The Hyperion is a great ship for people who don’t like to ask questions, like “Why didn’t I just buy a Megathron?”
-Goon Wiki
Today CCP drops the second mini-expansion on us. We had Crius five weeks back, and today we have Hyperion.
Of course, I was all “Heh, there is a battleship type called ‘Hyperion’ in the game, I should run with that!” when I saw the name of the expansion.
And you know where I’ll go for Rhea then…
Not a very original idea and, as it turns out, the Hyperion seems to be a bit of a loser when it comes to Gallente battleships. As the quote from the Goon Wiki above indicates, I would be hard pressed to come up with a scenario where one would choose the Hyperion over its Gallente stablemates, the Dominix or the Megathron. I even went over to my other site to find a picture of the ship, but with more than 800 EVE Online screen shots posted, the Hyperion only appears once. And that shot was a classic graphics shot from 2009, back when the ship might have had a place. Oddly though, the year 2009 fits into the scheme of things, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
The Old Hyperion
Anyway, the Hyperion expansion was not named for the Gallente battleship, which as far as I can tell gains no benefit from the update, but from the mythical titans, who lend their name to the expansion out into the foreseeable future. My momentary flirtation with the ship was mostly because Hyperion’s main focus is on wormhole space, and I know squat about wormhole space.
Hyperion Wormhole – Note ship not used…
Wormhole space showed up with the Apocrypha expansion back in March 2009 (back when I was taking classic graphics screen shots of Gallente battleships) along with the skill queue, tech III ships, the ship fitting window, that epic mission arc thing I never did, and an updated new player experience, all of which seems far more recent in my brain than five years ago.
Apocrypha – March 2009
But there it is, and wormhole space added nearly 2,500 star systems, which makes up more than a quarter of space in EVE Online. And I have barely ever been there.
Potshot and I were planning a wormhole expedition at one point. We were going to find a small wormhole, set up a tower, and live the life of the independent space pioneer. And then we found that we were far from alone in that idea as every wormhole we scouted seemed to be occupied. Packing up to go live in w-space seemed to be a fairly common goal. So it seems odd to read articles that talk about CCP’s vision for w-space being that of a nomadic existence, where players never settled but just roamed about, mining or ratting or whatever, only to return to known space at then end of their mission. I only ever heard, “new lands to settle!” sorts of sentiment back then, probably influenced by the ideas of sovereign null sec.
Emergent behavior took over, players did what they wanted to, and w-space became what it was. CCP has been clear in its blogs about Hyperion that they are not going to try to “fix” things to bring them back to what they envisioned, but rather change things to help suit what has become the defacto behavior in w-space… and, of course, tune some of the discoveries made by players over the years as to how to exploit w-space. Given enough time, players will always find the best, or most efficient, approach to anything.
Since I know next to nothing about wormhole space, I’ll defer to those who live there as to whether the changes are good or not.
The other graphic being used for Hyperion
Other than wormhole space, there are some changes to incursions and missions, including a new type of optional level 4 mission called a “burner mission.” In those missions, you will be tasked to go chase down and destroy a pirate faction frigate fitted for PvP style encounters. And you, yourself, will be limited to a frigate hull as well, so this is supposed to be something of a challenge… which is why it has to be optional… and perhaps a way to get people to transition a little more towards a PvP mentality after running endless PvE missions.
I will be interested to see if this ends up being used much or not.
There are also a couple of additions to the New Eden Store (formerly NEX) that give players some additional items they can purchase for real world cash and turn around and sell for ISK in game. The two new items are the Pilot’s Body Resculpt Certificate, which lets you redo your avatar, and the Multiple Pilot Training Certificate, which lets you activate a second training queue on your account so your alt can train up as well as your main. Previously you could purchase both of these with PLEX. At first I suspected that the increasing price of PLEX has prompted CCP to separate these two, though to get Aurum, the currency for the New Eden Store, you have to buy PLEX in any case, so the price of PLEX in Jita will still drive pricing so… what was the question again? Anyway, these are now things in New Eden.
And then there is the usual array of minor adjustments and bug fixes for the release. You can go read the Hyperion expansion page for the general overview and the patch notes for the gritty details. The expansion itself appears to have been deployed without incident.
The next expansion on the list is Oceanus, which should show up in another six weeks or so, putting it somewhere in early-to-mid October.
I guess that CCP timeline is way-off by this point (so I should probably stop using it), largely because what ended up going into Cruis, all those industry updates (and did those change the shape of industry very much, I haven’t really paid attention), were supposed to be in Kronos, so the clock got moved up for that first mini-expansion. And soon we will hear what Oceanus might bring. But for today it is just Hyperion.
As I have noted elsewhere, at least we get new music with each new expansion, so with more expansions we get more music, so I will leave you with the official CCP music for Hyperion.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 