YouGamers.com

Reviews

EVE Online: Apocrypha

Apocrypha - The New Bits

Apocrypha adds a handful of new features to EVE. The most important goal of Apocrypha is stated to be the introduction of real exploration to the game. Originally the EVE universe felt a bit sterile as there really wasn't anything you could explore in the game. Earlier patches introduced exploration, allowing players to use scan probes to hunt down a wide variety of sites in known systems for fun and profit. The problem was, the scanning mechanic was far too complex and required a considerable investment in skill points for the related skills and the use of a specialized ship for hunting down sites. It was career, but it required so much dedication that very few ended up doing it.

Apocrypha completely revamps the scan probes. You can now easily fit a scan probe launcher to any ship - specialized ships are now needed only when hunting down other ships in PvP that are trying to avoid you by hiding. There are still some skills you need to learn, but the practical minimum level needed to scan down easy exploration sites and wormholes can be attained in just a couple of days.

The related big feature is of course wormholes. Since the launch of Apocrypha, EVE universe now has unstable wormholes popping up everywhere, leading to other known systems and to uncharted wormhole space. There are about 2500 new wormhole-accessible systems that are the new wild west of EVE. No stations, no stargates, no sovereignty to claim, no CONCORD and no local. The last bit is important - every known system in EVE has a local chat channel that immediately shows who is in the system - a handy tool for avoiding pirates and other hostiles in low security or 0.0 space. In wormhole space the local chat shows you only if you say something in the chat and this dramatically changes the equation. Only way to know if someone else is in the system is to take a look with scan probes. Same is true for finding Sleepers - the new NPC enemies that populate the wormhole space.

Sleepers are also not your normal EVE "rats" (ones which are well known for having the AI of a dumb brick). While Sleeper ships do have strong offensive capabilities and very thick armor, the most deadly aspect of these new enemies is the evil piece of code that controls their reactions to players. Historically EVE NPC ships have picked the first target that comes to a predetermined range or opens fire and then kept attacking it until it goes boom or leaves the area - with no regard to who else is shooting at them. Sleepers introduce proper aggro mechanics - they pick targets and focus their fire based on intelligent assessment of the attacking ships, switch targets, attempt to stay at their optimal range, shoot drones and "spider tank" using remote armor repairers to help the ship that players are firing at. Add in the number of Sleeper ships equipped with warp disruptors or stasis webifiers and the fact that Sleeper groups often get reinforced with additional waves of ships as you finish the previous group and their evil capability to drop in several additional battleships to the field if players employ capital ships and you can probably understand why wormhole space is a whole new ballgame. Some low end unknown systems are theoretically soloable, but most of the wormhole space encounters are intended for small fleets.

Wormholes are also constantly decaying and have a mass limit - you can only take in a certain number of ships limited by the total mass until the wormhole collapses, effectively limiting the size of your expeditionary force and each hole is available only for a day or two. The average difficulty level of a wormhole system is influenced by the security status of the system where the wormhole appears, but it is possible to end up in a hard wormhole system from safe empire space as well. All wormholes are two-way and every wormhole space system has at least one wormhole in it. If you end up in wormhole space and your entry hole closes, the only non-suicidal way out is to use scan probes to find another wormhole - and that wormhole may very well end up leading deeper into wormhole space or a system on the other side of the known space, claimed by a hostile 0.0 alliance. Early on many explorers ventured into the new systems in fleets with limited number of probe launchers and the result was a pile of funny stories how super-expensive ships ended up lost in space as the expected exit closed while the ships with probe launchers already left the system (or got blown to bits).

Exiting a wormhole into one of the new uncharted systems.

The Sleepers guard their valuables in wormhole space with deadly force.

The main carrot dangling for the players in wormhole space is the capability to obtain Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers. New asteroid belts, gas clouds and the Sleepers themselves are the sole sources of materials and blueprint copies for these new ships and their subsystems, causing a predictable "gold rush" to the new systems. Unlike any other ship in EVE, Strategic Cruisers are built from sections - each ship has five subsystems and each base hull has hundreds of possible combinations you can build by mixing different sections. Each subsystem modifies the ships capabilities - number of slots for modules, speed, armor, shields, agility, cargo capacity, drone capacity, bonuses to weapon systems and so on.

