EVE Apocrypha Reaching Inwards and Out

By Paul Munn | January 16, 2009

EVE Online’s next expansion has been given the name Apocrypha and lands March 10th. There are a few things in the writeup for this one which caught my eye. Unlike the most recent WOW expansion, which of course was sold at retail as opposed to EVE’s expansions continuing to be free to all subscribers, this one has content for PVP, PVE, veteran, and new players.

Player vs player (PVP) gamers in EVE most recently got a huge helping of content with the creation of the long-promised feature of faction warfare in the game and with the implementation of longer story arcs the folks who enjoy mission running — the player vs environment or PVE folks — get a possibly big portion of new content. These so-called Epic Mission Arcs will introduce long-running stories through a set of missions and serve up some new enemies to square off against.

Something else new in the writeup is the use of the word “exploration”, specifically relating to wormholes. Exploring wormholes, which to me sounds like a new instancing mechanic, will open the door to players earning a brand new tier of modules called Tech III modules. These hint at starships becoming more like hybrid ships built from different types of parts instead of one ship hull type fitted with modules of varying effectiveness. That’s not to say the Tech I and Tech II options have limited player creativity — the recent example of a mining carrier being used by PVP suicide mission specialists to launch surprise attacks on unsuspecting miners is a great example of how players will turn a plowshare into a sword if they can do so economically. But Tech III might show something new and exciting to pilots looking to fly something new under the sun as well as something new to build for economically and engineering-minded players.

So what’s in it for the little guy? A revamped New Player Experience is also going to ship with it, which should further make the old salts flying around grumble about how when they started back in the day they had to fly uphill both ways in the snow to dock at the starbase and they liked it. Something else for new players is the news that EVE will return to retail via a publishing deal with Atari. I suppose this would have been good news if game retail wasn’t hurting as badly as other retailers — surely online sales nets them higher margins on the product be it directly from CCP for those wanting to play on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux or via Steam for those wanting to play on Windows.

Speaking of Mac OS, the release of Apocrypa will coincide with an upgrade of the Mac OS client to the Premium, high resolution textures Windows users got with the Trinity release some time ago. Methinks CCP is getting significant traction in the Mac marketplace to pour money like this into retexturing that software version when the non-high-resolution version works just as well.

All in all it looks like EVE is continuing on its growth trend, having recently set a new peak concurrent user record, along with reaching out to new players. What do you think?

You can find the current details on Apocrypha on Massively.