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EVE Online roadmap includes expansion plans and Excel integration

A greater emphasis on narrative and spreadsheets are among the highlights from EVE Fanfest's keynote.

Ozzie Mejia

May 6, 2022 3:55 PM

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The team at CCP Games had some grand plans lined up for this year's EVE Fanfest in Reykjavik, Iceland. During Friday's keynote, the team outlined a full roadmap for the years ahead. This includes some new features, a new expansion, and spreadsheets. That's right, there will be spreadsheets.

From a storytelling standpoint, look for EVE Online to introduce Arcs. Each of the game's four NPC Empires will see new story instances, which will lead to an expansion finale for the first arc. That is currently scheduled for a Q4 2022 release. For an idea of what to expect, you can check out the new trailer above, but CCP Games expects these narrative instances to have a substantial effect on everything happening across New Eden.

From a gameplay standpoint, look for a greater new player experience soon. The AIR Career Program is an initiative that will help walk players through one of EVE's four career paths: Explorer, Industrialist, Enforcer, or Soldier of Fortune. In addition to learning the ins-and-outs of each profession, newcomers can find tailored recommendations for how to go about proceeding through their chosen path.

A more unexpected reveal sees CCP Games partnering up with Microsoft for a new feature. EVE Online players will soon be able to add a JavaScript API in Excel in order to export data directly from EVE Online. This allows players to outline strategies, mark down numbers, and execute elaborate operations. Look for more information about EVE Online's Excel features in the future.

This won't be all that CCP Games has in store for the EVE Online fan base. More news is expected to come from EVE Fanfest, which is expected given the dev team's pent up excitement that follows the 2020 event's cancellation. We'll be watching here at Shacknews, but for everything revealed to this point, be sure to visit the EVE Online website.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?