EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Jeff Woleslagle: Lately, to put it mildly, we’ve seen a lot of unrest in the system sovereignty side of the game. In what ways do you foresee that Apocrypha will affect big picture alliance warfare?

Arend Stührmann: Well, the most obvious effect it could have is that wormholes can, either directly or via several wormhole systems, lead back to known space. So I’m really looking forward to the first incidence where a large alliance discovers a wormhole that leads into the backyard of their enemies, and to see how they use that particular strategic advantage, because wormholes… they have a mass limit. So in some cases you’ll be faced with the decision of, “Do I send two carriers through this? Or do I send 50 assault frigates through? From what would I get the biggest strategic advantage?”  

So it’s going to be an interesting sight to see when the first alliances find the routes, and the routes very definitely exist. But of course they’re always shifting and changing, ‘cause wormholes open and close either depending on whether the mass allocation has been reached or exceeded, or the time limit has been reached and they collapse.

Jeff Woleslagle: And will that information be readily available; I’m assuming that has to do with your scanner skills?

Arend Stührmann: Once you’ve found a wormhole you can actually show info on it. It won’t be exact, because wormholes are a very strange and mysterious bunch of beasts. But you will get some indication on whether or not you can expect this wormhole to be hanging around for a while or whether it’s about to collapse, and how much mass you can expect to be able to push through it.

Jeff Woleslagle: A couple of questions about Tech 3 stuff. Tech 3 strategic cruisers have a much lower barrier to entry than a lot of the Tech 2 stuff, making it a lot easier to forge your own purpose-built craft earlier in your game experience. Can you give some examples of the strategic holes these ships might fill?

Arend Stührmann: Again, that’s a tough one because the main thing we wanted to achieve with Tech 3 cruisers was versatility. So players can really customize these to fulfill any number of roles. And we really won’t know which strategic niches they’re going to fill until people start building them.

Really what Tech 3 was set out to achieve, is also put an element of unpredictability in there. So right now if you’re warping into a battle and you see you’re up against a Blackbird, you know that Blackbird’s going to have ECM. If you’re going against a Cerberus you know it’s going to be a missile boat. Whereas with these Tech 3 hulls, there’s that particular moment… that certainty isn’t there, and really we’ll only see once people start building them.

Jeff Woleslagle: What’s the fastest way for a player to get into exploration Tech 3 and the other Apocrypha features?

Arend Stührmann: Well, the first thing they should of course do is play their way through our brand new tutorial…

Jeff Woleslagle: You recommend that for players of all levels?

Arend Stührmann: Well, it could be useful for players to find out, especially those who are setting out to recruit newer players for instance, to know exactly what they’ve been taught from the tutorial. They’ll have a good grounding in the basics of the game, but sometimes it’s advantageous to know what a new players will know based on the tutorial.

The tutorial is also one way to get towards the epic mission arc that we’re introducing in Apocrypha. Experienced players will be led towards this through – our content team is calling them breadcrumb missions that they will get from the regular agents out there. But the epic mission arc, it’s effectively a grand tour of EVE. It leads you through all four faction bases, and is a somewhat challenging but still engaging way of getting to grips with the EVE universe and coming into contact with a lot of other players and other areas.