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EVE Evolved: Everything there is to know about Crucible
This summer's lackluster Incarna expansion and the ensuing microtransaction drama took a massive toll on EVE Online's player community and development staff. Players were quitting in droves, and CCP eventually had to lay off 20% of its staff worldwide. Two years of half-implemented expansions, broken features, and "first steps" that were never iterated on left players begging for a content-heavy expansion like Apocrypha or those released in EVE's early years. EVE is known for being practically a new game every six months, but since the blockbuster Apocrypha expansion, daily life in New Eden hasn't changed much at all. To pull things back from the brink, CCP refocused development on EVE Online and gave developers a free pass to work on hundreds of small features and improvements. The company began flooding us with details on new ships, graphical updates, new gameplay mechanics, and desperately needed balance tweaks, and we loved every bit of it. Although it's mostly small features and gameplay tweaks, the Crucible expansion feels like a genuine rebirth for EVE Online. The types of changes made show that CCP knows exactly what players want from EVE and that the company is now willing to deliver it. With CCP's renewed focus on internet spaceships, the Crucible expansion feels like the start of a new era in the sandbox. In this week's EVE Evolved, I pull together everything there is to know about the Crucible expansion that went live this week, from its turbulent origins to the awesome features and PvP updates it contains.
EVE Online: Crucible forges a new game today
Crucible is an apt name for EVE Online's 15th expansion, considering that the game, its developers, and its players have gone through a severe testing this year in many respects. CCP is hoping that Crucible will be better received than its previous expansion, Incarna, and is hyping it as "EVE reforged." Today Crucible is coming to the game as a free expansion following a period of extended downtime. It's very much a "kitchen sink" update, with major improvements and reworkings of game systems. These include items as big as improved space visuals and dilating time to allow for large fleet battles to touches as small as contrails, an improved font, and new Captains Quarters. New ships in the expansion are a given, but ground-bound pilots might be attracted to opening up their very own customs offices to tax planetary businesses. There are so many additions and changes, in fact, that it's almost futile to try to crush them into a couple paragraphs, so while you're waiting for the game to come back up, make sure to check out the patch notes, the EVE Online: Crucible website, and our own Brendan Drain's thoughts for more info.
EVE dev blog teases new player customs offices
How does the prospect of a player-owned customs office in EVE Online grab you? Whoa, settle down there, Mr. flying-in-space troll, as we're not talking about Incarna-style player housing here but rather a new mechanic that seeks to add a bit more sand to New Eden's sandbox. CCP Omen has the details in the latest EVE dev blog and in a nutshell, player customs houses exist to enable planetary taxation and to add a new wrinkle to the game's planetary interaction mechanics. You'll need to erect a customs office in orbit around a planet (note: there can be only one), and of course it can be attacked and destroyed by your fellow capsuleers. For a list of materials, costs, and associated corporation functionality, warp on over to the official EVE dev blog.
