GAMESRADAR: 5 REASONS TO ENTER EVE ONLINE: APOCRYPHA
EVE Online may have been around since 2003 (today marks its six-year anniversary), but developer CCP hopes to attract new players with its recent expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha. The game takes place in the New Eden solar system, run by empires of different races all working towards peace and progress within the galaxy. You emerge as a newly graduated capsuleer, an elite pilot who can control a ship from a special pod. But it’s your ship – not your pilot – that takes the center stage in EVE, and customizing it with various upgrades is key to surviving and thriving in the game.That means making lots of money, so get ready to take up a profession, tune up your craft, start buying and selling materials and build a corporation with friends so you can take a shot at cornering the market in EVE’s ever-changing economy.
EVE Online has always had a bad reputation for being overly complex. But with Apocrypha’s “New Player Experience,” CCP plans to ease in players put off by the game’s steep learning curve. Now, getting into the game is easier than ever.
Before, players were forever stuck with the attributes they first selected for their character. Finding out that the character build you were going for just isn’t working out as you intended after investing hours in the game was frustrating, to say the least. Now, players can change their attribute skills once a year. It sounds like a minor fix for a major problem, but the end result is a more streamlined and straightforward character creation system that gives you an avatar that complements how you play the game more closely.
After you launch into New Eden with your race-specific ship, you must undergo a newly redesigned tutorial that will teach you how to navigate through space and shoot down your enemies. New players now have the advantage of having their first million skill points gained at an accelerated pace, so they can get their hands on a broader range of equipment with much less space-grinding.
New in Apocrypha are wormholes that provide random pathways to uncharted areas of space, giving you a true sense of exploration. By scanning areas of space, you’ll find these wormholes swirling open for an undisclosed amount of time, letting only a few ships pass through before they close.
Not all wormholes lead you to unknown territory.Some will lead to known space and could prove helpful in finding new trade or smuggling routes. Entering unstable wormholes is best tackled with a crew, since you never know what could be waiting for you on the other end. Who knows? You might run into some Sleepers, Apocrypha’s deadly new NPC race.
The Sleepers hold the most advanced and sought-after technological resources outside of wormhole space, and while your first thought may be to shoot them up for the loot, they are far more lethal than your average space pirate. Engaging a Sleeper is more like a deadly PvP battle, and forces you to think carefully about every move in order to make it out alive. That’s because CCP created the Sleepers to mimic PvP actions. They can switch targets, heal each other and use evasive maneuvers. Sleepers can also determine what level of threat you represent, and will aggressively target a well-fitted ship instead of wasting time with weaker ones.
Apocrypha also introduces a new class of ship called Tech-3. This class allows for a ton of customization options, helping you tailor your ship’s defenses, as well as its overall look, to your liking. Each Tech-3 ship is composed of five new subsystems: defensive, offensive, electronic, engineering and propulsion.
Almost all materials needed to build Tech-3 ships can only be found by traveling through wormholes. For example, the blueprints needed to construct the chassis and hull of your Tech-3 ship can only be obtained by reverse-engineering ancient relics found in wormhole space.
Epic mission arcs are EVE’s answer to branching storylines like the ones found in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Throughout your time in New Eden, you will encounter agents who will offer you missions, which in turn are part of an ongoing storyline in which your decisions will affect the outcome, as well as your progress in the game.
The missions are all about introducing the world of EVE Online, familiarizing you with everything you learned,and giving you a choice on how to leave your mark on the universe. In future expansions, CCP plans to expand on the mission arcs by including some of the EVE lore to set up future events, giving veteran players a reason to tackle Apocrypha’s epic missions even though they’re meant for beginners.
So if you’ve grown tired of elves and goblins and are looking for a change of scenery (or just a new MMO experience), Apocrypha’s added features mean a lot of cool new reasons for newbies and vets alike to enter the fray. You can try EVE Online: Apocrypha for free by downloading a 21-day trial from Steam.
WIRED: EVE ONLINE: APOCRYPHA LURES NEW PLAYERS INTO HARSH, CRUEL VIRTUAL UNIVERSE
There’s a new massively multiplayer online RPG on store shelves this week: EVE Online Apocrypha.
Well, it’s not technically new. EVE Online has been running since 2003. But with the expansion pack released Tuesday, the MMORPG will experience an inevitable influx of new players. How will the gamemaker introduce them into a complex world that’s been explored by loyal veterans for nearly six years?
