At the "World Domination" keynote on the final day of EVE Online Fanfest 2008 in Reykjavik, Iceland, Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson unveiled the upcoming "Summer 2009 Expansion" for the sci-fi MMO, calling it the "biggest expansion in EVE Isk to date." They'd taken more than 300 CCP staff from other projects, and there were more programmers, artists, and the like working on the expansion than ever before, he announced.

New Player Experience

Acknowledging that EVE Isk had a "mildly steep learning cliff" (which drew chuckles from the crowd) that was a barrier for potential new players, Olafsson said that one of the primary objectives with the new unnamed expansion was to streamline the introduction. They'd focus more on learning by doing and progressive character creation, giving players more of a hands-on approach instead of walls of text.

There would also be changes made to the game's UI, continued Olafsson. It wouldn't be a completely different UI overnight, but the team they had working on it would be focused on strengthening the UI and making it more of a productivity tool, rather than a hindrance (especially for newcomers). "What takes 20 clicks now," he said, "should take 1."

Unstable Wormholes and Tech 3

While their aim was to make the game more palatable and welcoming for new players, the bulk of the expansion was certainly aimed at EVE Isk veterans. Unstable wormholes would be popping up in the universe of EVE - or rather, they'd always been there but the technology hadn't existed to discover them. Using new scanners, players would be able to track down these wormholes that would sporadically open and close.

The unstable wormholes would function as gateways to new, heretofore unconnected space - completely unexplored and undiscovered - that, joked Olafsson, was full of "stuff." Ancient stuff, he clarified: artifacts and the like, new resources that would open the way to the game's new Tech 3.