Just like a lot of other Eve Bloggers, I took a look at Odyssey on the test server Sisi. Keep in mind these are some first impressions, and things are still in motion, as the upcoming expansion is still in beta, so all is subject to change.
New gate effect
The new animation in itself is nice, the first few times you see it. It does get a bit old after that and it seems longer than the new one (which is probably not true), but as it disables the UI it is more intrusive than the old one. An on / off button would be nice. Browsing the market or taking care of your PI while on autopilot is annoying right now.
Scanning changes
I was a bit disappointed with these changes. I can see how they want to make it a bit easier to get into, but there is a bit too much handholding right now. You can only launch 7 probes and they’re either in pinpoint mode or wide broad scan mode (can’t remember the exact term). I usually only use 5 which works perfectly well, and was even 2 sister probes short on the first character I tried on Sisi ! Also the shift key now has another function and I was dragging the probes out of formation. Probably something you get used to, but I would rather have my old keys back. The pinpointing itself wasn’t much different, but seems to take longer as I was struggling a bit with the new interface and key setup.
The onboard scanner is now much more powerful and immediately shows all anomolies in the system ! The sites are presented on your regular screen, you can turn that on and off. Which isn’t very handy in my opinion. I don’t use the client full screen, sometimes I have three clients open in windowed mode, and don’t have that much screen estate. The list of sites is currently still there though CCP does plan to remove that, which I think is a very bad idea. Most feedback seems to agree with me here, so I hope they change their mind.
Ice Mining
Ice belts are no more ! You can now use the on board scanner and an ice belt anomoly will appear in the former Ice mining systems. I tried this out in Eygfe as you can see on the screen shot.
The mining times themselves have been halved, so it takes around 90secs now for a full cycle (with no Orca boost). The ‘belts’ themselves aren’t very big, so I assume the ice miners will spread out more or there will be a race for the new anomoly to appear. I don’t think these can support the almost 200 people in local in Eygfe at peak times, it’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, once this goes live !
Links
Mabrick has made a nice video on the Odyssey changes, you can find it on his blog.
UPDATE: Around the time I posted this, a dev post appeared in the feedback thread that addressed several of the issues mentioned above. Very nice ;).