Since its launch, EVE Online has earned a reputation for being dull, with a steep learning curve that has so far scared off all but the most patient gamers — and stubborn griefers. Apocrypha could change all that with its “new player experience,” which is designed to give guidance to fledgling space pilots and empower them with new mechanics designed to take some of the edge off the game’s tantalizingly cruel universe.
“Hopefully it’s a lot easier for [new players] to just get up to speed without feeling like they’re slogging through a mountain of manuals,” says the game’s lead designer Noah Ward. “It’s more of a crash course than a three-hour tour.”
EVE Online is appealing because it is a far cry from the typical MMORPG. In a game like World of Warcraft, a player improves his character by increasing physical attributes like strength or intellect. It doesn’t take many leaps of logic to understand which attribute would be best for a warrior versus a mage. Kill enemies, and you’ll gain experience points and levels, allowing you to improve your base attribute and grind your way toward the game’s tougher content.
But in EVE Online there are no classes, and your character’s abilities are determined by a combination of skills, the spaceship you’re flying, and where your own interests lie. The same battleship might serve with equal effectiveness as a hulking war machine, a support craft for repairing allies or even a humble mining vessel — provided you’ve trained the right skills and packed the right equipment for the given job. Skills are trained in real-time even if you’re not logged in, so players with busy schedules can still make progress.
But if you’d like to fly that shiny new cruiser or upgrade its guns, be prepared to wait. Attributes determine how quickly your character accumulates skill points, and choosing the “wrong” attributes at the start will seriously disadvantage new players.
One of EVE Online’s problems was that neophytes had to choose these important character attributes with no information about why they should pick them.
“They really had no business making those choices,” Ward explains. “Spaceship Command IV? Gunnery IV? Is IV good?”
Players who hadn’t done their homework were likely to create a character whose skill set was at odds with their play style. If, for example, a player was interested in fleet warfare, but happened to create a character that excelled at manufacturing or trading, he would face a long wait before he got to play the game as he intended.
In Apocrypha, a revamped tutorial will familiarize players with basic stellar navigation, mining, trade and the nuances of EVE’s complex combat system. That’s Ward’s “crash course.” The three-hour tour comes later, in the form of an Epic Mission Arc. This new quest for rookies spans the game’s massive universe, introducing them to the various factions that populate EVE while testing the lessons they learned in the tutorial.
A skill queue has been implemented, so players are now able to schedule a limited number of skills to train in succession — no more getting up at four in the morning to start a new skill. And Apocrypha also adds the ability to reassign a character’s attribute points once a year, so players young and old who have rethought their personal goals aren’t completely out of luck.
As a gamers’ stimulus package, new players will train their first million skill points twice as fast as normal players. With faster training times, rookies will be able to access a wider variety of equipment sooner, allowing them to quickly get out and contribute to one of EVE’s player-run corporations — or just shoot at other players a bit more effectively.
In the past, skill points were hand-picked by the game’s designers. Rookies might not have understood what a particular skill did, but it was likely there for a reason. Players now have full reign over their characters, but those who haven’t paid attention to the tutorial are likely to make costly mistakes.
“It gives them more control, but it also gives them the ability to screw up,” says Ward.
Of course, costly mistakes are fundamental to the EVE Online experience. EVE remains an unforgiving place. It is notorious for including nonconsensual player-versus-player combat. Rookie pilots are still likely to be ambushed by unscrupulous veterans.
Speaking of veterans, the Apocrypha expansion also adds loads of new content for older players to come to grips with — from modular, customizable strategic cruisers to wormholes and the intelligent, brutally difficult sleeper drones that now lurk within new, uncharted solar systems.
There are new challenges, and the learning curve remains steep, but the barrier to entry has plummeted. If you’re at all interested in MMOs, and don’t mind putting on your thinking cap from time to time, you’ve officially run out of reasons to avoid trying EVE Online.
Images courtesy CCP
IGN: A LOOK AT EVE ONLINE’S APOCRYPHA EXPANSION
With nearly 300,000 users and a single game world for the whole base, CCP’s EVE Online stands out in the MMOG space. The game recently reached its highest peak concurrent users ever at 51,675, which represents the number of players simultaneously logged into the game. So how has CCP managed to grow since the game was launched in 2003? Considering all the players log into the same universe and that a majority of the gameplay is player-driven, EVE’s world has a different kind of flavor than many of its competitors that require users interact repeatedly with scripted content. Those who dive into EVE can eventually join up by the game’s sizable, player-run corporations that own vast tracts of space to battle for additional assets, engage in subterfuge within the game and on message boards to nab enemy intelligence and dramatically alter the make-up and organization of the world, and grapple with an ever-changing marketplace.
