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Apocrypha expansion for EVE Online launches Tuesday, March 10th
As CCP Games rolls out the most significant expansion for EVE Online to date, Apocrypha, players should prepare themselves for an extended 13-hour downtime, lasting from 03:00 GMT to (est.) 16:00 GMT on Tuesday, March 10th. Storyline updates in the form of news reports will continue throughout downtime, kicking off the backstory of the Apocrypha expansion. Massively has a solid overview of Apocrypha for you, most recently a visual tour of the expansion and a hands-on with the developers, explaining EVE's new features. Patch Notes for this 10th EVE expansion are up as well. Updates to the patch notes will be made in green, and you can follow the highlighted links to all of the relevant dev blogs explaining the various facets of Apocrypha. We've covered much of this content at Massively, but two recent dev blogs from CCP explain how the new exploration system will work and what exactly makes the Sleeper NPC race's AI so formidable.
EVE Online Apocrypha expansion trailer kicks off storyline events
CCP Games just dropped the trailer for EVE Online's Apocrypha expansion, which sets the tone for the storyline players will soon experience. The trailer depicts a cataclysmic event which creates rifts in space-time throughout the New Eden galaxy, affecting all of the races. We see fleets of ships investigating the anomalies and take their first journeys through wormholes, emerging in unknown space. There, the explorers find bizarre structures whose design is unknown to New Eden's races. These space stations house the technology behind Tech III, advanced modular ship designs, but seizing technology potentially thousands of years beyond that of the capsuleers awakens long-dormant defenses: the drones of the ancient Sleeper race. We've got the YouTube embed of the Apocrypha trailer in HD for you below the cut.
Massively's Apocrypha expansion hands-on: The Sleepers
The Sleepers The inhabitants of these uncharted solar systems may take offense to your encroachment upon their territory, however. The Sleepers, an ancient race of NPCs known for their mastery of virtual reality and cryogenics, will provide the greatest PvE challenges players have ever faced in EVE Online through their guardian drones. Their AI is far beyond what players are used to going up against in PvE. The Sleepers will have varying levels of strength and adaptation to player threats. They do seem to have a particular hatred for their creators at CCP, given their ultra-violent response to Ward's arrival at a structure the Sleeper drones constructed in space. They move in on him, dishing out *all* damage types: beams sizzle for EM and Thermal damage; warheads obliterate for Kinetic and Explosive damage. Fortunately Ward's Proteus is set up to deal with this ("I'm going to put on a GM shield extender, or when we go through there I'm going to get wasted!") making his ship virtually impossible to kill, letting us witness the Sleeper offensive in safety.
EVE Online developer explains how to build Tech III strategic cruisers
For many players of massively multiplayer online titles, the crafting side of these games is especially appealing. Quite a number of EVE Online's players are drawn to the crafting side of this particular sci-fi MMO, and those in large corporations and alliances have learned how their collective efforts can allow them to produce vast quantities of items and reap equally vast sums of ISK.EVE's crafting system is also very much the backbone of the game. Almost every ship and module used by players in the game was created by another player. Those who are into the combat aspects of the game are reliant upon the producers to supply their tools of destruction, and that destruction in turn creates demand (and fuels profits) for EVE's industrialists. It's an interesting bit of symbiosis (despite that animosity towards those on the other side of the fence) that keeps New Eden thriving.
