When a game begins new distribution, there naturally tends to follow an influx of new players who may have seen and picked up the game for the first time. As a result, I asked Petur to go into more detail about the expansion's New Player Experience: "EVE is an open-ended game," he began. "If you choose a profession, you're not tied to it, you can change whenever you want... What new players were facing before this expansion was having to decide beforehand, without actually knowing where to head in EVE. Now, the progress is more non-linear. You decide that it's cool to fly a new ship, you try that... you want to try mining or resource management, you can try that... You slowly build up your character instead of building it first and then using it. So you have more informed decision making than you did before."
Up until the launch of Apocrypha, EVE Online made use of static ships. eq2 plat By this I mean that if you built a ship, that ship looked exactly the same as every other ship of its class. Not that they didn't look great, but they didn't have a whole lot of diversity in them. This is what makes the introduction of Tech 3 ships into the game so important. For the first time, players will be able to choose their own ship designs (from a set of pre-existing modules, of course).
"We haven't had a lot of players playing with them yet," Oskarsson answered, referencing the amount of time it takes in-game to actually build a new ship. "But what we can gather from data and feedback from the test server, players love it. The idea of putting together your own ship [is great]."