EVE Online Fractured Skies: Big Fights Every 10 Weeks

CCP Games launches the EVE Online expansion Fractured Skies on 10 November, alongside a paid 24/7 alpha for the companion shooter EVE Vanguard.

The headline change is not a ship or an interface. Design director Greg Hennessey says Factional Warfare is being rebuilt around Conquest seasons, so a large battle lands on a fixed schedule instead of whenever a coalition decides to start one.

• Four navy attack battlecruisers: Naga, Tornado, Oracle and Talos variants
• Nine Synchronizer rig sets across four empires and five pirate factions
• Thirteen free pre-fitted AIR Academy ships inside Starter Space
• A new optional HUD, first phase through Feature Preview
• EVE Vanguard 24/7 paid Alpha with three new maps
• The first Conquest season, reaching its climax in February

CCP calls this the second entry in the Theaters of War trilogy, following the summer’s Cradle of War, which introduced ongoing Military Campaigns. The Fractured Skies Expansion post sets up the next step through fiction: the four empires have built Conquest Engines capable of taking whole systems inside the Factional Warfare warzones, and a CONCORD pact is the only thing keeping them switched off. The pact is written to fail over the coming weeks.

Hennessey spent most of a PC Gamer interview on lowsec rather than the nullsec politics EVE is known for, and he rates the people fighting there highly.

“Our nullsec players are the ones who want to plot for three years and go have a billion dollar war for a year. players every day are like, let’s go out and brawl. Let’s just go lose some ships, boys.”

— Greg Hennessey

Conquests give that daily churn an ending. You enlist with a faction, fight Directives across a season, and bank Conquest Power that converts into an advantage at the final Siege, where each side brings a Conquest Engine online and tries to destroy the other one first. The winning side gets monuments and a line in New Eden’s recorded history. The first Conquest runs in February, later than the expansion itself, which CCP explained by saying the feature needed more time to cook.

The scheduling is aimed squarely at people who have never been inside a fleet fight.

“But every 10 weeks or so, you’re gonna know: I can roll up with whatever I have and go shoot some structures and have a big fight.”

— Greg Hennessey

EVE’s reputation for enormous battles is earned, and the end of World War Bee 2 between PAPI and the Imperium set four Guinness World Records in 2021. That war took over a year and a layer of coalition politics most players never reach, which is the distance Conquests are built to close.

I care far more about the permanence than the brawling, because a fight that gets written into a game’s history is the rare kind that still means something a year later. The risk I would watch is the calendar itself, since an emergent war turning into a scheduled appointment can lose the unpredictability that made EVE’s wars worth reading about in the first place. Hennessey is not pretending it happens in a vacuum either: Conquest results move resource and ship prices in the player economy, and an underdog can hire outside help to close the gap before the Siege.

The ground war feeds the same system. EVE Vanguard moves to a paid 24/7 alpha on the same day, with three maps split by security level: High Castle in highsec, where squads work shared objectives without PvP damage, Vorago in lowsec, where rival warclones stand between you and extraction, and The Vault in nullsec, where three squads of three fight through a layout that changes between deployments. Warclone expeditions start feeding Conquest Power to a chosen side from February. Founder’s Access goes on sale through the EVE launcher on 10 November.

New pilots get thirteen free pre-fitted AIR Academy ships covering combat, exploration and mining, usable inside Starter Space without any fitting knowledge. Thirteen ships I can fly before learning a fitting screen is the only kind of onboarding that would get me into New Eden at all. The AIR Career Program folds into the Achievements system and resets all current progress, so veterans can run it again. Before Conquests begin, January brings a one-off clash between all four empires over Drifter technology, fought in lowsec, with the winner taking an exclusive Drifter module into its LP store for a limited window.