Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Hefty EVE Online: Incursion update

More new features in the pipeline.

A substantial update has just gone live for sci-fi MMO EVE Online: Incursion, developer CCP has announced.

The new patch adds enhancements for clones and jump clones, market improvements, the return of character capturing and plenty more besides. See below for the full, colourful list of tweaks, as published on the game's official forum.

Elsewhere on the site, senior producer CCP Zulu promised that there was more to come too.

"We've still got tons of changes and at least three more planned point releases for Incursion with the possibility of more stuff added in between them," he explained.

"The Incursion voyage means even more 'little fixes' from Team BFF in the future, adjustments to the character creator and also some sizeable database steroid injections. Fixes and faces and uberhamsters oh my.

"We're going to continue on this path of more, smaller and more evenly distributed deployments in the future now that we have the ability to do so and it seemed quite well received by you all. Over the coming weeks and months, our dev teams will add meaningful content and fixes to EVE and we'll be sure to keep you up to speed on all the upcoming face-meltitude that they entail."

Clones:

  • We've cleaned up the jump clone window in the character sheet. It now has buttons instead of a right click menu and just generally looks better.
  • You can now remotely destroy a jump clone from anywhere.
  • When you select a new home station for your clone, the region and sec status is displayed. This is to prevent jump cloning into "oh my god where am I this can't be right who are those people?"
  • We've greyed out clones that hold less SP than you currently have, to help people avoid buying clones that don't really do anything.

Incursions:

  • Made tweaks to the way a constellation is selected. Unfortunately, if I told you any more about this process, I'd have to kill you.
  • Incursion ISK rewards are now subject to corporation tax, like other bounty forms.
  • To increase the lifetime of Incursions, we've made a small cut in the contribution the sites make to the influence bar.
  • Speaking of the influence bar, it pretty quickly became apparent that the low-sec and zero-sec ones needed adjustment. Sansha influence rate of regain in both those security bands have been minimized, meaning they'll be a lot easier to do.
  • Since there isn't a good reason to remote rep someone who is criminally flagged apart from griefing, we're removing the ability to RR criminals in highsec. This is to close a loophole where people would CONCORDOKKEN their fleet. Thanks to Team Gridlock for making this change for us.

UI:

  • We've added a warning when you remove agents from your contacts, to make sure you don't remove the wrong one.
  • The sell/buy window now opens in the last state it was used, either normal or advanced. This is to make sure no one gets arthritis from clicking too much.
  • The assets tab lets you search by distance.
  • You can now drop items into containers without having to open them, BECAUSE THAT'S HOW IT SHOULD BE.
  • The location of player stations should now be visible through the market, so you don't accidentally spend all your ISK buying janitors in a hostile station.
  • The appearance and autopilot tab are both drag and drop.
  • Get contracts in the show info window has been moved from a button to the menu.
  • Added more intuitive group and menu icons.
  • The character sheet has been cleaned up a little bit, because it was getting dusty.
  • You can now clear waypoints while in space, and not just from the map.
  • Portrait grab should be back ingame, so you can go back to silently weeping while stroking a printed picture of your avatar. You're creepy.

NPCs:

  • We've re-balanced officers so their difficulty reflects their value more.