Eve: Valkyrie – Welcome to the Warzone

2017-09-26

Today is a great day for Eve: Valkyrie—the new Warzone expansion is coming with a load of improvements and new stuff! What? You did not hear of it? You do not even know what Valkyrie is? Let’s fix this planet-sized hole in the hull of your knowledge!

Join the Valkyries

Eve: Valkyrie is a spinoff from Eve Online. The action takes place in the same universe, just like Dust 514, but in space, just like Eve. In fact, you are even more in space than in Eve Online, as you are a “space fighter pilot”, literally.

Originally developed for VR, this space shooter will make a Valkyrie pilot out of you. These pilots control small manned spaceships (around the size of a heavy drone in Eve) dogfighting around the huge stations and fleets we all know from Eve. Of course, you can play in various types of hulls from light fighters to heavies, and of course, the support class.

In terms of gameplay, Valkyrie used to be VR-only, which gave an extremely immersive experience. Pilots are brought together in teams that fight over objectives in a 3D map. They are several game modes (and detailing all of them is not the purpose here), but from its humble start of two repetitive game modes, Valkyrie has blossomed into a respectable first-person shooter with a broad variety of maps and modes.

Valkyrie is a buy-to-play title with microtransactions for cosmetics, but all updates and expansions, like Warzone, come absolutely free.

Enter the Warzone

And here come the new expansion: Warzone.

This HUGE update is opening the game to non-VR players! Not only that, but players on any platform — PC, PlayStation 4, standard monitors, and any VR headset of your choice — will be able to play together on the same servers! Valkyrie was one of the first games to offer cross-platform VR support between Vive and PSVR users, and this trend of compatibility is continuing strongly with Warzone.

Another new feature is the ability to create a squad with your friends to play together, though this option is platform-bound: a PC player (VR or not) can only squad up with another PC player, not with a PS4 player.

The other headline features are classics for this kind of game: two new maps based around a Sisters of Eve station and a Drifter Station; one new game mode called Extraction, that is an objective game mixing combat and piloting abilities, and of course, a rebalance of the ships along with new ones.

Friendship: the best ship class

Until now, Valkyrie has had three classes, each having several hulls with different abilities: Fighters, Heavies and Supports.

Fighters are agile and fast, lightly armed and defended. They come in different flavours, from pure fighter to “healer,” with EWar and mixed types around. Heavies are generally slower, but well defended and pack stronger weapons systems. Meant for control, they are excellent in setting in a place and locking it down. The last class, Support, is pretty much self-explanatory: buff allies, shoot enemies and get out using EWar as needed.

All these classes will still exist, but pretty much all the existing ships are reworked. Note that the Fighter class has been renamed the Assault class. Along with this huge rework, new ships and classes are added, like for example Covert ships.

Videos about four classes (the three base ones and the covert one) have been released, such as this one about the Covert class.

Ships now have a primary weapon, two abilities/secondary weapons and an Ultra.

Final Details

To close on the big news from Warzone, the beta of Valkyrie League is now closed. Valkyrie League is the competitive mode of Valkyrie. It will not be brought back up in Warzone, but CCP plans to improve it and release a final version soon™.

The minimum recommendations for the game have been updated, and as you can see here below, for non-VR users the requirements remain reasonable.

MINIMUM 2D SPEC
OS: Windows 7 SP1 or newer
CPU: i5-3570K
RAM: 4GB RAM
GFX: GTX 460 or equivalent DX 11 compatible card
Network: Broadband
DirectX: 11
Disk Space: 30GB

MINIMUM VR SPEC
OS: Windows 7 SP1 or newer
Processor: Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 390 equivalent or greater
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 30 GB available space

For newcomers, there is a launch pack called Drifters, available on Steam/PS Store. You can find more details here.

For those who already own the game, all in-game unlocks and pre-order bonuses will be carried over into the new system once the update goes live at around 1600 UTC.

If you are still on the fence, Imperium News will happily provide you with a hands-on review soon, and we will be covering our launch experience live on our Twitch channel from 1700 UTC

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Comments

  • Pew Pew

    It feels weird that CCP are doing something exciting and successful.

    September 26, 2017 at 10:17 AM
    • Alot Pew Pew

      Well, exciting. Rant all you want but Eve is still well within the bandwidth of complete success.

      September 26, 2017 at 7:45 PM
  • Erick Asmock

    I am excited for this release. Busy RL but once I get time I can’t wait to play. The kid’s would love a console version.

    September 26, 2017 at 12:43 PM
    • Rhivre Erick Asmock

      There is definitely a lot of buzz around this release.

      September 26, 2017 at 2:34 PM
  • Alot

    Busy getting a joy stick and whatnot for elite dangerous, so at that point may as while try this.

    Bit early for this sort of thing but it would be cool if they created scenarios based on famous eve events. Not just the massive brawls but those small instances which people would view as ridiculous if not for the fact that they actually happened – like the brave ship which was shot down carrying their entire stock of training manuals.

    September 26, 2017 at 2:47 PM
    • Mischa Gau'ss Tesla Alot

      There is an introductive story played solo, but it’s honestly (from what I saw) anecdotal, like a long tutorial. There also is a coop mode, but I never had the chance to try it (introduced with Joint Strike, nov 2016). From what I know however, it’s more like PvE in group, no real scenario…. And finally the Wormhole system introduced earlier this year provides mini events: https://www.evevalkyrie.com/articles/updates-and-patches/wormholes-update-and-patch-notes

      September 26, 2017 at 3:08 PM
    • Froggy Storm Alot

      I was actually wondering how this game is going to match up, mouse vs hotas vs controller.

      I hope they don’t freagment the play, but if mouse and hotas are superior console players will suffer.

      September 26, 2017 at 6:22 PM
    • pervertparade Alot

      Do we have an Eve counterpart for “dive dive dive hit your burners pilot”?

      If you’re willing to sacrifice strict fidelity then you could recreate some neat scenes. I think that it would be difficult to portray the “history” of the scenes (i.e. names and places) during a fast-paced twitch experience – but it might be possible to illustrate some of the mechanics (traitorous fleet warps, 1v1 at the sun, unable to corp-kick that AWOX guy because he’s currently in space, etc).

      Imagine that the player is performing scout duties for a routine patrol and accidentally leads the fleet into a pipebomb trap. Suddenly it turns into a weird bullet-hell experience in which the player must use wrecked ships as cover from periodic spherical death-blasts.

      Or the player is performing guard duty on a decrepit old starbase when an enemy dreadnought uses a reverse-polarity Higgs anchor to perform an illegal subspace maneuvre (POS bowling). The player’s fighter wing is scrambled to clear tackle and save the scattered ships, while comms chatter from the starbase commander insists that he has holographic recordings of the whole thing and that the dread pilot is going to be in serious trouble.

      September 27, 2017 at 2:25 AM
      • Freelancer117 pervertparade

        I see what you did there. Freespace ftw o7

        September 27, 2017 at 2:53 AM
      • Fidelity, as is traditional, would die a subjective death. That said, just like we keep getting computer games replaying famous battles from history, the entire value of quoting player made eve events is to evoke the very real sense of history which actually exists – which benefits from dropping as many names as you can.

        While the actual events are usually subjective, if you playing a fighter pilot you going to be relayed vague incomplete data in the mission briefing anyway. Plus if you worried about players getting irked about being misrepresented, forward the Valkyrie scenario to the respective corps leaders beforehand and simply state “we’ll run with the version of your past event or we’ll find an event with different corps to run with”.

        September 27, 2017 at 9:35 AM
  • GroggyNard

    Glad to have another use for my TrackIR.

    September 26, 2017 at 5:40 PM