CCP has regularly released new content geared toward both seasoned players and new ones since launch. The next expansion, Apocrypha, which as of today should be appearing in stores as a new retail box and delivered free to any current subscriber, comes with a number of features. If you’ve never tried out EVE, then the added “new player experience” would probably be of interest to you. Lead designer Noah Ward told us the way new players get into the game has been streamlined in an effort to better ease them in. Now you won’t have to deal with as many character-building decisions up-front, many of which previously required research and understanding of the game, which, if you’re new, you don’t have. With Apocrypha, these kinds of choices are embedded further into the creation process so you’ll have a better base of knowledge.
The character development system is also being given more flexibility, allowing for redistributions of attributes if you want to switch things up. Skill development has been made more convenient, as CCP has added a 24-hour skill queue. Of course if you’re a new player that probably doesn’t mean much of anything to you, so here’s how it works in EVE. To get new skills in the game, you trigger them to start training, which will take a certain amount of time to finish and proceeds in real-time whether you’re online or off. After one skill is finished training, you start up another, and so on. The 24-hour queue allows people to string together multiple skills, meaning if you’re trying to be as efficient as possible with upgrades, you won’t have to log on at odd hours of the day or night to start up the next training process. The reason this queue is limited to 24-hours is because CCP didn’t want to create a queuing system that allowed people to queue up a year’s worth of skill training then walk away from the game until everything was finished. With the setup in Apocrypha, CCP feels it’s just the right amount of time to keep players active while introducing an element of convenience.
After you take your first steps into EVE, you’re bound to be overwhelmed by the size of it all and the apparent lack of structure, so CCP is building in more player-versus-environment quest arcs to offer more structure. While before there were simple missions, Apocrypha’s epic quest arcs can branch and, according to CCP, incorporate more storylines and reward structures. Sometimes these will lead to totally new space, like the unstable wormholes that the expansion is adding to EVE’s already sizable universe of 5,000 solar systems. These wormholes will pop up randomly, and can be detected using a new scanning mechanic. Once accessed, they open up spaces to discover new enemies and technologies. Just as randomly as the wormholes appear, they can also disappear, adding a whole new kind of dynamic element to trade routes and lines of assault within New Eden.
Often while traversing this wormhole space it seems you’ll run into an ancient race known as the Sleepers. By pummeling and snatching components from their vessels, seasoned players will unlock the options to construct Tech 3 strategic cruisers. These highly customizable ships can be fitted in myriad ways, and with different subsystem configurations the overall look of the ship will change, adding more of a sense of variety and individuality to the world.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, then by all means give it a shot. It’s certainly a game that represents a change of pace from the standard fantasy MMOG, with an emphasis on social support and networking, and the sharp visuals are certainly appealing.
BIG DOWNLOAD: FIRST LOOK: EVE ONLINE: APOCRYPHA
CCP’s EVE Online is a spacefaring MMO held in reverence by its players, and a certain amount of respect/fear by those who haven’t played it. One thing that both groups seem to agree on is that EVE isn’t something to be taken lightly. Word of its complexity has spread among those who don’t generally play MMOs, and even the game’s developers sometimes refer to the learning curve as more of a Learning Cliff, which tempts the unwary with promises of gameplay riches, only to dash them to the rocks below.
With that in mind, we were hoping that our recent interview with Noah “Hammerhead” Ward, Lead Game Designer for EVE Online, would provide some clarification. Is EVE as hard as everyone says? How can new players manage the overwhelming number of features? What can players look forward to in the upcoming expansion, Apocrypha? What follows is all the information we could extract from Mr. Ward, gotten in much the same way as one might extract ore from an asteroid. See? You’re learning already!
Apocrypha is the name of the newest expansion pack due for release on March 10th, on both CCP’s site and on popular digital download service Steam. And for the first time in a long time, EVE Online will be available as a boxed product, to be found in retail stores, starting in the US on the 10th and everywhere else on March 12th. From the sound of it, CCP has crafted something that will please players who complain that EVE‘s cosmos is, for all of its seeming empty space, nevertheless contained and crowded. The way this will come about is by the introduction of wormholes, portals to new, uncharted territory. Players will have to use their probes to scan areas of space they suspect might contain a wormhole. These wormholes will be somewhat graphics-coded per risk level, so players will know on sight whether or not it’s for them. And interestingly, none of the wormholes will be instances, meaning that it’s possible for other players to enter the same space you occupy, if they’ve scanned and found the same wormhole as you have.
