CCP is announcing that EVE Online, its long running space faring MMO, is getting a new expansion, the eighth for anyone who's still counting. It's called the Empyrean Age and it sets the stage for a conflict like EVE has never seen before.

All the tensions that exist between the four major political players in the universe of EVE come to the surface and the only possible resolution is an all out war between the various factions. Each player in the game can get the new expansion free of charge and can opt to join one of the four empires in their struggle. The actions that players and corporations in the game world execute will influence the way the war goes for each of the combatants, and the MMO will dynamically evolve based on player action.

Noah Ward, a lead designer for CCP, said that "Factional Warfare has been on the wish list for a while and we're excited to be able to introduce it in this expansion, giving players a new framework to engage in roleplaying and PvP. The focus is on accessibility and fun. The features in Empyrean Age will appeal to players on many different levels: a tightly integrated storyline, social camaraderie, focused combat and battle statistics."

The expansion will also open up a new area of space, called Black Rise, that contains 49 new star systems, 80 new NPC agents and some 40 space stations. Most of them will already have an alignment in the coming war, and players will have the option of claiming un-aligned space for their empire and also of attacking enemy occupied space.

The new expansion also comes with a long list of fixes and changes for the game, all of which can be viewed here. The most critical of them involve CONCORD response to players that join war fleets without being engaged in the war and some fixes to the lineup of the Amarr navy.

A novel tie-in related to the Empyrean Age expansion is set to debut later in the summer, telling the story of how the four EVE factions, the Caldari, the Amarr, the Galente and Minmatar, have come to full blown conflict.