Rhea Review

This is Rhea

Rhea has been out for over a week now and therefore I feel expertly qualified to wax poetic on its merits and flaws. I'm a blogger right? That's what we do. We're experts on everything. Rhea added a bunch of shit to EVE, and I'll discuss each one in turn.


Thera and the shattered wormholes

Myself and many other pilots began scanning for Thera immediately after the server reset on December 9th. I wasn't the first to find it, but soon got inside and joined in the bloodletting as an unwilling participant. I stayed there for about a week, even going so far as to join the EVE Scout team, after which the lure of RAGE (Hard Knocks' home system) became impossible to resist.

Thera is the first and only wormhole with stations inside. The Sisters of EVE have four stations, each with typical services like insurance and clone bays. The market and contract system are permitted, as is clone jumping in and out. The system usually has at least 20 wormhole exits at any given time to all types of k- and w-space, making it a sort of Grand Central Station.

There are 100 shattered wormholes in addition to Thera. "Shattered" refers to the planets, which are broken and unsuitable for planetary interaction. They also have no moons, meaning no starbases. Any incursions into them will at best be semi-permanent with an orca or mobile depot. These systems have typical wormhole sites, and are the only w-systems to contain ice belts.

Thera itself, while unique, isn't particularly cool in and of itself. What is more interesting is the burgeoning community that is setting up shop there. Furtherance is one of the first corporations to establish themselves, and provides intel and scouting from their channel (Thera Local Chat). Other groups have also begun to spring up in the system with varying goals. I'm hoping that Thera becomes a focal point for content, both from its own residents and guests from other places in New Eden. I'm less optimistic about the shattered systems, which will probably do little to attract more visitors to w-space and will just clutter up everyone's siggy maps with frig holes.

Removal of clone grades and SP loss

I love the hardcore nature of EVE. The galaxy is a cold, dark, violent place, and death should always have serious penalties so as to make combat more exciting and meaningful. I will be honest, my unreserved schadenfreude loves reading about drunken and/or negligent pilots who have trained long skills multiple times because they got themselves podded before properly upgrading their clone. However, we need fewer barriers to pvp, especially for ancient, SP-soaked toons like mine who were penalized with a hefty fee whenever we died. I applaud this choice, which reminds me of years ago when learning skills were removed.

Tech 3 destroyers - the Confessor (Amarr)

Allow me to introduce the Confessor

The Confessor is the first tech 3 to be released since the t3 cruisers in Apocrypha. It functions a bit differently from those ships - it has only one skill per ship instead of 6, does not remove skill points upon death and, instead of modular subsystems, can swap "modes" on the fly. There are three modes - sniper, defense, and speed - each providing different hull bonuses.

I have not yet flown the Confessor as its price hasn't settled, but the concept is very interesting. It will be much cheaper than a t3 cruiser and still offer many options for gameplay. I look forward to t3 destroyer roams where pilots can switch out modes in space depending on the needs of the gang (although module changes will still require a depot, of course).

The Bowhead

The bowhead is an ORE freighter that has a huge SMA. That's it. It can carry around a lot of fitted ships at once. So, I'm sure that incursionbears will love it, but it's a very specialized hull that will not be of use to most pilots. I want to see some great anti-tanked lossmails from CODE.

Physically-based rendering

PBR is a visual technique that brings out more light into the dark models of EVE ships. CCP Mankiller wrote a mathy article on how it works that I don't really understand, but basically what it does is bring out detail in models that had previously been obscured or concealed. After Rhea, my corp's comms exploded with nerds inspecting every ship in EVE and remarking on their differences. Most of the ships look pretty good. Some of them are a bit odd, like the Ishtar, which now has some red and green paneling. Any problems or weirdness after PBR aren't really from PBR though, they're from the wonky textures and models that have been slowly infiltrating EVE over the last decade and are now completely visible. It's kind of like turning on the floodlights in a grimy room and then blaming the light for the dirtiness. CCP has more work to do with modeling, but PBR is a breath of fresh air in an ancient game.

Map/UI

Rhea includes a beta for a new star map. It is slick and much easier to read than the current F10 map (which is still right where it's always been, for you hipsters out there). It can also be resized and moved around the screen real estate as the player desires; very handy on null roams and such. CCP has promised even more goodies with the Proteus release next month, like visual dscan cones and probe scanning.

CCP Optimal and the EVE UI Group reskinned the user interface, adding new icons, color themes, blur effects, and more. These aren't quite as dramatic as the dev blog would suggest, and the mouse-over window blur is more of a hassle than anything else (thankfully, it can be turned off). In general it is difficult for me to comment on the usability of EVE's UI, as I have played for almost nine years and have not played many other MMOs, so this is kind of all I know and I have grown accustomed to it. I do like the new color palette, and the option to have it switch colors based on the ship I'm flying is kind of neat. Otherwise, it looks a lot like the UI before Rhea.

It's the little things

The Angel Cartel jacket

A bunch of smaller additions and improvements were included in Rhea. Some examples are a wandering sleeper in k-space, light balancing to certain lasers, vanity dread skins, pirate-themed capsuleer apparel (see pic for example, courtesy of our dashing model), recruiter-initiated corp applications, and more. One of the more notable of these is the new modeling for the Blackbird and Incursus hulls and their t2 variants, which all look very nice. I killed a couple of the new falcons recently and I have to say they were very handsome.

The bottom line: 8/10

CCP's new release strategy and renewed focus on EVE Online (bye bye WoD MMO) has revitalized this game. It has come a long way from the 2011 Incarna doldrums, and there seems to be more content than ever now. Most importantly, the content is coming from the right place - the players. As long as CCP keeps giving us the tools we need, we can do the rest.