Eve-online: Apocrypha

Once upon a time, back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the earth and computer programs were stored on magnetic cassettes, there was game called “Elite”. In it, you played the part of a space-ship pilot, trading and fighting your way through a huge (for those days) universe. I spent entirely too much of my childhood playing this game, so a MMORPG with a similar concept seemed almost designed for me.
I had a great time playing Eve – too good a time. When I realised that I'd just got up at 4am to modify the skill my character was training, I knew it was time to quit – cold turkey.
Now I've relapsed, but it's OK. I've got it under control.
The Apocrypha expansion is one of the largest that this game has had, but this article is going to be concentrating on revamped character creation screens and new player experience. The learning curve for Eve is notoriously steep, but I think they've improved things.
Eve has four playable races, all variants on humans. There's the Amarr (militaristic theocrats), Caldari (corporate plutocrats), Minmatar (space gypsies) and Gallente (French). My old character was a Caldari soldier so I went some something completely different – a Minmatar miner.
The old character creation screens were full of numbers with little explanation for what they all meant and the wrong decisions could cripple your character's future development. Nowadays, these choices are all about the role-playing. Different races have different territories and natural enemies and specialise in different technologies, but that seems to be about it.
The options available in portrait screen are restricted by the choices made in character creation. It's no City of Heroes; I found it difficult to make my character smile, but that could be because (as descendants of rebellious slaves) the Minmatar don't have much to smile about.
It's a long time since I did the old tutorial, but the new version seems much longer and holds your metaphorical hand more tightly. It takes you through the basics: piloting, fitting your ship, combat and skill training – including the new training queue. In Eve, your character is assumed to be training a particular skill all the time, even when you – the player – are not logged on. Under the old system if your character had completed training a level of a particular skill then he or she will stop training until you log on (hence me logging on at 4am – and I wasn't alone in doing this). Nowadays, skills can be queued up, as long as all the skills in the queue will start in the next twenty-four hours. It makes a big difference, especially in the early stages when you've got a dozen low-level skills to train, all with times measured in minutes.
There's a potential problem in the tutorial. If you blaze through the initial section, it will ask you to fix a particular module to your ship before you have trained the necessary ability – this could be a little confusing.
I love the graphics. The ship models reflect the race of origin, so (for example) the Minmatar vessels are delightfully ramshackle. Turrets track the vessel you're firing on and if your ship is seriously damaged it will vent gas and flame into space. In many ways we're spoilt; if you're fighting a pitched battle through the wreckage of a massive space station, you don't have time to appreciate the detail that's gone into the environment
Under the old system, before designing my first character, I read a couple of player-made guides and planned in detail to make sure I wasn't going to gimp myself. That's all gone; you don't need to read the guides any more, but the tutorial doesn't mention the Learning skills or re-mapping attributes. This could be considered an oversight.
When the initial tutorial completes, you're given a choice of character development: Industry, Business or Military and handed over to an Agent (NPC) that will take you through the next stage of the tutorial. This tutor is several “jumps” away giving you a chance to see a tiny fragment of the galaxy. The industry, business and military tutors are all based in the same system; it's possible to put your character through all three routes and well worth taking the time.
Once you've selected one of these agents, the tutorial continues, taking you through the initial stages of your chosen profession and giving you additional equipment. If you read the help files and think laterally about the equipment you're given/obtain during one mission, it will help you out on the next (particularly the industrial route).
The Industry track takes you through mining ores, refining them into minerals and manufacturing them into the finished products. Mining is nice and relaxing (the whale-sounds of the game soundtrack help). If you're based in a nice safe area (not that any part of space in Eve is really safe), it's something to do while browsing in another window. Incidentally, it's rather sneaky that the ship that you get for completing the Industry tutorial can't be used on a trial account - thus encouraging your to upgrade.
The Military tutorial is a series of longer and more complicated fights (with a couple of courier missions for variety), introducing you to more advanced uses of armour and shields (tanking) and equipment such as the stasis web (basically a gadget for slowing a fast moving target down to the point where you can shoot at it).
The Business tutorial is – kind of – a cut down version of the Industry track where you're encouraged obtain some of the raw materials by trading. Check prices carefully before buying anything in the tutorial stations – people profiteer off the n00bs.
After the last mission your tutor point you in the direction of another agent, the start of the first of the new “epic mission arcs” – a long and connected series of missions. Personally, I don't think your character would be ready for this yet. I'll be training my character's combat skills for a few days and doing missions to get the cash to fit out my frigate. The second part of this article will be out in a couple of weeks.
I've not even scratched the surface of what you can do in Eve and even the tutorial will only take you through the basics. It's a dangerous world – you'll probably lose a couple of ships before you begin to realise how dangerous (luckily, going through all three tutorial tracks will provide you with some spares). My main character has nearly a year's worth of playing time and there's still loads that I haven't done.
If you're serious about your gaming, then at some point you really ought to read Raph Koster's “A Theory of Fun for Game Design; apart from anything else it'll help you to understand why you like some types of games and not others. One of the main themes of Koster's book is that humans have fun when they're learning and exercising their brains. A year into this game and I'm still learning. There's whole areas that I haven't tried – exploration, PVP and invention to name three. OK, I've lost a couple of ships to other players by wandering into a dangerous area, but that's nothing like the huge fleet-versus-fleet battles that the revamped architecture now allows. Yes, you can lose weeks of work to a fifteen year-old who doesn't like your character's portrait, but this means that the game will only become a grind if that's what you want.
If you like the idea of playing in a Babylon 5, Farscape or Serenity universe, but the complexity of the game put you off, then it looks like they've sorted out the problem. There's nothing quite like Eve and I hope I've managed to explain something of why I love the game. Fly safe.