EVE Online
Monday, February 27th, 2006So here I was, looking at GameIndustry.com to see all the awards Myst 5 won... when I noticed an advertisement for a 14-day trial for EVE Online. Now, I'm a huge fan of MMOs (duh), and the only thing that keeps me from playing several at once is the monthly fees that come with them. Also, I will never play one without first experiencing it for myself... so I usually wait for these trials. (The one exception was World of Warcraft, where when just about the entire Myst community decided to get it and said it was awesome... then I just bit the bullet and tried it out.)
So, hey. Free MMO access for 2 weeks. Sounds good. Always wanted to play EVE Online to experience the single-server gameworld they have. Granted they only just recently peaked 100,000 players, but the idea of a single massive gameworld fascinates me. That, and the EVE Online gameworld is really big. But I didn't realize how big until I played it.
The gameworld is GARGANTUAN. It's the largest gameworld I've ever seen in my life. I'd rank it up there with the size of Morrowind. You have almost quite literally an entire galaxy to explore. It takes several minutes to cross just one of many, many, many regions of the galaxy at warp speed. There's really no telling what you might find when exploring on regular propulsion.
The whole thing carries the style of Tradewars 2002... an ancient text-based RPG (kind of) back in the days of dialup Bulletin Board Services. The basic premise was... you created a character, and you were assigned a basic spacecraft with a moderate amount of cargo holds with which you could buy and sell materials at various star ports. Sometimes, depending on the server, you even started with a planet with a small amount of colonists that slowly created materials for you. Once you gathered enough money, you could choose between about 20 different ships, depending on what you were planning on doing. Merchantile or Freelancer. If you picked up the Freelancing job, there were plenty of evil-aligned alien craft wandering around the universe for you to kill and collect bounties, with which you could replenish your weapons and shields.
So it has Tradewars elements with a control interface not unlike the Homeworld games. You are in a 100% 3D environment... you can fly in any direction manually, or automatically plot waypoint courses to desired destinations. Unfortunately, you are not allowed realtime manual ship controls (such as the A W S D keys) and must use the mouse to choose a location, although doubleclicking in random space will pilot your ship off in that direction.
It also seems to have some elements of the game Freelancer, as far as quests and general plots and such. You visit various space stations and planets and pick up missions from agents. You then carry out the request, and, depending on the mission terms, return to the station and claim your rewards. Unfortunately, I can see this becoming very old and monotonous very, very quickly... there's not nearly enough variation in what you do. Perhaps in the more dangerous areas, you'll have to fend off space pirates (both players and NPCs), so perhaps that'll make things more interesting. Also, since the gameworld is so freakin' huge, traveling to the mission coordinates sometimes takes a very, very long time. Especially if you have to go pick something up and then return. As I'm writing this, I've spent 10+ minutes going in one direction and have just started coming back. I guess this isn't too bad, since WoW has long quests, too, but at least WoW demands interaction. My ship is driving itself with Autopilot (even with the window minimized) and I can hear everything going on.
I've also heard that EVE Online heavily promotes public relations. As in... you are constantly changing reputation levels with everybody in the universe... NPCs, Corporations, players, etc. You can either become the most powerful political figure or the most notorious pirate. That, I think, is really cool... but I don't think I could ever become well enough known to actually have this aspect become fun. I'm more of a loner who pokes around for a living, testing the waters of both legal and illegal avenues for making money.
You are allowed 3 characters on the single server, which is a bit restricting for me, since I love multiple characters (I easily have 40 characters on WoW, not all active, no, but I experimented with different classes and races). It at least allows you a character designed for doing good, and a character designed for pirating... and then one that'd never be used.
The game is very player vs player (PvP). There are security levels posted for each region you visit. 1.0 being the highest, and you will probably never be touched. From 1.0 it goes down to 0.0, which is completely neutral space with no police... and anything can happen out there and nobody would know. So far, I've only ventured into 0.5 space, which I've also heard can be dangerous if you're mining asteroids. It seems pirates like to wait in obscure places and then pounce on full cargo ships.
So in the two days that I've played it, I think I'm currently hooked... though right now I'm still learning and exploring. If nothing changes soon, then I don't think I'd want to pay for it. But it seems to be a very nice low-lag game with high interaction, a huge gameworld, and the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want. I haven't yet had a quest that required extra help, so that's good.
...and one final note. To warp into other regions, you have to use a special device, much like jumping regions in Freelancer. You have to fly to this big huge wormhole looking machine and fly through it. Guess what it's called?
A Stargate.
So when you're flying through regions, you constantly hear the computer saying "warping to Stargate" and "approaching Stargate". It's veeery cool. I like the technology they use. Your ships constantly need help in flying vast distances... not like Star Trek where they can fly anywhere as long as they have the time. Your ship sometimes just simply can't get there... and (at least my 2nd ship) the warp drive is constantly shutting down to regenerate power to go into warp again. Hyperdrive lanes are more realistic to me than an Enterprise that keeps going and going and going and... yeah.
Anyway. I'd suggest trying it out! Especially since there's a 14-day trial.
But as for buying it? I'm not sure... not sure at all...