EVE Online's next expansion, Equinox, has been announced, bringing new Upwell Consortium structures, including a futuristic space elevator called a Skyhook, a moon miner, new nullsec resources, and more.
Coming on June 11th, Equinox aims to put even more power in the hands of its players, especially in how corporations harness the resources of nullsec space. After teasing new offerings, including constructing an unknown structure in the system of Auviken, the Upwell Consortium, an in-game faction that specializes in interstellar structures which capsuleers can build, announced this morning that three new structures were coming.
These new structures are aimed at allowing for even deeper resource harvesting in nullsec, where many of the player Empires roam and compete for control over New Eden and its vast array of resources.
Speaking with MMORPG.com in an interview last week, EVE Online’s creative director Bergur Finnbogason described the three structures and their purposes, including a new futuristic space elevator known as the Skyhook.
While the new structure will be able to harvest planetary resources, it doesn’t replace existing planetary infrastructure capsuleers have been utilizing for years.
“The Skyhook will be a way of collecting resources from [planets]. The Skyhook is a new, beautiful structure sitting by planets, shooting an elevator down to a lower platform that will track up resources from planets.”
The first of its kind structure, CCP Games community developer Peter “CCP Swift” Ferrell described how capsuleers have interacted with the new, half-built structure in an attempt to figure out what it is.
“We’ve seen players do crazy things to try and glean as much information as they can out of it because it’s a mystery to them, right? So they're just like, ‘Oh, what can I do with this?’ One of the first things they did, in classic EVE fashion, is they locked it up and shot at it to see where the hitbox was, to see if, ‘oh, maybe I can learn some information if I know where the center of it’s supposed to be,” and stuff like that.”
Swift described a scene where a player patiently shot at the structure for forty-five minutes, which is definitely some dedication.
Another new Upwell structure coming with Equinox is a new sovereignty hub, which Bergur says will replace the I-Hub and the TCU in space. Finally, a new automatic moon miner called the Metenox Moon Drill will take some of the tedium out of moon mining for large corporations and, in a way, introduce yet another juicy target to the fabric of New Eden. Bergur also stated in our conversation that new resources would be coming for capsuleers to play with while utilizing the latest suite of products from Upwell.
Over the last few weeks, the Upwell Consortium has been sending communiques to the in-game “Big Four” Empires in EVE, which players have been finding fragments of and piecing together, all while this unknown structure is being built in orbit around the planet of Auviken IV. In the communications, Upwell is seemingly selling the Empires on a new cloning procedure directed at the citizens of New Eden themselves. This new cloning tech aims to build the workforce capsuleers will use to harness the power of these new structures.
Another bit of speculation is down to whether this new cloning bit by Upwell is connected to Vanguard Clones, the boots on the ground players inhabit in the in-development EVE Vanguard FPS, to which Bergur would only coyly confirm it has “something” to do with Vanguard, but would not elaborate on any more.
Equinox is also bringing four new ships aimed at helping to haul those new resources, which every single one has the ability to hold their own in a fight. The new haulers are aimed at helping survive nullsec space, including the Deluge's high warp speed and its "immunity to cargo scanners," or the Torrent's micro jump drive capabilities.
Also coming with EVE Online’s Equinox expansion are updates to the SKINR tool, which enables cosmetic customization of ships and structures in EVE Online. The new tool will enable players to create their own custom ship SKINs, using “a variety of cosmetic layers and patterns available,” all of which will be resellable on the in-game markets. This, in a way, opens yet another career path for creative EVE players to follow, earning a bit of ISK for their artistic skills in addition to their other chosen career path in New Eden.
CCP Games also states that Equinox will bring UI improvements, allowing for more streamlined navigation of the corporate UI, improvements to the AIR career system for new players, as well as new Corporation Project types such as salvaging wrecks, ship sacrifice, and more.
Not to be outdone, EVE Vanguard is also getting some improvements in June, the FPS module CCP Games is working on is bringing new features, such as weapon modifications, a new map, and “new activities within the sandbox,” according to this morning’s press release. The new map, described as an archipelago housing the ruins of a facility Vanguards will be exploring, will be available on June 20th and run through July 1st for Omega accounts.
