PvE Mission Content | EVE Online

PvE Mission Content

2008-06-12 - By CCP Molock

I thought I should write a blog to let everyone know that we at CCP have some big plans for PvE and for mission-runners in particular. To give you a sense of how much effort we’re putting into it I can reveal that we currently have eight developers working full-time on mission and deadspace creation. We also have a number of freelancers assisting with mission text creation.

Getting everything in order for Empyrean Age and Factional Warfare has been a dizzying process. We have 160 new Factional Warfare missions launching as part of the Factional Warfare feature. In addition to this we will be adding more Factional Warfare content in future release and we are very excited to provide players with yet another way of experiencing EVE Online.

Empyrean Age also brought us a number of new tools and toys for our deadspace complex and mission designers to create flashier and more interactive missions for both Factional Warfare and the regular agent varieties. A lot of players run missions for money and we want everyone to be able to run them for fun as well. Keep an eye out for new exploding ship and structure events, for NPCs that aggress, or not, based on your standing. Look for mission story arcs that allow players to choose various paths and for some cool new static effects in deadspace locations, not to mention new object artwork and shipwreck models and much, much more.

A side effect of Empyrean Age is that we had a large number of agent missions sitting in queue that had to be delayed to support the release of Factional Warfare. Recent additions and modifications to our internal processes and procedures has resulted in, shall we say, a few speed bumps for our interdepartmental delivery lines. Once we have these smoothed out we will be pushing out new mission content faster than you can say, "Please, Sir, may I have some more?"

In Empyrean Age 1.1 we’ll be including about 100 new regular agent missions and we’ve already got another 125 missions or so in the QA pipeline beyond that. In addition to this we’ve just received another 120 missions from our writers and we’re about to seed the plans for another big batch of new Factional Warfare missions. There are a lot of missions in the future.

One last thing I wish to clarify is that we don’t always have to add new missions into EVE as a part of a big release; we can effectively add them to Tranquility during any downtime, if we want to or need to do it. So there’s no saying when new mission content may appear, just keep your eyes open and you might see some new stuff.

It may take a little time to get everything implemented, but never fear, mission runner — we got your medicine right here.