CCP recently announced Eve’s next update, due on August 14th. We’ll receive new designs for both the Navitas and Thalia as well as new textures and visual effects. The Tayra, Bustard Badger and Crane are getting redesigned as well, with new models, textures, and animations.
CCP are also continuing to improve the new player experience The August update will introduce a new, more basic starter site for players. This will be delivered by the Agency, and should give them suitable combat challenges and training tasks.
Finally, lasers will be receiving a performance update. Players should see improved performance when many lasers are being fired at once. These improvements will include both better rendering and optimized audio.
In the Winter expansion, we can expect more rebalancing on a range of ships and modules, to help shake up the meta and keep it fresh. We’ll likely see more details about the particulars of these balance passes during the run up to the Winter expansion and into early 2019.
For the last few years, one of the most requested features for Eve Online has been a 64-bit client for the game. The current 32-bit client freezes up when using more than 4GB of memory, sometimes even crashing below that at 3.5GB of use. Giving players a 64- bit client will be a huge step in the right direction and will hopefully help reduce the number of client crashes in huge fights.
As we saw at FanFest this year, we’ll also be seeing three more structures entering the mix. These are the Upwell jump bridge, cynosural jammer and cynosural beacon. The current POS versions of these are some of the most used assets and structures in the game. Releasing them as Upwell structures will do away with some of the last pieces keeping POS in the game, and bring us one step closer to removing them completely. Exactly how the migration will take place we’re not sure, but having everything under the same structure tree will help with access list as well as browsing and identifying them in a system much easier to deal with.
Players have been able to use SKINs on their ships for a number of years now, and we’ve seen many different collections. Following this tradition, CCP will be introducing structure skins this Winter. These will allow for players and corporations to adjust the appearance of their structures. In the future, this feature could be used to help identify the different roles of of structures, such as having a different SKIN for public and private moons.
Lastly, we should see an overhaul to the settings menus. In its current state the menu can be hard to read and work with at times. The update states that players will benefit from a clear and more coherent layout with simpler options.
I for one can’t wait for the introduction of the smaller Upwell structures, it will be interesting to see how CCP introduces the switch over grace period before the POS modules get removed. The collection of structure skins and how they are interested to the game will also be key, as they are held at corp level, not player level.
UPDATE: The August Update has been pushed back a week to August 21st.
