First Day Of Crucible

As launches of MMORPG expansions go, yesterday's launch of Crucible went pretty smoothy, at least for me.  The announcement that the expansion was deployed went up around 1700, or about 3 hours after the scheduled time.  Of course, working in Chicago like I do, that was 9 hours before I could get home, plenty of time for everyone to download the game before I tried.

I have to update two clients and for the first time I had to run the repair tool on one of my computers.  Following a 9 minute download, the repair tool took 22 minutes to eventually install the game.  Not to bad considering a 1.2 GB download because of the graphics.

Upon logging in, I noticed that the Captain's Quarters in the Minmatar station I was docked in looked a lot better.  I suspect that the graphics settings changed from what I had set, but as I did not notice any lag like the initial download of my CQ at Incarna's launch, I left everything as is.

Planetary Interaction doesn't look any different, but then again I wasn't importing or exporting products last night.  On the train ride home I read the uproar over the hugely increased cost of conducting business in the CONCORD (high-sec) and InterBus (low-sec) run stations.  For high-sec, everyone knew that the tax rate would double.  From what I read on the forums, no one expected the base prices of products to increase as much as they did.  I thought about just stopping, doing the math and writing a blog post about what I'm sure will be a hot topic in the Eve blogosphere in the coming days, but I had courier missions to do.

And am I glad I decided to play the game!  Wow!  My first missions were done flying a Mammoth.  After I got done looking at the background, the first thing I noticed is that my Mammoth had engine trails going into and coming out of warp.  That little detail made the warp experience a little better.

The Ice Cream Man Warping To Zero

The warp tunnel affect is pretty cool also, especially when warping through a planet.  Ships look like they are transiting a distorted subway as the warp tunnel gets dark and then lightens up as the background nebula appears.  I didn't get a screenshot of that experience, but I did get a nice one of how celestial objects along the way appear distorted.

An uncloaked Prowler in warp.  Don't try this at home.

One nice feature is that pilots no longer need to be within 2,500m to click on the jump button in the action menu.  Just click on jump on the outbound gate and you warp to zero and then jump through.  Before Crucible, I was turning the autopilot on and off to get the same effect.  Now I don't have to pay as much attention to how I'm flying.  Caution, though.  This functionality does not work for cloaked ships like blockade runners.  When I tried it, I received the message that I could not jump through because I was cloaked.

Coming out of warp at a backwater high-sec gate

I didn't have much time to play last night, but what I saw flying around my little corner of Metropolis was pretty pleasing to the eye and left a good first impression.