creating a power vacuum that thousands of players seek to fill. Meanwhile the old guard fights tooth and nail to hold onto the regional control of the game's world that they've built up over the years. Then there was also the PvP tournament assassination which has raised a few eyebrows. These stories have now been reported widely by the gaming press, and while they hold some interest for players and non-players alike, EVE really isn't all about betrayal and retribution. That's why it was refreshing to simply sit back and watch the first half of the PvP tournament finals today without any drama bombs.
But this didn't stop CCP from dropping a few bombs of their own during the live Alliance PvP Tournament broadcast today-- hints about some major changes to the game that may be coming in the Apocrypha expansion. Three of the game's developers were on hand today to let the viewers know a bit more about the expansion than has been addressed in the dev blogs thus far, and a few surprises were revealed.
Perhaps the biggest hint came from CCP Fear, who mentioned that character re-specs (specifically, attribute re-specs) may be implemented in the future. **Take this with a grain of salt the size of a hamster for the time being; it was only mentioned very briefly, and there hasn't been any further mention of this from CCP Games beyond Fear's comment during the tournament.**
CCP Chronotis also made an appearance in between the PvP matches, and noted that flying the Apocrypha expansion's modular Tech III ships may come with some real consequences -- a character may actually lose Tech III-specific skillpoints when they lose a ship in combat. Or, in other words, as your ship is vaporized, so is some of the knowledge you've gained of how to pilot it. Another angle on this may be that a player's affinity for piloting that particular configuration dies with the ship.
Steep consequences? You decide. But as with the aforementioned attribute re-spec option, the devs are still working out the game mechanics and are subject to changes, or even outright removal. Dev blogs on these and other features will be coming out in the coming weeks leading up the March 10th Apocrypha expansion launch.
