The upcoming Tyrannis expansion was nearly upon us, when CCP announced their decision to delay its release.

We regret to inform you that deployment of our upcoming expansion Tyrannis has been pushed back by one week to May 26th, and that market seeding of Planetary Command Centers is pushed back to June 8th.

In our regression testing, we have identified scalability issues with the Planetary Interaction feature, which led to code refactoring that then needed further testing before being launched to Tranquility. Planetary Interaction is a unique feature in the sense that it is available to almost all players in the game providing opportunity for manufacturing for the masses, so ensuring that it runs smoothly on our cluster is of great importance to all.

Long story short, something’s broken. And, in a move that is so totally unlike developers of games the world over, CCP has chosen to fix it first before releasing it upon the unsuspecting masses.

The coolest aspect of this is that they’re doing a partial deploy, in a way. Giving people a chance to get their brain wrapped around the concepts here is a good thing, because it’s not a feature that I would personally recommend people just run headlong into, lest they end up wasting quantities of ISK needlessly. Consider playing around on the test server first.

One of the worst aspects so far of what I’ve seen is the whole concept of knowing what the hell to do with the stuff afterwards. Previously, I’ve made note that all I could find as an end product is nanite paste, but in fact the high end outputs of the processes here will end up as inputs to manufacturing sovereignty gear. The pain in the ass here is that in order to find that out, you have to dig into the blueprints section of the market.

Ok ok, so that’s not too bad, but think of this from a different perspective. You’re a person just starting out with your planetary endeavors, and you can see all the things you’ll be producing and how they tie into other planetary productions. Beyond that, you get no direct information. Why not show a subgrouping of products the stuff can be used in that is outside of  planet production, like oh I don’t know, sovereignty gear?

At any rate, fear not, for you will have some additional stuff to play with on the 26th.

EVE Gate will also be released on May 26th, with its web access to EVE Mail, Calendar and revamped contacts, both in-game and on the web.

The EVE Gate service is pretty cool actually, and I’ll be doing a writeup on winterblink.com about it soon. I can’t wait to see how that service grows in the future, but having access to evemail outside of EVE has been one of my wish list items for a while now.

Sources:

• Dev Blog: Tyrannis Release Delayed

One upon a time you used to be able to go around through EVE and find these interesting places talked about in the backstory of the game. Apparently giving us these funky new planets has robbed us of this content. Thanks to CCP Bettik, this content will be coming back to the game in a new and improved fashion.

The aforementioned objects would have to be moved over to the dungeon system. The alternative would be to deprive EVE of content, thus making the vastness of space therein somewhat more vacuous than it currently is. We broke the project down into how many dungeons needed to be created and turned into static dungeons. After much figuring and calculating, we decided to turn those 2,238 objects into basic dungeons – remember, they were not part of our dungeon system before – that we could then populate out into the game ad infinitum.

Now this is actually kind of cool, especially for those who like the back story to EVE. Mind you, I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head that noticed these things were missing, but I think most of that is due to the fact the content itself used to be basically static stuff with little interaction.

One other interesting tidbit comes with the addendum to the blog by CCP Tallest.

In some regions, we had to make new landmarks entirely. Most of these sites were tied to the empire factions in some way, so they wouldn’t make sense for, say, the Rogue Drone regions. Since all of the other regions were getting new content, though, we didn’t want to leave the rogue drones out. So we simply created a few new ones for those regions.

So areas that never had them now have them, and the end result is that the content can be expanded along with the story. Right, and I imagine a lot of people are still shrugging about the whole endeavor. I don’t blame you, this probably won’t add massive game-changing differences to the game, but integrating the story to the game in an interactive and expanding way sounds like it’s full of potential.

I just hope it doesn’t end up going the same way the COSMOS constellation effort went.

Sources:

• Those That Came Before Us: Tyrannis Landmark Updates