Ambitious Capsuleers,
EVE Online’s third Quadrant of 2021 – Gateway – launches today! The Gateway Quadrant kicks off with an updated and improved new player experience to train freshly cloned Capsuleers, great opportunities for established corporations and alliances to recruit and train those Capsuleers, the introduction of brand-new Skill Plans to streamline Capsuleer advancement, and much more. There’s never been a better time to start, continue, or return to playing EVE!
Since 2020, EVE Online releases have been divided into four Quadrants each year, packed with exciting events, game features, login campaigns, balance updates, visual updates, technological advancements, competitions, Abyssal Proving Grounds, and more. Each Quadrant has a unique theme focused on a specific aspect of EVE Online, which guides the type of content you can expect to see. Quadrants are not limited to delivering content within a set theme only, but most will be connected to it to provide a holistic experience for Capsuleers in New Eden. The content itself is delivered in smaller increments throughout the Quadrant’s duration instead of a single big patch, giving you something interesting to do on every space adventure! Be sure to check out this Foundation Quadrant wrap-up for the highlights from Q2.
Gateway
The Gateway Quadrant will open the door to the EVE universe for many new Capsuleers and provide new pathways for them to connect with their dreams and ambitions in New Eden. It will also provide established player corporations and alliances new avenues in which to direct the training and advancement of fresh recruits, of which there will be many!
Gateway will be a shorter Quadrant than normal, and will also act as a stepping stone to EVE Online’s fourth Quadrant of 2021 – which starts in November – where a new era will dawn across New Eden, signaling updates for resource scarcity. Corporations and alliances would do well to use Gateway as an opportunity to recruit new Capsuleers wisely and begin training them up for the next Quadrant, where they will be able to ready their ships and materials for the new beginning!
Welcoming New Pilots
A brand-new, story-driven Capsuleer training experience for rookie pilots is now live in EVE Online, after having received a very warm welcome and valuable feedback from the veteran community during its time on the Singularity test server! Incoming players can now arrive in New Eden and get their initial Capsuleer training from the Association for Interdisciplinary Research (AIR) in this major update to EVE’s new player experience. It is the first step towards an improved introduction to New Eden for all Capsuleers, and one that will engage players to keep them in the game longer.
Crafting this narrative-driven content called for quite a bit of innovation when it came to tooling, resulting in more immersive experiences and faster iteration capabilities, more dynamic visuals and improved UI highlighting. This will benefit both current and future content capabilities so that players can continue to experience cinematic, immersive, and engaging gameplay in EVE Online. This is the first step in improving the gateway to New Eden for fresh pilots, and will continue to be updated.
To give new pilots a further boost, the Starter Training Boost Bundle is now available in the EVE Store at 15% off, giving rookie Capsuleers 500,000 Skill Points and a Prototype Cerebral Accelerator to advance their skill training options! It’s worth noting that more established Capsuleers in corporations looking to train fresh pilots can contract their Prototype Cerebral Accelerator to new recruits.
Skill Plans – Focus Your Advancement
The new Skill Plans feature is also now live in EVE Online, streamlining and simplifying your progression through EVE’s many skills and advancement avenues! This feature allows you to build a list of skills, without needing to buy and inject them first. A Skill Plan is an ordered list of skill levels with specific goals which you can create to follow and keep track of your training as you aim for your desired experiences and challenges in EVE.
Skill Plans also allow you to share lists of skills with each other via chat, EVE Mail, corp bulletin, etc, and interact with them, all inside the EVE Online client. You can set up to five milestones in a Skill Plan, indicating specific sub-goals within it, and a milestone will be completed as soon you train all the skills required for the item or skill in question. With the aim of developing and expanding the Skill Plans feature in the near future, work is already underway on Corporation Skill Plans.
With the feature having already been tested on the Singularity test server, it has been fantastic to see the EVE community discussing Skill Plans and embracing them, especially considering how central the skills system is to anyone’s gameplay in EVE. The benefits of streamlining this process and having experienced EVE players embrace it will have a great effect on all new Capsuleers that enter the game.
EVE in the Epic Store
Speaking of gateways, a new path into New Eden is opening on 23 September as EVE Online will be coming to the Epic Games Store! The Epic Store platform’s arrival will open up the gates of New Eden to players who will previously not have had any experience of EVE Online.
This platform will bring in waves of new Capsuleers, expanding the EVE community. These fresh pilots will play through the updated AIR new player experience, leaving them ripe for recruitment, training, and integration by established player corporations and alliances. There will be an in-game celebration with an event and rewards to mark the arrival of these new Capsuleers, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
On the Horizon
Going live with the Gateway Quadrant are a couple of changes to resource distribution. More ice has been brought back into New Eden with its availability having doubled, and the availability of Mercoxit has also increased. These changes signal the start of greater updates to the scarcity of resources in the universe, and you can expect them in the fourth Quadrant which kicks off in November 2021, running until the beginning of February 2022. That’s not all! There are exciting additional gameplay updates being cooked up for launch during Gateway that will be geared towards veteran players. More details will follow on these updates soon.
Providing fresh access to EVE Online through new gateways will help grow the global Capsuleer community, and the new AIR Capsuleer training program will prepare them better than ever before for life in New Eden. The eventual resource distribution conclusion that Gateway will set EVE on course for, in addition to the waves of new pilots coming in with AIR’s new training, mean that established players will have plenty to sink their teeth into. All of this continues to set EVE Online up strongly for its third decade and beyond!
