EVE Online: Cold War Edition will put the fragile peace sustaining the Empire territories at risk, as sovereignties secretly vie for advantage over their foes. Empires will unite to form pacts, old superhighways will be changed... a new world order is forming. Dozens of new passageways into the deep space regions will create unprecedented opportunities for both veteran and new pilots alike.

Some of the features of this upgrade include:

- COSMOS Constellations: A new large scale gameplay element where pilots will have agent encounters in space, new environments to explore, and new technologies to discover.
- Dreadnoughts: The fearsome Dreadnought enters the battlefield equipped with jumpdrives and will have enough firepower to take down player owned structures.
- Outposts: A compact and effective alternative to the current player built stations.
- Freighters: Massive haulers with immense capacity to help players conquer deep space.
- Leadership Overhaul: Enhanced fleet warfare, new skills, and modules will improve players' ability to defend and attack in fleet combat.
- Pirate Factions: Better...Stronger...and likely to reveal their secrets and high value loot.
- Industrial Revolution: Starbases get a major boost and more valuable minerals will be available in low security Empire space.
- Combat Changes: Many changes that will further improve combat in EVE, making combat even more tactical.
- Unicode Chat Input: Chat in any language, for example Asian fonts will be rendered by the EVE font system, along with Cyrillic and Greek.
- New Tech Level 2 technology: Includes missiles launchers, drones and various defensive modules.