Shadow of the Serpent: Sarpati’s Revenge

Virge Salvador Sarpati and the Serpentis are out for blood, and the history of EVE Online will change forever. That’s the gist of the latest event, “Shadow of the Serpent”, being released next week. The background of it is the vast expansion of the military capabilities of the Serpentis Corporation, the narcotics-dealing corporation based in the Fountain Region. The lore background of Salvador Sarpati, “CEO” of this criminal corporation, is deep and fascinating, and I strongly encourage that you seek out the Chronicles discussing the Serpentis. A good backgrounder is here.

The thirst for revenge from V. Salvador Sarpati eventually lead him and his cronies to steal the Solteur-class Iapetus titan, Molyneux, from the Federation Navy, which is described here. Already you can see that this event has a lot of excellent and deeply fascinating angles. Players have always enjoyed delving into the Serpentis/Federation conflict as an inspiration for years of exciting roleplay, story writing, and other content creation, and the web is filled with excellent examples. That is what makes the Shadow of the Serpent so interesting.

CCP has learned from lessons in the past year of events they have released, and they discussed some of the awesomeness they have planned in a devblog, here. To break it down simply, there will be a section on the right of the login screen will display available objectives, whether it is to clear a certain number of sites, or simply to eliminate some pesky Serpentis rats in the asteroid belts.

As you complete these objectives, you gain points that contribute to a system of awards. Since the effect is cumulative, you can log in sporadically, complete some objectives, and it will trickle into bigger and bigger rewards over time. The system is interesting, and it seems likely to encourage more participation from these events due to increased visibility. The news ticker at the top of the status screen is awesome, too, for the lore nerds out there, and gives key background to the events as they unfold during the six week long event.

The sites themselves will primarily be in the form of dungeons, with NPC’s to shoot (however, players will be a constant threat in lowsec and nullsec as well!), though CCP seems to be keeping much of the content of this event on the down low for now. The rewards are also a mystery, though many suspect rewards relating to the new Serpentis faction dreadnaught, supercarrier, and Erebus class ships, the Vehement, the Vendetta, and the Vanquisher, respectively, along with various modules and booster-related items that might be dropped. Many more meticulous EVE metagame writers will have dissected these ships more thoroughly than I, so please refer to them for more details. Needless to say, they will wreck face when they are brought to bear.

Serpentis Research Vault in “Serpentis Shipyard and Research Facility” site. Yes, that’s a Serpentis Forizar-class citadel.

One of the key items required to produce Serpentis capital ships will be the “Serpentis Modified Capital Microprocessor”, essentially overclocked and specially programmed computer cores that make the Serpentis capitals tick. Without them, it would be impossible to build these ships. I expect this will be a hotly contested item as the BPC’s of these ships are bought and sold on the contract markets.

Another key item is the “Asklepian” type implant sets, which provide a bonus to armor repair amount. These are only effective for local repair modules, and do not benefit capital-sized modules whatsoever. However, you can imagine the hilarious possibilities of combining these with active tanked bonus ships such as the Deimos, Myrmidon, etc, Exile boosters, and ganglinks. I look forward to the PvP videos!

CCP is clearly laying the groundwork for a dynamically evolving and challenging set of events. The Scope Network tool in-game is a window that seems to be able to be configured for multiple types of events, for various factions. This could lead to some engaging fun to come in the next year or so as CCP unleashes the remaining citadel-type structures and content.

It is an interesting time to be in EVE. Time to log in and squish some Serpentis snakes. See you out there.

Featured image art by Gabriel Cassata.