Players will find that Wormhole Space (WS) contains more than just a new area to explore — there’s also a new race to discover. Known as “The Sleepers”, this mysterious race has entered hibernation, and protects itself from meddling with a system of drones of varying abilities. Players will find that these drones are noticeably different in structure than anything they’ve experienced up to this point in EVE Online. For one thing, they have a very sleek, insectoid look to them that makes them seem menacing, even at rest. For another thing, they’re very protective of their resting charges; to the point where they’ll attack anything that comes near. And once they do, players will discover that CCP has outfitted these ships with a new type of AI — one that behaves quite differently than the other NPC ships they’ve encountered in the past.
Sleeper drones are smart enough to recognize which attackers carry the greatest threat, and will switch targets to acommodate. Rather than, say, typical pirate behavior, in which enemies simply orbit a player ship and keep attacking until destroyed, Sleeper ships will actually call for reinforcements and retreat when they have to. They’ll even “heal” each other when needed, making them much more dangerous adversaries for even the staunchest combat-ready veterans. Sleeper ships will also deal different types of damage, requiring that players have a flexible strategy in place that can be updated on the fly (so to speak).
Add to this the WS environment itself, which will affect player ships in different ways, much like — and please forgive the geek-out factor, here — the way that Kirk and Khan’s ships were affected by the nebula in Wrath of Khan. No telling exactly what the effects will be at this point, but be advised: WS ain’t your old backyard.
What’s in it for the player who manages to win through and claim victory over the Sleepers? Tech 3! Longstanding players of EVE Online will rejoice at the addition of the new Tech 3 level of technology, which can only be harvested from Sleeper ships and structures. Of course, it’s not quite as easy as simply picking up components and attaching them to one’s ship. Tech 3 parts must be taken back to a starbase or player outpost, and reverse-engineered to gain their benefits. This is a new skill that must be researched before it can be used. After that, however, players will find that Tech 3 items are modular and offer a variety of uses — which we’ll leave to the players to discover.
There are also new graphical updates in Apocrypha, including a new particle system, shadows cast on ships (which may not sound like a big deal, but really looks great when you see it), and a new ‘warp in’ effect for ships. And they’ve not stopped there: citing CCP’s desire to constantly upgrade the New User Experience, there will be new introductory movies per race, that explain in better detail how each race differs from the next. The ship fitting system will also receive an update, featuring immediate visual feedback on what the ship will look like after changes have been made.
EVE Online will also change the way that players have previously been forced to make certain advanced choices right out of the gate, feeling that this has served only to confuse new players at the outset. Helping in this will be the new skill called “Neural Remapping”, which allows players to queue up a list of skills for their character to learn while not actively playing, limited by a 24-hour window of time. There will also be new Epic Arc missions, which will be less linear and offering more of a branching of possible storyline avenues. Both of these changes should help ease the sometimes rigid-feeling structure of EVE Online, and make the entire experience more user-friendly.
EVE Online: Apocrypha is available tomorrow in two flavors: Premium, and Premium Lite, which will be less graphically intensive for players with lower-level systems. Those of you new to the universe of EVE Online will find a great deal of incredible content to sink your teeth into. Those of you who already play can look forward to yet another amazing update to the game you already know and love in Apocrypha. Go get it now — your ship awaits.
MASSIVELY: EVE ONLINE DEVELOPER NOAH WARD ON PLAYER DRAMA IN THE SANDBOX
This is a topic of discussion over at MTV Multiplayer this week. EVE Online‘s lead game designer Noah Ward (aka CCP Hammerhead) sat down with MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John, to discuss some of the potential within the EVE sandbox. The interview focuses on CCP Games‘ hands-off approach to what the players are doing in the game. As long as players aren’t spouting racial epithets or making real-life threats against one another, EVE‘s gamers can basically do whatever they choose on an individual or collective level.
Check out the MTV Multiplayer interview with Noah Ward for a closer look at the game’s player-driven drama and CCP’s perspective on it all.
KOTAKU: EVE ONLINE SCANDALS ARE GOOD FOR BUSINESS
Massively-multiplayer game EVE Online has had its fair share of scandals and controversies. That’s what happens when you let the gamers run themselves. But they’ve hardly been a deterrent to subscriptions.
