Apocryphalyptic

Posted by Stropp on March 10, 2009

I noticed last night when I logged in to Eve Online an announcement that for tonights daily downtime, the servers were going to be down a bit longer so that CCP can release the Aprocrypha expansion. Yay!

Even though I’ve been playing Eve on and off for the last couple of months, and I was aware that Aprocrypha was on the way, this one sort of snuck up on me a bit. Hrmph, the whole year so far has snuck up and awy from me, it won’ t be too long before the next round of games comes out — Specifically Champions and Jumpgate in June.

Back on topic; There’s a couple of things that are looking really sweet with Aprocrypha. The biggest of these is the addition of a whole bunch of new systems that are only accessible through temporary wormholes, and that are inhabited by a new, far smarter, big bad. The new AI baddies won’t be your same ol’ dumb rats, they’re going to use tactics to make the battle unpredicatable. CCP are adding a new element to exploration here.

Closely tied to the new systems, are the Tech 3 ships. I’m not sure if there are any frigates in that bunch, but these are new highly customisable ships whose function in a battle won’t necessarily be easy to determine. Let me explain. Nearly all of the current ships have stats that lend themselves to a certain activity. Some improve missile flight time, where others are give bonuses to electronic warfare activities. From what I understand the new ships will obfuscate that.

The other big feature is the ability to now queue skill training for up to 24 hours. So now if you buy a bunch of new skills, you can queue them all up so that if one is scheduled to finish within 24 hours, you can queue the next immediately after. Now this is nice. It means that those inconvenient lifestyle activities; going to work, out with friends, or just plain sleeping, don’t interfere with your skill training.

The only thing missing from the skill training as far as I’m concerned is the ability for skills to keep training when they complete a stage. So when I start training a new skill, let’s say Salvaging, the training currently stops when it reaches level 1. What I’d like to see happen is that the skill keeps training to the maximum level of 5 if I don’t step in to change to a new skill, perhaps due to one of those peskly lifestyle activities mentioned earlier.

That’s not all that this expansion has to offer, there’s also a new player/character experience on the cards, Apocrypha is looking to be a serious update to the game. All up though, Eve Online is going from strength to strength and Aprocrypha looks set to continue the rise of Eve Online as one of the most successful and influential MMORPGs around.

Popularity: 5% [?]