5 Reasons to enter EVE Online: Apocrypha

EVE Online may have been around since 2003 (today marks its six-year anniversary), but developer CCP hopes to attract new players with its recent expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha. The game takes place in the New Eden solar system, run by empires of different races all working towards peace and progress within the galaxy. You emerge as a newly graduated capsuleer, an elite pilot who can control a ship from a special pod. But it’s your ship - not your pilot - that takes the center stage in EVE, and customizing it with various upgrades is key to surviving and thriving in the game.That means making lots of money, so get ready to take up a profession, tune up your craft, start buying and selling materials and build a corporation with friends so you can take a shot at cornering the market in EVE’s ever-changing economy.

EVE Online has always had a bad reputation for being overly complex. But with Apocrypha’s "New Player Experience," CCP plans to ease in playersput off by the game’s steep learning curve. Now, getting into the game is easier than ever.

Before, players were forever stuck with the attributes they first selected for their character. Finding out that the character build you were going for just isn’t working out as you intended after investing hours in the game was frustrating, to say the least. Now, players can change their attribute skills once a year. It sounds like a minor fix for a major problem, but the end result is a more streamlined and straightforward character creation system that gives you an avatar that complements how you play the game more closely.

After you launch into New Eden with your race-specific ship, you must undergo a newly redesigned tutorial that will teach you how to navigate through space and shoot down your enemies. New players now have the advantage of having their first million skill points gained at an accelerated pace, so they can get their hands on a broader range of equipment with much less space-grinding.

New in Apocrypha are wormholes that provide random pathways to uncharted areas of space, giving you a true sense of exploration. By scanning areas of space, you’ll find these wormholes swirling open for an undisclosed amount of time, letting only a few ships pass through beforethey close.

Not all wormholes lead you to unknown territory.Some will lead to known space and could prove helpful in finding new trade or smuggling routes. Entering unstable wormholes is best tackled with a crew, since you never know what could be waiting for you on the other end. Who knows? You might run into some Sleepers, Apocrypha’s deadly new NPC race.