14 DAY TRIAL // As outlined at EVE Fanfest 2014, CCP is determined to rework their massively multiplayer online game's expansion schedule, from two big expansions to ten smaller releases, spread out evenly over the course of a year.
The latest developer blog from the company has revealed that, in the future, EVE Online's content will be added in smaller increments, with one release scheduled to come out every six weeks, which will offer an overall increased quantity of content, as well as an overall better experience altogether.
There are two main benefits that the new model brings to the table, the fact that the new small- and medium-sized features reach players faster, and the fact that the bigger features and changes will be more easily and thoroughly implemented, because the development effort won't have to be timed to the two yearly updates.
An added bonus of this decision is the fact that content will reach players more easily, and there will always be something fresh to do, without lengthy periods of downtime and monotony while waiting for the next features to hit.
EVE Online has just celebrated 10 years of activity, and the official blog post informs that the current model of updating their MMO two times per year was already a pretty fast release cycle, as far as MMOs go, and that each expansion widened the scope of the game with sizable additions, new systems and features, and responded to what players were doing with the content already in the game.
But, over the years, a lot of things have been added to EVE Online, offering an unparallelled diversity of experiences and accommodating many different play styles.
It also means that the game is so big that, if CCP takes six months of development time to focus on a single area of the game, everyone whom the upcoming changes do not influence is stuck waiting for the next expansion, thus getting a single serving of new content per year.
Having a game with such a large scope means that making big changes entails a very big risk, and that, if things go wrong, the devs have to wait for six months in order to fix some of the issues that may arise from an important content addition, and the dependence of releasing fixes in just two batches forced the team to be conservative in the past.
CCP wants to bring a lot of fresh ideas into the game, and as such wants to hold nothing back, which the new density of updates will help achieve.
CCP has also announced the fact that the New Eden EVE store is open for testing purposes on the Singularity public test server, and that it will be instrumental in the future when it comes to offering new ship skins and other character- and account-related services to the EVE Online fanbase.