Apocrypha Review - Edit

Final Score

8.7
Great

Pros

A skill queue that takes the annoyance out of training short skills.  Four new, customizable ships.  Improved character creation and tutorials for new players.  New graphical effects.  Thousands of new

Cons

Only one Epic Mission Arc avaliable at the moment.  Sleeper/Wormhole content isn't that accessible for solo players.

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Once you're done with one, or all of the career mission arcs, the agent will point you in the direction of the Sisters of Eve Bureau located in the Arnon solar system, and it is here that you can find the agent for the very first Epic Mission Arc. Missions in EVE are seen as something to be grinded through, completed, and salvaged as fast as possible, with many players making almost all of their money from running these missions exclusively. The Epic Mission Arc is, hopefully, a sign of CCP taking a different approach to the mission system.

"The Blood-Stained Stars" takes you through dozens of missions that are linked by one big narrative, with a couple of "branch points" that let you choose different paths through the story. Currently, there is only one Epic Arc in the game; it's very much an extended introduction of the EVE universe, and is aimed at younger players. It takes you through the space of the four main factions as you work for various agents, and each mission description usually provides you with little bits of information or history about New Eden. This won't be very attractive to players that only see missions in terms of money per hour, but it should be interesting for solo players that just want to cruise through the universe, and there are some cool sights to see on your journey. It's a nice prototype to show off what the Epic Arc system can do and hopefully we'll see more of them in the future.

The graphical updates and additions to the New Player Experience are a substantial part of this patch, but, at its core, Apocrypha is the exploration expansion. There's the new scanning system, which gives players a more intuitive, graphical interface to use when scanning down cosmic signatures, and the number of exploration sites has also been doubled. Amongst the various hidden asteroid belts and pirate bases there are also the new wormhole anomalies. Wormholes are quite possibly the biggest change to the landscape of EVE that has ever occurred. These randomly spawning gateways link to other solar systems (also at random), and can even lead to one of the thousands of new unknown systems that have also been added. Players will need to tread carefully though, as the wormholes will collapse after a certain ship mass or time limit has been reached, leaving them "lost in space" until they can find another exit. Inside, there are a whole host of exploration sites that contain, amongst other things, the artifacts and materials to build the new tech three Strategic Cruisers.

The four Strategic Cruisers function a little different than other ships. Instead of buying a single ship hull, there is a base hull with slots for five different subsystems (electronics, engineering, offensive, defensive, and propulsion) that affect the stats and abilities of the ship. This allows you to tailor the ship to specific roles, and they can only get more diverse as new subsystems are released. Although, at the moment, there are only three versions of the five systems for each of the four races, but a fourth one is already in development. However, if you want the resources to build them, then you'll need to fight the guardians of unknown space, the deadly Sleepers.

These enigmatic drones are something we haven't seen before. They are very dangerous, and they don't like you. It's no secret that the NPC AI in EVE isn't that great, and the Sleepers are using a brand new AI system that makes them much more challenging to fight. They can web and scramble targets from long range, switch targets intelligently, and repair each other. Their damage and tanking abilities are also high enough that it takes teamwork to bring down all but the easiest of Sleeper spawns.

With wormhole space, CCP has created tiny pockets of lawless 0.0 space for players to dip their toes into, and built a system around them that's open enough for players to interact with in their own way. Everyone can get involved in WH space, from miners to pirates, and it's not tied to any specific region. The weeks since the release of Apocrypha have been full of the stories that make EVE great, tales of heroic success and unfortunate tragedy as expeditions run into Sleepers, or each other.

With the revamped New Player Experience making EVE more accessible, I want to give Apocrypha a higher score, but it's clear that it will take time for the success of some of the bigger features to become apparent. Will Strategic Cruisers become more than just a toy for rich players? As I write this, the handful of parts that are available on the market are stupidly expensive. Is the flurry of activity in wormhole space just a "gold rush" that will end soon? If tech three is a flop then the incentive to go exploring through wormholes will drop substantially. Whatever happens, there is one thing we can be sure of: nothing has changed New Eden like Apocrypha.