The manufacturing chain to build Tech 3 ships is extremely complex, requiring looted blueprints, salvaged sleeper components and new materials manufactured in player-owned starbase reactors in addition to the basic minerals. The jury is officially still out if it is all worth it, but at the moment the expected price of the first completed Tech 3 ships is astronomical - perhaps north of one billion ISK, almost enough to buy a Dreadnought. Pretty steep for "just" a cruiser - a small ship that can sometimes get blown up in a second when bigger ships duke it out in fleet battles.

Skill Queue, Epic Story Arcs...

Apocrypha's addition of skill training queue is one of those "why on earth it wasn't done like this in the first place" type features. It used to be that you had to juggle with numerous skills or wake up to alarm clock in the middle of the night to ensure as little wasted training time as possible. The new queue, while a bit quirky during the first days, allows you to queue up to 24 hours of skill training and then top it of with one more skill that is scheduled to start within the next 24 hours, but may actually complete even weeks into the future. As long as you can log in every few days, it's pretty much impossible to lose training time any more - unless the queue manages to bug out. CCP has already fixed some of the problems and I'm sure they'll work out the remaining kinks in the next week or two and the concept itself is just pure "win".

Related to skill training, you can now also re-allocate the inherent stats of your character. New characters get two free re-allocations while existing characters get one, and there is a 12 month "cooldown" to get another once they are used up. Great for fixing poor stat allocations of some races and perhaps of interest to someone with an old character they ended up abandoning due to mistakes with the old character creation.

A lot of noise was also made about the inclusion of epic mission arcs for those who are tired of the same old missions. Unfortunately at the last minute it was revealed that while a lot of work had went to implementing the code required for the new misson arcs, the only actual arc included in Apocrypha is the "newbie" arc that starts right after the tutorial. It's not a bad set of missions and it's clear that the mission code itself was greatly expanded, but understandably the shipped product doesn't quite match the pre-hype in this regard - every veteran empire dweller looking for more story-driven content based around shooting NPCs ended up disappointed.

Other Rough Edges

CCP has historically spent a lot of time and effort to expand EVE in many ways. Yet almost every expansion has been plagued with small nagging issues. Unfinished features, unbalanced ships or modules (usually "pre-nerfed" to be not worth the effort or the additional skill training required) and outright bugs. While bugs are usually fixed rapidly, there is a whole laundry list of earlier content that was more or less abandoned after going live. COSMOS missions and some specialized Tech 2 ships are a great examples of this issue.

With Apocrypha, the "tradition" continues. Currently the Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers look like super-expensive toys to be shown off in screenshots, not actually flown into combat. The amount of materials and manufacturing steps required make them completely overpriced. Based on combat testing on the test server they are great cruisers, but if a standard Tech 1 cruiser with modules costs around 15 million and a truly tricked out Tech 2 cruiser with modules tops out around 200 million, if Tech 3 Strategic Cruisers are going to go for 600-900 million a pop, it's just... you could buy a Carrier for that! While the market ultimately decides the final price of Tech 3 ships, considering that the Sleepers are just mean to anything short of a well-prepared fleet, the risk/reward calculations translate to two potential outcomes - either Tech 3 ships will be super-expensive, or there will be no Tech 3 ships as the risks in wormhole space do not translate into rewards from selling the harvested raw materials and blueprint copies that would beat "safe" ISK farming through Level 4 missions or basic 0.0 space mining or ratting - and every non-PvP activity in EVE tends to be distilled to a comparison between risk and expected ISK/hour reward.

CCP could of course change the whole equation by simply adjusting the material requirements or the loot drops. Could happen, but if past history of EVE development is anything to go by, I'm not holding my breath.

Apocrypha's new scanning system also has some balance issues. While the bar has been set pretty low for scanning down exploration sites and other non-moving targets, the new system has also made it nearly impossible to locate an enemy vessel that is boxed in a single solar system but trying to avoid a fight on purpose. It takes a lot longer to narrow down a scanner hit you can warp to, even if you have some general idea where the hostile is hiding.

Oh, and it would be nice to get some real epic mission arcs, instead of the single one that actually shipped. At least the underlying code now supports them, so it's possible that the concept of epic arcs is not abandoned like the non-repeatable special COSMOS missions were.

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

Related Stuff

Tags