CCP has announced the launch date of the tenth expansion for its MMOG Eve Online. Eve Online: Apocrypha is to be "the most ambitious EVE expansion in the game’s over five year history" and is to coincide with the March 10th release of Eve Online as a boxed product in partnership with Atari.

Though this probably won't make a whole lot of sense to any players who aren't already very familiar with Eve Online's lore, the plot of Apocrypha is that " vast, unpredictable wormholes" have opened in the universe, and players who choose to explore them can find new technology within which will allow them to produce new "Tech 3 modular ships" with heightened customizability.

In addition, NPCs will be able to assign "Epic Mission Arcs" to players, which are "full of meaningful stories and more intelligent and deadly adversaries," possibly offering more to the kinds of players who like a more "scripted" MMOG experience rather than the vast and (daunting!) player versus player possibilities traditionally offered by the game.

Finally, for players who find the whole thing daunting anyway, they are also offering an entirely new "New Player Experience" for players joining the game.

“Just this past week we broke our concurrent user record with 45,186 people flying unbound in the same game world at the same time—a huge percentage of our quarter of a million current subscribers and a true testament to EVE in our sixth year of operation,” said EVE Online Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson. “Today is an unprecedented time to start playing, as you can get ahead of the curve before Apocrypha releases in stores and our hard work hits the server cluster. It’ll be easier than ever to get ‘lost in the wormhole’ that is EVE with what we have planned for the future of our expanding universe.”