Apocrypha 1.5 this August

Things have been silent on the dev front since the release of Apocrypha this March. Apocrypha was a major success for EVE Online. We rose to new heights in terms of concurrent players and subscribers, and more importantly, we are very proud of the new features and functionality it provided.

Now we are working hard on our winter expansion. Winter is quite far away, and we felt because Apocrypha was really early for a summer expansion, we should put out a mini-expansion, rather than wait until winter to release all the stuff we are working on. It should come out mid-August if all goes well. We refer to it as Apocrypha 1.5.

Small, Medium and Large rigs

Ever wanted to build the ultimate speed kite frigate but couldn‘t afford the rigs? Tank your cruiser to the max? Mod your little hauler? Now you can!

We are adding small and medium sized rigs ( existing rigs will be considered large rigs ), which will be cheaper to buy and make. With this we are hoping that more people may get introduced to the joys of rigging and the sorrow of losing your specially fitted beautifully rigged ship. CCP Chronitis will explain further in an upcoming blog.

Level 4 epic arcs in Apocrypha 1.5

Apocrypha 1.5 will be rich with content. We have several new epic mission arcs, which unlike the level 1 epic arc we introduced in Apocrypha are all level 4, meaning they will be more challenging, but also more rewarding. With each themed around a specific race, these captivating stories deal with moral ambiguity, intrigue, honor and some people's lack of it. This should come as no surprise to those who know EVE and what we are about. As before with the epic arc that was released in Apocrypha, they provide a deep, interesting story, where your choices influence the outcome.

Specialized Cargo holds - Fuel bays on black ops

We are introducing a system that allows us to author specialized cargo holds on ships. We will start by adding fuel bays on black ops and possibly other ships. This means we‘re adding more space for your fuel, without the ships becoming horribly unbalanced haulers of death. The technology behind this opens up doors to making other types of bays, just for ammo, just for livestock or whatever. Those options will be explored in future expansions.

Factional Warfare improvements - LP for kills

We have been closely monitoring reports on lag in Factional Warfare, analyzing the network behaviour, player behaviour and scrutinizing code. The reported lag does not always occur and is elusive to track down and resolve. We currently have engineers allocated to the resolution of the problem, working tightly with the quality assurance department and our bughunters.

Meanwhile, in an effort to make Factional Warfare more fun, we are looking at introducing Loyalty Point rewards for kills and captures, with special LP stores for each militia, offering unique goodies for hard working militamen and women. More details to follow in an upcoming blog by CCP Ytterbium.

50% features versus 50% maintenance

A recurring question I get from players is "How much time is spent on new features versus fixing and improving existing stuff?". The answer is simple. We allocate 50% of our developer time to new feature development and the rest to polishing and iterating existing systems and resolving defects. We feel this is a healthy balance between moving forward and maintaining what we have already built. EVE is over 650.000 lines of source code today, compared to 280.000 lines when it was first released, so there's a lot to maintain and refactor. Apocrypha 1.5 will have a considerable amount of fixes and polish coming out from this work.

The Winter Expansion

We will be reporting on the winter expansion as it draws closer. All I can say, is that it is focused on sovereignty and you will not be able to walk in it. Check on the dev blogs in the weeks and months to come for more updates. Those who are into RSS and those kind of things can also subscribe to our RSS feeds.

Thanks for reading!

• Torfi Frans