EVE: Valkyrie Gets A Death Star-Esque Trench Run Mode
Don't get cocky, kid!
The first major free update for EVE: Valkyrie [official site] is now live, which means you can finally take the fight to an enemy team's carrier ship. Called Carrier Assault, this new mode taps into every Star Wars fan's obsession with flying down trenches, shouting "you're all clear kid," and then making really expensive military equipment blow up.
Getting to that climactic finale, however, requires chewing through three stages of attack and defense, the first being a skirmish mode. Here players will vie for control of three power relay stations, and when they manage to capture two of them, the enemy carrier's shields will temporarily dissipate. From there, the attacking team must destroy cooling nodes on the enemy carrier to disable its defensive systems before launching a Death Star-style trench run to destroy the core and the ship itself. New boost gates have also been introduced, getting pilots back into the action quicker by providing them a one-way speed boost to specific objectives.
But Carrier Assault is more than just a new game mode, there's also a new map called Crossroads to dogfight in as well. Crossroads is also available in both of Valkyrie's Scout and Survival game modes, letting you discover more echoes to help fill in the teeny amount of backstory that existed prior to the update. While I haven't had the chance to try Carrier Assault for myself yet, I did get to do battle in Crossroads back at Fanfest earlier this year. It's...well it's a new map, which is to say it looks pretty as hell but I would be hard pressed to point out what distinctly sets it apart from other Valkyrie maps. In any case, Carrier Assault looks rad.
The update also introduces a bunch of smaller fixes and balance tweaks, including a new tactical menu to display the status of every player in your match and their basic statistics. There's also a rework to how multiplayer match selection works, now allowing you to choose between playing every available game mode or just Carrier Assault continuously, like falling in love with a song and then listening to it on repeat until you want to puke. If you want to read the full patch notes, you can do so here.
Finally, no word yet from CCP on when HTC Vive support will be added, but it should be later this year. They recently announced that Valkyrie would be coming to Playstation VR on October 13, so hopefully Vive support arrives before then. If you own a Vive and are dying for some space combat, perhaps House of the Dying Sun will satiate you?