EVE Online Free-to-Play Grows, Project Nova is Still Alive

This past weekend, CCP held its annual EVE Vegas event. As the name suggests, the convention is all about the company's flagship game, EVE Online... and it takes place in Las Vegas. During this EVE-centric weekend, fans of the game spent some time together celebrating and attending panels where they got to hear the latest EVE news from the devs themselves.

This weekend, there was big news on the free-to-play front for the game. After noting that the game's current free-to-play offering -- the Alpha clone -- wasn't really a hit with potential players who became frustrated with the limitations and either quit or just upgraded to the subscription mode, the company has decided to offer a more robust Alpha clone.

According to Massively OP, who was on the ground at EVE Vegas, the December Lifeblood expansion will offer Alpha clone players more ship options, giving them the ability to fly battlecruisers and train for ships belonging to all four races. They'll also be allowed to use tech 2 small and medium guns.

Alpha clone players will be able choose from skills worth more than 20 million skill points but it will still take them longer to train and they'll only be able to train up to the 5 million mark for free. After that, they'll have to subscribe or use skill injectors.

Based on these plans, Alpha clone players will hopefully stick around longer. However, the 5 million point cap still has the potential to frustrate players once they hit it. It will be interesting to see what kind of impact these changes have once they hit in December.

In other EVE related news out of the event, Project Nova (the spiritual successor to the now dead Dust 514) is still in the works although secrecy is still very high. CCP confirmed its partnership with Sumo Digital on the FPS title and while we likely have quite some time before we see the title in action, fans of the FPS can take comfort in knowing it is still a high priority for CCP.