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EVE Online: Apocrypha

A Massively Multiplayer Game Like No Other

EVE Online is, above all, something completely different in the MMO genre. Since the glory days of Ultima Online are long gone, it remains as the only real sandbox game that gives players ton of freedoms to bend the game world to their will. No other publisher has been willing to risk it with a true sandbox world where the players are just given a bunch of tools and game systems and it's up to them to make it all work.

It must be said that Apocrypha does continue the unfortunate tradition of EVE, shipping with numerous new features that are either not balanced or not even fully completed. To CCPs credit, the overall code quality and implementation has improved in the past year or two, so nothing is outright broken but if you poke the new features a bit deeper, a lot has been left for the playerbase to test in the live servers and there are some issues here and there. In a way the design philosophy is understandable for a sandbox-style MMO - toss a bunch of things in, concentrating on ensuring that nothing breaks anything critical and then see what the players make of it. Logically you'd then go back in and re-tune or rework the bits that didn't end up working - except that EVE has a long list of previously shipped expansions with major features that didn't quite work out - yet almost universally they have ended up untouched as CCP dashed forward to build the next cool new feature.

Apocrypha is a great expansion, especially at the pricetag of "free" for the existing subscribers, but when Tech 3 manufacturing, Sleepers, epic mission arcs, new sound code and new graphical effects all ended up shipping in somewhat unfinished state, one can only hope that CCP would actually stick to polishing it all until it shines instead of dashing forward to complete the next shiny feature for the next expansion pack. In this regard, CCP could learn a thing or two from Blizzard - their development schedules are longer and always contain follow-up patches to major expansions to tie up any loose ends and fix any bits that didn't work out as expected. So far CCP has done such re-touches only to mend actual bugs.

Still, due to the unique gaming environment offered by EVE, ultimately some issues are forgiven in the scoring - the good bits far outweigh the bad and sometimes you just can't score a game by just mechanically deducting from a perfect score due to identifiable flaws. EVE Online is a harsh but great game, and Apocrypha is a good expansion - flaws and everything. It's also a good reason to give EVE another go, especially if you are one of those who were quickly turned off by the clunky tutorial or the harsh learning curve.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

EVE Online is also available for Mac OS X

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

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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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