Well, ladies and gents, this is it, the biggest EVE expansion ever. Took me an hour to download it and nearly as long to patch it. The patch was bigger than my existing install.

And I am….pretty much completely underwhemed.

EVE Classic is gone, but that doesn’t bother me much. Even though only one of my systems was running Premium on the basis of the suspicion that it would cause my older machines to choke, Kithshasa is handling the new Premium content fine. There are a bunch of little tweaks, new gear, and whatever.

But the big deal is supposed to be what they’re calling “strategic cruisers.” The first “tech 3″(only not really) ships, that and wormhole space.

Wormhole space is a stupid waste of time. The less said about it the better.

“Strategic” Cruisers aren’t much better. The difficulty of building one paired with the disincentives for losing one (inevitable skillpoint loss being the big one) are counterbalanced by not nearly enough. Sure, it’s a really schnazzy configurable Cruiser. But it’s a Cruiser, which ultimately means that my Mega Pulse Lasers will still render it into scrap and expanding vapor in seconds, and given the effort involved in building one, you can bet on them costing more than a Battleship, to say nothing of how hard they’ll be to come by at first.

To add insult to injury, they really aren’t very configurable. There’s one per race, and while they have a lot of options, all of those options fit within the race’s traditional roles: Amarr armor-tank and use lasers. Caldari do EW and use missiles. Matari Do Whatever It Is Matari Do (I’ve heard it involves afterburners and autocannons) and Gallente use blasters and drones, and maybe do some neat tricks with propulsion jamming.

Ships were actually more configurable shortly after release, before CCP added platform/role bonuses and made them a requisite for accomplishing anything.

In other words, as novel and neat as they are, they’re really just more of the same. If you’ve got a Loki, you’re going to end up building something that looks a lot like some kind of Tech 2 Minmatar Cruiser. And even within that subset, there are some features you’re just not going to have. Add in that they’re just plain ugly and…

So, in review:

Classic gone: meh.

New Player Experience: some steps in the right direction, maybe. Shrug.

New Animations: <3 Awesome job, CCP.

New Ships: meh.

Wormhole Space: blah.

Combine “blah” for the sake of “meh” with the fairly poorly executed rollout (patch wasn’t available in advance, autopatcher didn’t work for some people, promised torrent for fallback installer was nonexistent,) and I think you have a moderate fail with Apocrypha. Which is really kinda too bad.

Now I get to go back to waiting for Ambulation, I suppose.