During EVE Fanfest 2014, CCP Games took the stage to announce the next update for the “thinking persons” online strategy game EVE Online. Titled Kronos, this update aims to improve accessibility, diversity and meaning to industrial gameplay.
Vast industrial operations are behind the famous player wars that rage across EVE’s sprawling universe, while smaller individual efforts generate wealth, meaning and power at a personal level.Kronos will create dynamic shifts in the industrial landscape by adding cost-scale differences, specialized workers and teams, changes to reprocessing, and more.
Players’ activity will begin to affect the industrial palette of solar systems, allowing for more meaningful decisions and giving them more reasons to interact with each other in cooperative or adversarial ways. New players will be able to get into Industry more quickly as manufacturing opens up and the user interface is reworked.
Kronos will also offer other features in CCP’s ongoing commitment to improve EVE Online year after year. New Mordu’s Legion ships (frigate, cruiser, and battleship) are coming alongside a new mining frigate, the Prospect. Rebalancing efforts will change heat, transport ships, freighters, pirate faction ships, and drones. A new in-game store will prepare for even more customization options in the future, and other changes from sound customization to solar flares and warp effects will complete the release. The update is set to go live on June 3rd, 2014.
More specifics on the release will be made available in the coming weeks. Kronos also marks a major change in how CCP Games will be approaching the update model to EVE Online. Whereas previously you could expect to see perhaps two or three major expansions per year, the game will now see around 10 possibly smaller albeit still significant updates annually.
Andie Nordgren | Senior Producer for EVE Online
The new cadence of development will allow us to take on bigger, more ambitious features, deliver content at an increased pace, and give our players even more to look forward to. Kronos is the perfect release to kick off the series of upcoming changes as it provides the foundation for the colonization dreams of player empires we’re working towards—epic sci-fi construction projects that lead to new parts of the universe.
