“Trinity: The expansion you have to see” is the header of a brief news item on the CCP official site, giving an overview of the November expansion, that will equip EVE with a brand new graphics engine. The Devs at CCP seem to have done a great job too, as you can see from this slideshow on flickr.com and this movie on ign.com showing off some of the changes done to ship models.

Most of what is in the game has been redesigned for the new graphics engine “Trinity 2” and they will make use of the shiny Shader Model 3.0. Whatever that means - it does look good.

The expansion comes in two flavors: classic and premium, both of which are free. Classic will allow players with not so up-to-date hardware to keep on playing with the old graphics engine, while the premium upgrade with its huge 1 GB size will deliver the new look to your machine. A few details can be found over at the CCP official site from this Dev Blog .

As with any expansion that deserves its name, players were promised a big addition to content on top of the graphics. Looking at the new ships alone, there seems to be some love for everybody. “Black Ops” jump-drive equipped battleships and heavy interdictors for PvP action, some sort of tech2 battleship to give the mission runners an edge for upcoming PvE slaughter and maybe even the long awaited freighter with jump capability for the hardy industrialist. From what I’ve seen on the test server, some of these ships do require some serious skill training, but there are new frigate class ships in the package too that sound very fun to fly and will be usable for players that are less privileged skillpoint wise.

For my part, I’m curious not only to see the new graphics, but also what effect the new ships will have on warfare and the political map of EVE….

Phyra