Just under a month ago, CCP announced Tyrannis, the next big expansion for EVE Online. Tyrannis centres around the planets of New Eden, which have so far played a purely visual role in the game. The expansion promises to open these planets for exploration and industrialisation, with players scanning for juicy mineral deposits and setting up vast, sprawling industrial networks. An early prototype of the planetary interaction feature has even been put on the EVE test server and players can help develop the expansion by giving their feedback.
CCP typically release two expansions per year and Tyrannis has been roughly slated for this year's summer expansion. Although the summer expansion can sometimes come as late as July, CCP have just released a new teaser trailer confirming a May 18th release date. This gives the developers just over 8 weeks to get the expansion into shape. This should give the team more time to work on the next expansion, which most are hoping will be Incarna. Skip past the cut to watch the official Tyrannis teaser.
If you look real close at the end clip you'll see a missile coming from what looks like the planet's atmosphere. So maybe, just maybe, they will have missile silos that can launch defense missiles in low-null sec.
Sorry to disappoint - this expansion won't have any combat. That wasn't a missile, but rather a rocket, which is how you get your goods from the planet to orbit.
The winter expansion is supposed to bring combat though :D
No apologies needed, the only reason I didn't think it was a rocket is because you don't actually see anything take off from the planet when you launch stuff to space but yea...makes a lot more sense.
Seems a little unusual to be laying down a specific release date for a patch two months in advance, but good on them, nobody matches CCP's record when it comes to the amount of content and functionality added to a game for no expense beyond the regular subscription.
I think setting a firm release date is part of their agile development philosophy. In project development, they say the work always expands to fill the time alotted for it. So if you give people double the time, you may get roughly the same result but it'll take twice as long.
By setting a release date, they can plan their short development sprints and hopefully cram months worth of development into a few weeks. I've used a similar system for group software development projects when I was in university and surprisingly, it actually works.
Heh. The reason why there's so little to see of the actual interaction is because CCP has only yet developed the very basics of the expansion. They want to cooperate far more player feedback in this expansion than ever before, so it's been up on the test server for some time now, where everyone can try it out and suggest ways to improve it. This expansion is working already, but far from finished.
