It seems that the deployment of Dominion has been completed, with a minimum of pain and suffering. Well, unless you’re the IT guys at CCP in charge of handling the deployment.
I deliberately avoided the test server so as to experience the new planets and vistas first hand when the expansion went live, and to say the game looks gorgeous is an understatement. Heh, well I mean EVE’s always looked amazing, but the planets, my God.. the most hilariously pointless thingies in space now rank among the most striking features of the game. Check out this shot of the graveyard in Luminaire.
I can only assume people are having similar feelings of amazement at the visuals, but more importantly there’s some seriously great features here in this update.
The fleet finder is an incredibly intuitive way to find a group of friends to get blown up with, and I don’t think people are going to be able to live without it now that it’s around. One of the things I always hated was having to interrogate people in multiple mediums (TS/vent, chat, etc.) in order to find out what’s going on. Now it’s all there for you to find out that information yourself. In short: you have no excuse to not get into a gang.
Unless of course you just got blown up because you were staring at the new planets. Hell even the Jukebox can be legitimately manhandled into playing custom music. And finally.. FINALLY, you can whore the EVE forums in the game itself, since the browser is actually capable of rendering something designed to post-1996 standards.
No, I’m not kidding. Hell even this site renders properly. This has to be some sort of CCP trickery.
All of this is window dressing though, pure icing on the moist, chocolatey cake at the heart of this thing: the changes to sovereignty.
While you’ve been reading this, practically every single alliance with leadership worth their weight in metal scraps is hard at work figuring out how to harden (lol?), improve, and redesign their territories to take advantage of the new system.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but my eye’s on the map to see how things shake down, and to see if CCP’s wet dream of properly-utilized space will come true.