Speaking with MTV, Noah Ward, from developers CCP, reveals that after the latest user-induced meltdown to hit the game – in the form of the disbandment of the largest player alliance via treachery - people didn’t really seem to mind. Prepared for a backlash of users leaving the game in their droves, Ward & CCP actually found that:
The largest alliance in the game was broken up by a trader on the inside and when this happened we were really worried at first because we were like, “Oh no! Everyone’s going to quit!” And it was really horrible for us.
That was in the morning, but a couple hours later the buzz on the forums was crazy, subscriber numbers were growing, and everybody was really excited. Because everyone was becoming complacent and bored with being the biggest alliance, and then all of a sudden now there’s war and turmoil. People who used to be in the alliance were re-subscribing and everyone was really excited about it so it’s not necessarily always a bad thing when this sort of stuff happens.
Gotta say, despite MMOs as a whole never really grabbing my attention, it’s this kind of thing that has me leaning towards giving EVE a good, hard look. You just don’t find that kind of real-world intrigue in other games.
‘EVE Online’ Designer: Players Actually Like In-Game Scandals, Corruption [MTV]
MTV MULTIPLAYER: ‘EVE ONLINE’ NOT COMING TO CONSOLES, BUT POSSIBLY IPHONES
The lead designer of “EVE Online” talked to me about how his game holds up against other upcoming space MMOs. He also shared plans to connect “EVE” players on handheld devices and a Facebook-like social networking site.
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Released in 2003, “EVE Online” is about to launch its 10th free expansion “Apocrypha.” Lead designer Noah Ward of CCP Games stopped by last week to show me what’s new in the space MMO, and I also wanted to know just how “EVE” continues to thrive in this economy.
He said that they’ve continued to see increasing subscribers since launch, except at the end of last year. “That’s when we went into overdrive and started making this expansion,” he explained. Though the company typically does two expansions a year, one in the summer and the winter, “Apocrypha” is coming out this month. “So not only is this the most ambitious and biggest expansion feature-wise and the number of man hours put into it,” he said, “it’s also coming out in 75 percent of the time [it usually takes].”
“In this economic crisis we’ve been seeing a lot of people being laid off, while here at CCP we’re actually hiring.”
Ward credits this to the streamlined process that the company’s developed, as well as cutting back on other projects. “In this economic crisis we’ve been seeing a lot of people being laid off, while here at CCP we’re actually hiring,” he said of the Iceland-based company. “‘EVE’ is our core breadwinner, and we’ve dropped a lot of side projects, but we didn’t just fire all those people, we said ‘What can you do for ‘EVE’ and how can you make ‘EVE’ a better game?”
The designer also said that the economy hasn’t affected its subscriptions. “It may have even helped because if people are laid off that means they’re at home with nothing to do!” he added.
Although “Tabula Rasa” is now shuttered, there are still forthcoming space MMOs to look out for — namely titles like “Jumpgate Evolution” and “Star Trek Online.” I asked Ward if he thought these games might take away “EVE” players.
“‘EVE’ is more of the older thinking man’s game, and ‘Jumpgate’ is the more ‘pew-pew-pew’ space shooter that’s going to appeal to a much younger audience.”
“I don’t think they’ll really rob players from us,” he replied matter-of-factly. “They are sci-fi and they’re in space, but the actual philosophy those games have is so different from ‘EVE.’ ‘EVE’ is more of the older thinking man’s game, and ‘Jumpgate’ is the more ‘pew-pew-pew’ space shooter that’s going to appeal to a much younger audience. ‘Star Trek’ is sort of the same formula as all the other MMOs: you got your dude and you go on mission with a couple other people, and it’s really storyline-based and just very different from ‘EVE.’ We do see our players playing more than one MMO though.”
And although console MMOs are becoming the new trend, “EVE” players shouldn’t expect to pick up a controller anytime soon. Instead, Ward revealed that CCP is currently focused on having “EVE” on other platforms — like mobile phones. “We obviously looked at the console space because it would be silly not to consider it,” he said, “but ‘EVE’ is such a deep game that the gameplay doesn’t really lend itself to sitting on the couch with a controller. What we’re more interested in is augmenting ‘EVE’’s gameplay in the handheld space, like iPhone or Smartphone [applications] that let you check your skills or that sort of thing.”
“‘EVE’ is such a deep game that the gameplay doesn’t really lend itself to sitting on the couch with a controller.”
