Oceanus Announced

Over the weekend CCP announced, via devblog, the feature list for the next expansion due on the 30th September 2014.

I've read it a few times now and I've absorbed the comments on Reddit and the comprehensive preview by TMDC (really 646 words is comprehensive is it?) and I'm still left considerably underwhelmed by what is to come.

Opening Comment

To me there is very little for the average player, sure Interceptors and Interdictors are getting another rebalance (which I do think is needed) but aside from the start of the named module rebalancing (although this only starts with a renaming) there are no significant features or changes of benefit for the average player.

Name

I'm not a fan of the name, every time I see it I think of Oceanic I think of water and things NOT associated with EVE Online. I did the customary google search on the name and found this. 

In short, Oceanus was believed, by ancient Greeks and Romans, to be the an enormous river encircling the world, which was divine personification of the World Ocean, 

What this has to do with EVE Online I can't begin to imagine, what does a river have to do with spaceships in space? Given the feature set its fitting, a bunch of hooey for a release of hooey.

Features

The translation of EVE Online into French is long overdue, I always thought it was strange that there was a Japanese, German and Russian translations but one of the largest groups (French language) did not have a localised translation.

Mac users get an update but as I don't use a Mac and I don't know anyone who does to play EVE I can't really comment further.

Burner missions get an update, the "logistics friend" seems like a good variant but I've yet to try one of these missions and I have been put off attempting one after reading about how difficult people have found them. I know people are finding fits that work but I'm just not interested in frigate sized missions at the moment.

Named module naming changes. Not much can be said, the names will be changed and statistics will be updated later, in a later expansion. There is a devblog due on this that will explain how this will be done and I'm actually very interested in this as it will be a good indicator on how meta modules are going to be rebalanced.

There are a few graphical updates, the most visible one being a rework of the cloaking animation, more ship skins with changes opening up the possibility of customizable ship skins in a later expansion without impacting existing ship skins.

The largest graphical update will be to the visual appearance of wormholes with (hopefully) pilots now being able to identify the type of wormhole and whether or not their ship will be able to use it just by looking at it. CCP released an image of the changes but no labelling on the image we don't know what each wormhole means.

I'm most happy with the announcement that it will be a lot easier to import fittings from external tools such as EFT/pyfa and BattleClinic from the clipboard instead of having to mess around with xml files and the in-game EVE fitting tool. 

Notifications get an overhaul with the introduction of the new in-game opt-in all-in-one-location notification system and options to configure how and what notifications you'll see in various levels of detail. More details are to come in a yet to be released devblog.

There are a lot of small changes too, more tool tips for market groups/categories, new music (wait... EVE Online has sound/music!?), previews for the New Eden store and lots of "under the hood" changes to the game.

What About Null Sec

At the end of the devblog CCP mentioned the following:

The design team of EVE Online are working actively on changes to the game mechanics impacting null security space. The Council of Stellar Management are coming to Reykjavik for the CSM Summit next week, and directly after the summit we will bring the full discussion about the plans to the EVE community. Read more in this forum thread.

I don't know if we'll see anything in Oceanus, I doubt it, but gathering community feedback and assembling members of the CSM together in Iceland with CCP is the start. CCP obviously have ideas but tempering these with feedback from the CSM/player base will take time and I don't think we'll see any changes for at least another expansion or two.

Conclusion

Oceanus isn't a great or inspiring name for an expansion based on the features we've been told are coming, Perhaps they should just drop the Ocea from the name and go with Anus as the expansion name, it would then succinctly describes the release for most players I'd wager.

I don't see any changes coming from the Null/Sov Warfare summit considering there are only 15 days (from when this is written) until release and the list of features really is small and will not have a huge impact on the game.

That said, we can't have great expansions every time maybe Oceanus is the "take out the trash" release for 2014 but some changes here are groundwork that later, better features, will be built upon.