Eve: Trinity due first week in December

Trinity, the latest expansion for space-based MMO Eve Online - from Iceland's CCP Games - will be released during the first week of December.

The patch, which contains a massive graphical overhaul to the game — in which over 500 ships have been completely re-drawn from scratch — will be made available for free, as with CCP's other Eve expansions.

The news was released at this year's FanFest, which saw a record 1000 people attend the event in Reykjavik, and featured lectures, panel discussions, roundtables, tournaments and stage shows.

Trinity will also feature 20 new ships, along with numerous enhancements to the game's mission and drone systems, and in-game voice communication software Eve Voice will also become free to use.

CEO Hilmar Petursson also announced that the company was working on building one of Europe's biggest supercomputers in order to eliminate lag from the game's most populated regions.

New details were also released on some content being worked on now for release in 2008 - tagged the Ambulation Project, which will enable players to be represented in space stations as human avatars for the first time, FanFest attendees heard how it will be possible to create and manage bars, clothes stores and plastic surgeries.

Furthermore, work is still ongoing at the concept stage on long-term plans to make planetary interaction possible, although details on what that might represent in gameplay terms are still scarce.

Subscriptions for the game, which have been rising by around 80 per cent every year since launch, recently hit over 195,000, with player concurrency records being set on a weekly basis — the latest is 37,200, and Eve was only overtaken on a single server number by Second Life earlier in the year.