Other projects that CCP is working on is a social networking site called Cosmos, which Ward described as “Facebook for your ‘EVE’ character,” where players will be able to upload screenshots and link their character with their corporation and alliance. Ward also promised that there will be a calendar and other applications to keep players connected to “EVE” wherever they are. CCP also plans to work on an “EVE-lite” client, which would not only let players do everything they normally could in the game (outside of space exploration), but also stay connected via chat.
Not to mention the the 11th expansion that’s due out before the end of the year; Ward says it will most likely be out this winter, though they haven’t picked out a name for it yet.
Until then, the “EVE Online” expansion “Apocrypha” is out on March 10. It will be available online as well as in stores with 60 days’ game time and an in-game collectible ship as a vanity item.
THE ESCAPIST: EVE PLAYERS LIKE SCANDALS AND CORRUPTION
With scandals and cut-throat treachery the rule rather than the exception, the dog-eat-dog world of EVE Online isn’t quite for the faint of heart. But according to Noah Ward, one of the game’s developers, that’s exactly what the game’s players love about it.
The futuristic world of EVE Online is not a friendly place. Why, just last month, one of the top executives of the biggest in-game alliance went turncoat, defecting to the enemy and dissolving the alliance for good. Before that, it was a cabal of approximately 70 players exploiting a bug to harvest entirely more raw materials than they were supposed to, affecting the in-game economy of more than two hundred thousand people.
Despite all of the uncertainty, lead designer Noah Ward told MTV Multiplayer, gamers weren’t being turned away from the turbulent universe of EVE, as the developers at CCP had feared. In fact, they saw quite the opposite:
That was in the morning, but a couple hours later the buzz on the forums was crazy, subscriber numbers were growing, and everybody was really excited. Because everyone was becoming complacent and bored with being the biggest alliance, and then all of a sudden now there’s war and turmoil. People who used to be in the alliance were re-subscribing and everyone was really excited about it so it’s not necessarily always a bad thing when this sort of stuff happens. Somebody on the other side was interviewed, and he was saying “When you beat the biggest raid in WoW you don’t get an interview in The New York Times but when this sort of thing happens it makes real-world news.
Nor does the dev team intend to step in and put a stop to it – after all, the extent to which EVE is player-run is in fact one of the game’s main draws: “We let them do their own thing. We will step in if there are racial slurs going on or any real-world threats, but if it’s all within the role-play and within the game, we don’t change anything.”
MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John goes on to ask Ward whether or not he thinks that other MMOs should follow suit and try to be like EVE. Me, I’m torn. On the one hand, the stuff that goes down in EVE is completely awesome, but it only really works because it’s the game that it is – the only other way another MMO could have the same kind of interactions is … well, if it was EVE. Sometimes you’re in the mood for an EVE, sometimes you’re in the mood for a WoW, or a LotRO, or a WAR. Let EVE stay the unique gem that it is.
MASSIVELY: EVE EVOLVED: APOCRYPHA EXPANSION PREVIEW
As March 10th draws ever closer, EVE Online‘s Apocrypha expansion is coming more and more into focus. Information on the new game mechanics and content is being released in the form of developer blogs and the official expansion page complete with screenshots and artwork is already up. Most importantly, a test version of the expansion is live on Singularity, EVE‘s main test server. Like any good journalist, I took my camera crew onto the test server to get some pictures of Apocrypha in action. What I found blew me away, literally.
In this gallery article, I take a visual sneak peak at parts of the impressive new Apocrypha expansion with a whopping 37 screenshots. In each screenshot, I talk about all of the new additions to the game.
MASSIVELY: NEW EVE ONLINE CHARACTERS WILL INITIALLY TRAIN SKILLS TWICE AS FAST IN APOCRYPHA
Massively recently mentioned a few of the changes coming to EVE Online through the New Player Experience, part of the Apocrypha expansion which rolls out next month. Of particular interest, or concern, to some EVE players is CCP’s decision to reduce a starting character’s skillpoints to 50k from the current 800k many existing characters began with. CCP Games apparently hopes to clarify this decision, and thus stave off any torches and pitchforks, with today’s dev blog. EVE developer CCP Flatboy writes,“In Apocrypha, new characters train at double speed until they reach 1.6 Million SkillPoints. That is all.”The reason that new characters will get this boosted skill training rate is to compensate for the fact that, for simplicity’s sake, new characters will begin with less skills. The New Player Experience is all about reducing the complexity that someone just starting out can find themself mired in, and having more control over how the character develops.
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