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EVE Evolved: Everything we know about Rubicon
Back in April, EVE Online Senior Producer Andie Nordgren delivered an incredible long-term vision for the game's future that included deep space colonisation, player-built stargates, and players controlling practically everything that's currently run by NPC empires. This vision sets the tone and direction for development over the next ten expansions, each of which will introduce a small component of the overall goal. In a live interview session earlier this week, CCP revealed the first steps it will take toward space colonisation in its upcoming winter expansion. Named Rubicon, the expansion will be in players' hands on November 19th and promises to give individuals and small groups unprecedented control over the sandbox. It will let players fight over planetary customs offices in high security space, significantly buff the ability of small ships to participate in hit-and-run style warfare, and even introduce a new set of personal deployable structures that can be hidden anywhere in space. All this comes alongside two new Sisters of EVE ships, twitch livestream integration, and significant balance changes to Marauders, Interceptors, Interdictors, and Electronic Attack Frigates. In this week's EVE Evolved, I run down all of the new features and changes announced so far for EVE Online's Rubicon expansion.
Epic Mission Arcs in EVE Online add new dimensions to game's PvE
There are so many reasons we love to play MMOs, but for most of us, repetition isn't one of them. Although EVE Online differs from most other MMOs on the market in a number of ways, it still has some of those PvE pitfalls that have long been part of massively multiplayer online games -- specifically, repetitive missions (quests). As with any game where there are only so many quests that NPCs can give out, a mission runner in EVE will play through the same stories multiple times. Granted, many players who run Level 4s all week are doing so for the ISK, not to enjoy the story. There are only so many times you can rescue The Damsel or blow up another Zor before you've stopped paying attention to the story that's presumably taking place around you. Although this issue of quest repetition in MMOs certainly isn't limited to EVE Online, the developers at CCP Games want to address this problem in their game, and their solution to creating more engaging PvE content is the Epic Mission Arc.
