Singularity… Testing… Testing… – Empyrean Age

Earlier this week, I decided to check out the Empyrean Age patch on the EVE Test Server (Singularity). I was originally going to have a quick look the day after but as I couldn’t sleep at the time, I thought I may as well do it sooner rather than later. The first, most obvious change was the login screen. I have to say, I was hoping they wouldn’t change it much. I prefer the Trinity login screen with the camera zooming over and out from the EVE logo but that’s not to say that the Empyrean Age version isn’t cool looking.

The first thing I noticed upon logging in, was the colour scheme change, which is a now a creamy brown but as always if you don’t like it, you can change it to something you’re more partial to.

Eager to try out the militia feature, I clicked the Militia button in the Caldari station I logged into to see if I could pick which Militia I wanted to join. Much to my initial disappointment, you can only join the Militia of the race of the station you’re in when you click the button. It was only after thinking about this for a minute that I realised that it made perfect sense. After all, I’m sure a Gallente Militia recruiter would find it exceptionally hard recruiting capsuleers to fight the Caldari and Amarr while in a Caldari station.
So, I then had to find my way to a Gallente station in the fringes of the Caldari State’s section of Empire space. Which, surprisingly, wasn’t that hard. I eventually found one in Otosela, only a couple jumps away from Tasti.

After clicking the Militia button, I was presented with the window you can see in the screenshot below. In this window, you can see a short few paragraphs that seems to essentially be a call to war. Which, given the circumstances, is probably what it is.
Under that, you can find a short (very short) list of consequences of your decision to join the Militia. These consequences being;

• You will be at war with our enemy’s militia.
• Entering enemy-controlled high-security space will result in your being attacked by the powerful navies of that faction.

You also get some recent news on the right, relating to your chosen race. So far it only consists of an RP news post and a test post, but I would expect that territory capture summaries will also be posted. But don’t quote me on that, just a guess.

Fortunately for me, I had enough good standing with the Gallente Federation to join their Militia. This was quite surprising, as I don’t remember ever doing very many missions. So, I’m not entirely sure how I got high enough standing to join the militia. That said, I’m also not entirely sure what standing you need to be able to join the militia. For all I know, it could be quite a small amount.

Anyway, after clicking the “Enlist Me” button, you’re taken out of your corporation (if you joined while in an NPC corporation, I assume) and put into the Federal Defence Union corporation. You are also able to see your rank (Federation Minuteman being the lowest) and your time in the militia. There are also a small selection of statistics, covering the total number of militia members in the different militias, kills, victory points and systems controlled. As well as all of these statistics for you personally, and your corporation.
And finally, below that, there are three lists. These being: nearby systems, dangerous systems and conquered systems.

I didn’t have time to have a look around anything else as by the time I’d gotten this far I was feeling extremely tired and my bed seemed too inviting.

A last note before retreat to my bed, I noticed something while looking at the Federal Defence Union information page. In the description, it states that the Gallente were provoked by the “destructive Caldari”. Now, unless I’ve missed something quite important, as far as everyone knows the Gallente are supposed to be the only empire to commit a destructive act. Does this mean that there’s more to come? Maybe the Caldari destroy a Gallente station, or bomb a Gallente inhabited planet?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Fly safe.

EVE Tutorial Play-Through

I’ve been meaning to do the new tutorial for quite a while now. I’d originally forgotten but while sitting in Tasti, and being bored as hell, I remembered and started creating a new character. As I hadn’t flown Amarr before, I created a female Amarr Khanid character and named her Reina Alair.

So far the tutorial seems pretty well done, I haven’t noticed any major problems as of yet. The first difference I noticed (well, it was hard not to notice) was that now the players ship starts in a deadspace location instead of in a station. It’s quite a good place to start as it is an abandoned Mining Facility, so it’s quite a convenient place to learn to mine and fight because of the Veldspar asteroids and pirate drones scattered around the area.
I’m currently only up to working for the tutorial agent, but I’ve already noticed a few bugs and general things that shouldn’t be happening.

• After maximising EVE (after minimising with Alt + Tab while in full screen mode) the engine flame graphics disappear, leaving the trails to look like they’re coming out of inactive engines.
• I’m not sure if this is a new feature or a bug but mining lasers now only fire once per cycle instead of continuously throughout the cycle. I’m not sure whether a new player would accept this as how they work or believe that they’re not working properly, but when I saw them it led me to think that the lasers weren’t working as they should.
• This is hardly a big problem at all, but Aurora calls the tutorial agent ‘him’ when it is in fact a woman.
• When undocking from a station, the overview moves about a third of the way across the screen, meaning that you have to move it back to the side or wherever you prefer it to be.

It seems they’ve really cut down the tutorial, I remember it taking hours to complete. I was expecting to get a whole post written from it but it seems that I’ve already finished it after only an hour or so. I guess that this is proof of how well they’ve condensed the tutorial from a few hours long to just over an hour long.
If you want a more in depth tutorial explanation, head over to Revelations Tutorial – Part I, II & III (oops, I originally linked to the wrong post) over at The Ancient Gaming Noob. This one didn’t turn out the way I had planned, so here are a few screenshots I took while doing the tutorial. I’ll try and get a proper entry (one that isn’t taken up mostly by screenshots) posted soon.

On a side note, I’ve been thinking about changing the layout of my blog. I’m getting a little bored of my current layout so I was thinking about changing it to the one you can see below.

I prefer it to my current one to be honest but I was just wondering how everyone else felt about it. I don’t want to end up as one of those people that changes their blog layout every few months. So, what’s your opinion? Should I stay with my current layout or switch to this new one.