paran0id’s blog

EVE expansion ‘Apocrypha’ was released 4 days ago, March 10th. What can I say about this expansion so far?
Well, to be honest, the first that comes to my mind is: good job. I don’t remember an expansion going so smooth and being so successfull as this one, and i’ve seen quite a few already!

The most noticable changes:
It’s all about the Wormholes. The whole thing has been modified and adjusted because of these new space anomalies. Scanning is completly different from what it was before Apocrypha, we have T3 modulated ships, new probes, new skills, new cosmic anomalies and complexes, and so on.
We also have the skill queue, which isn’t 100% fully functional right now as there are reports of a few bugs on it, but it’s nothing as serious as, for example, the whole ’socket closed’ problem everyone had in Quantum Rise. There’s also the whole ‘Attribute Remap’ function which i’m not really to fond of since we are limited to 1 remap every 12 months.
We also have some new tweaks and features added to the user interface. There’s a new fitting screen that allows you to save/load ship fittings (*very* usefull imo), the neocom has suffered a few changes too (no more zoom in/out buttons), and few fixes and new options added to the context menus here and there.

On top of this all we have the new Premium Lite graphics (shader model 2.0), i was actually thinking that this was going to be a bad move, but I can honestly say that, so far, i haven’t noticed ANY change on my game performance with these new graphics. (I was using classic graphics before) Right now, i’m using ‘max quality’ settings and everything just runs smooth as it ran 5 days ago. There’s also new animations for jumping, warping, scanning (survey scanner, etc), salvaging, tracking beams, turrent effects, scramblers, etc etc as well as new sounds for each of the new animations mentioned. Not every single bit of the new graphics or sounds are working I mean, on wormhole space there are some problems with textures, the wormholes and the warp animation seems to be screwed up (there’s some pixelated bits, you can see it on that wormhole screenshot on the left), the sound glitches and loops when listening to the new race-intros etc.

All in all, hats off CCP. You guys did a great job and you actually didn’t cause THAT many problems on the community with the new expansion. Some people complained about the file size of the patch, granted it was a big download (nearly 2GB for classic clients) it was more than worth it!

EVE: Apocrypha is recommended and an endorsed product by this blog. :)