EVE Online gets free-to-play access this November

Although an MMO going to free-to-play isn’t usually headline news (most MMO game actually launch with a free-to-play option), EVE Online is a completely different animal.

When the next expansion is released, CCP have chose to split their clones into 2 different types, Alpha and Omega. For the past 13-years, EVE has been available to players willing to subscribe to a monthly fee. The first, called the Alpha Clone State, will be a new base state for any user to train and use skills, and be saved for new users or those who are returning to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game. In addition, you have access only to your faction’s ships and weapons compared to Omega Clone players that can learn ship and weapons skills from every faction in the game.

The skill set that Alpha Clones can train is race specific to the character that is training, and includes skills for flying tech one frigates, destroyers and cruisers, and for basic access to trading and industry. If you have skills trained on a character in Alpha State, which are not part of the Alpha skill set, those skills will be locked and unusable until Omega state is reactivated.

The list of trainable skills available to EVE Online free-to-play accounts listed in the announcement is relatively hefty, but capped at a maximum level of four or five. “Characters on subscribed accounts will be granted Omega state, while Alpha state will be given to characters on any unsubscribed account”.

“If your subscription runs out, though, you can continue to play EVE”.

“Part of our vision for the future of Eve has included more open access for some time, but with the interconnected nature of the game comes vulnerability”, developer Team Size Matters explains.

CCP outlines the entire update in needlessly complicated lore terms, but the basics are familiar to nearly anyone who’s played a free-to-play game.

CCP has put together an in-depth Q&A section, as well as a list of every skill the developer is considering allowing for Alpha players.

The free-to-play approach is uncharted territory for CCP Games.

“We’ve found a design we believe in”.

“As you know, EVE is a very special game”. The big changes come to free players (Alpha Clones).