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EVE Online: Apocrypha

Welcome to the Sandbox

EVE Online is somewhat unique for being the only "sandbox" MMO on the market, perhaps with the exception of Ultima Online. Almost every other massively multiplayer game has been built to work like a "theme park ride" - you do some quests, kill some monsters, gain levels and improve your equipment while moving through a more-or-less predetermined set of content carefully constructed to entertain. Players are split among numerous identical servers and major sources of rewards are often instanced to ensure that everyone gets to ride the popular rides for the best rewards. In a theme park-style MMO interaction with other players is often tightly regulated - player vs. player combat may be restricted to specific arenas or zones and every effort is made keep everything fair and to limit the amount of damage a player can do to the game experience of other players. Everyone gets to be a special snowflake, kill the biggest dragon, loot the mightiest sword and bullies are generally frowned upon.

EVE Online is decisively not a "theme park" MMO. Instead, EVE Online gives you a massive "sandbox" and a huge set of toys and game concepts to play with, leaving it up to the players to choose what they want to do with all the tools at their disposal. It is a true virtual world and can be hard to comprehend at first for someone who has been introduced to MMOs by World of Warcraft and it's carefully pre-canned content. This is both a blessing and a curse.

The EVE sandbox is not padded, most of the toys have sharp edges and some residents of EVE are bullies or just don't like to share their corner of the universe with others, putting all those dangerous toys into good use. EVE is harsh. EVE is mean. EVE rewards teamwork, dedication and preparation. Not every gamer has the time, inclination or simple self discipline to play EVE. This is one of the reasons why EVE has not managed to break into mainstream. At the same time it is the reason why EVE keeps on adding players year after year.

The Newbie Meatgrinder

Another reason why EVE has not really broken into mainstream has traditionally been the "learning cliff" that has caused many EVE careers to end during the first month. In the old days EVE tossed newbies into a pool of sharks and told them that they should probably learn to swim. The sharks were pleased but the newbies rarely survived. The first attempt at a proper tutorial in Red Moon Rising expansion, while an improvement, was clunky and still tossed you to the pool of sharks in the end. New players usually ended up more confused after the tutorial than before it. The sharks thanked for the confused newbies and the end result was often the same.

Considering that your avatar only shows as a small portrait in the game, the character creator is surprisingly flexible.

Tutorial Crash Course, first baby steps to figure out the skill system.

This has now changed quite a bit. For a new player, Apocrypha completely re-does the initial game experience. Character creation has been reworked and in essence your race and bloodline are the only big decisions - they determine your starting location and the ship and weapon type you first use. Both race and bloodline also affect the visual appearance of your character but not your stats, so there is no risk that you'd end up with a sub-optimal character. The initial career selection is retained mostly for roleplaying purposes and it no longer bestows you with a set of starter skills. You have always been able to do absolutely anything you want in EVE by just choosing the right skills to train and now with Apocrypha you can start the customization of your character from a much more basic level. There is no need to be stuck with skills you perhaps do not want and definitely have no clue about any more.

Early on you are given a set of missions that are theoretically optional but very lucrative. These missions teach you the basics of the three main career options for making money in EVE - Industry, Business and Military. Every EVE pilot can do all these things and freely choose how to specialized his character and the intent is that a new player gets to try all three activities to learn the basics and understand how each activity can be turned into additional assets. After all, it's ISK (the in-game currency of EVE) that makes the world go around. You could even say that while you can't "grind" for XP in EVE, you tend to "grind" for ISK instead. Ultra-capitalist universe and everything...

Career counseling for new players - you really should try out all of them.

First steps in learning the art of pew pew in EVE.

Industry missions cover the basics of mining, refining and manufacturing of goods. While there are some NPC-dropped weapons and modules, the vast majority of equipment and all the ships used in EVE are built by players from materials harvested by players either through mining or exploration. Industrial tycoons can end up generating massive wealth, but the competition is fierce and while mining is a popular way to make money early on, manufacturing tends not to generate any real profits until you have learned a number of related skills, invested heavily in blueprints and fully understand how the market works. It's a career, but you really need a nest egg before you can make a living.

Business missions dip into trading - EVE has the most comprehensive market system in a MMO (hence the "Excel in space" running jokes) and there are numerous ways to make a buck without ever undocking from a station. Like in real life, there are plenty of people out there ready to separate fools from their ISK and scams involving in-game items and in-game money are perfectly fine - buyer beware! It's also perfectly possible to play EVE like a massive version of Elite, hauling goods between trade hubs as a trader. The starter missions actually reward you with a basic hauler for free, and the starter systems offer a potential market opportunity for many goods that are in demand for new characters.

Military career covers the most obvious way of playing EVE - shooting stuff for loot and salvage. Initially you have a skill to fly a frigate of your race, the ability to use the main type of ship weapon traditional to your race and a couple of very basic ship-related skills that are needed by every character in EVE. The career introduction missions dish out numerous additional skills for free, and each is nicely explained in practice - sometimes with special "civilian" versions of the necessary module so you can try out the mechanic before training the skill needed for the real version of the module in question.

Overall the new start is a huge improvement and finally offers a set of simple, easy-to-grasp lessons to the main concepts of EVE. It's still a crash course and the sheer volume of information can be daunting, especially if you try to dash through the missions quickly, but I can't see how CCP could have distilled it down any more - EVE is a complex game and requires some dedication before it begins to open up to a newcomer.

Personally I would have added a more blunt explanation on the basic concept of fleeing from NPC combat. During my testing of the new tutorial, many genuine newbies in system were getting shot down due to their inexperience with EVE combat. A simple, yet unmentioned trick for NPC fights is to always set your autopilot to some nearby system - if you end up biting more than you can chew, simple activation of the autopilot will warp your ship to a nearby stargate and out of harms way. With bigger ships you may require more pre-planning, but early on this improves the odds a lot.

Story-driven EVE for Newbies

After the three career introductions, each consisting of ten missions, you are pointed towards the first epic mission arc of EVE, "The Blood-Stained Stars". While a definite challenge for a new player, it contains a nice package of "canned content" for those not used to the sandbox style of gameplay, easily keeping a fresh pilot busy for a week or two and providing a soft landing to the more open-ended gameplay. The arc takes you all over the safe empire space and you can freely branch off to do other things, returning to the arc later as you choose.

Unfortunately the step from introductory missions to the first story arc is a bit rough and you are not really told what to do with all the ships, skillbooks and loot you accumulate over the introduction. There is no universal "bank" to store your items that is accessible everywhere - your have free hangar space in any station, but it's tied to the station and if you are playing on a free trial there is no practical way to move around all the stuff as haulers cannot be flown on trial accounts. To a veteran of EVE, it's quite obvious that there is no need to haul most of the stuff around. Keep the skillbooks you can't train just yet (they take almost no cargo space), fit your best available combat-ready ship and just turn rest of the assets into ISK quickly by reprocessing and selling the minerals. The missions do introduce players to the concept of reprocessing ships and modules, yet a newbie most likely will end up trying to haul all the stuff around when the epic mission arc expects them to go nomad around the galaxy.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Gameplay, cont.Page 4: Gameplay, cont.Page 5: Apocrypha FeaturesPage 6: Visuals and PerformancePage 7: Summary, Scores

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