With traditional video games, expansion sets are basically a way for developers to introduce new content to the game, such as new maps, new quests, new character classes, races, weapons, items, and so on. However these days such as expansions now come in the form of DLCs and it looks like EVE Online’s developer CCP will be adopting a similar model.
The company has recently announced that they will no longer be offering up expansions for EVE Online in the traditional manner. Instead they have announced that they are planning on releasing 10 updates that will span across an entire year, with the 10th expansion only being released in 2015. According to CCP’s CEO, Hilmar Veigar Pétursson who spoke to the folks at Polygon, “It’s going to change everything. It’s going to allow us to respond quicker. It’s going to allow us to actually take more risk in a good way.”
The first update that will take place is called Kronos which will see a release on the 3rd of June. This will be followed by Crius on the 19th of August, Hyperion on the 23rd of September, Oceanus on the 4th of November, Phobe on the 9th of December, Rhea on the 20th of January 2015, Tethys on the 7th of February 2015, Theia on the 17th of March 2015, and last but not least is Themis which has been scheduled for a release on the 4th of April 2015.
On one hand we can only assume that gamers will be pleased by this new model. This means that they won’t have to wait a year or two for an expansion and will always have something to look forward to in the game. The downside is that it is possible that the updates might not have the same amount of depth that an expansion with a 1-2 year dev cycle might have, but who knows, perhaps CCP will surprise us all.
In any case what do you guys think? Is this a model that you prefer, or would you prefer to see larger and more in-depth expansion sets released over such frequent updates?
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