Earlier this week, EVE Online Executive Producer Andie “CCPSeagull” Nordgren announced that the game will be returning to large-scale expansions in addition to frequent patches. What can we say — it’s a trend this season.
“The new Structures will be our biggest step yet to building player-driven space colonization in EVE from the ground up, and truly put space infrastructure into your hands in an unlimited way. That’s why the introduction of them is at the heart of our next expansion. […] Yes, I said expansion. We want to give you EVE Online expansions with a more epic feel to them again, but in a new form.”
Nordren explains that while CCP liked the ability to push out smaller updates, the chance to collect feedback on features as they rolled out, and the timeline flexibility, the team also believes the smaller patches created a “disjointed experience” and “put a lot of responsibility on you players to figure out what’s coming and when, and what the future of EVE is, instead of [CCP’s]Â packaging big changes together and telling you about them all at once.”
CCP will continue to push patches on a regular five week schedule, beginning with the upcoming Vanguard and Parallax, but expansions will be added to the mix.
“What’s then the difference between a release and an expansion in this hybrid form? First, an expansion will be a set of big, connected features that both make impactful change on EVE, and make a statement about what kind of game EVE is. Second, there won’t be a fixed number of them per year, but rather we will announce when we have one in the making and what the main features are. While we will have a timeframe in mind for the release of the expansion and tell you about it, the exact date won’t be pinned down until we are confident that the state of all the connected features are in a good place.”
The studio also released a new dev blog on citadel sieges. Nordren’s update video is below.
