Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

EVE Online’s long tradition of giving away their expansions to their subscribers continues with today’s release of Apocrypha, and this one looks like it has a very diverse set of updates and changes to the game. There are a few things, however, that stand out from the coverage I’ve seen on Massively.

The first surprise, for me, is that CCP is adding a form of experience debt. In a game that prides itself on being level-free, instead running on skill points that continuously tick upwards in real time, this new feature equates to skill point debt. It’s all part and parcel of the powerful new Tech 3 modules and ships that can be built from combinations of them — a first for how ships are built in the game. The new Tech 3 ships require you to train five skills — one per ship subsystem– and if you are aboard a Tech 3 ship when it is destroyed you lose one level in one randomly selected skill of the five. That’s a straight-ahead time penalty since you can only get skill points by training in real time, and it’ll make flying one just a bit more nerve-wracking.

The second notable item has to do with the Sleepers, the cutthroat NPC AI that you must defeat to get the blueprints and other materials to reverse-engineer Tech 3 modules. You need to “scan down” a wormhole in known space to reach them — using a vastly simplified replacement for the current scanning system — and those wormholes, while pretty, are not permanent. Push enough starship mass through one and it will destabilize and disappear leaving you far from home at the business end of some serious Sleeper firepower. Gulp!

Remember Star Trek Voyager? I’d be shocked if it took 75 years at high warp to get home from Sleeper territory but fortunately if you’ve got a scanning probe or two left you can find another wormhole and see how deep that rabbit hole goes. That is, if you can live long enough. You see the other threat in Sleeper space happens to be other players. It’s 0.0 space where anything goes and the Concord police service doesn’t exist. So if you find a wormhole and pop through it, bring a buddy to watch the door on the other side to keep someone from walking in, clocking you, and walking back out.

CCP also revealed that the simplification of scanning and exploration will revitalize exploration in general with more archaeological sites and resource sites to find and a boost to the population of gas clouds used to create illegal boosters or drugs in the game. Apparently the drug economy was languishing due to the difficulty in making money at it compared to other lines of business.

One final bit about this update that worries me as someone who has been flirting with subscribing for a long time is that they’re getting rid of their old client version and creating a new Premium Lite client to sit alongside their Premium client. My laptop’s graphics chipset isn’t so hot, so I’m not really sure it’ll run that well. Last time I did a trial of the game I had to turn most of the graphical goodies in the Premium version down.

Well then this might call for a test of this new version. Maybe their brand new $35 retail box of the game will go on sale somewhere and I’ll be tempted by its included 60 days of game time and a shuttle that is unique to the retail release.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching how this new expansion is received by the PVP and carebear populations.