Post by Gilvan Blight on May 1, 2007 11:14:01 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Quickly:[/glow] a very different MMO, amazing depth, can be too much.
[glow=red,2,300]Summary: [/glow]
This is an MMO that has been around for a while and is doing something different. It's a space opera MMO that really reminds me of the Traveler rpgs (both pen and paper and the ones that have made it to PC).
You pick from one of 4 races, then 3 sub races, then a gender (so a total possibility of 24 different character types). This sets your starting stats. Now these aren't stats like in other MMO, not STR, DEX, etc. These are all metal and social stats. Things like Intelligence, memory, charisma, intellect, wisdom, etc. These stats influence the skills in the game. You next pick a heritage, what type of family did you come from. This gives you your first set of skills. The types are Agriculture, tech, military etc. You then pick a vocation for yourself, these are more specific, engineer, soldier, miner, etc. This gives you a further set of skills (or increases your existing skills). You lastly get some free points to spend to further increase or add skills. With a minimum of 3 choices at each of these steps plus the 24 different racial choice, added to the 'free selection skills' you can nearly guarantee no starting character need be the same .
You then embark on a multi-hour tutorial that teaches you how to play. This took me about 5 hours, and it was well worth it. Besides teaching you the basics, this also ensures you will get help by other players when done the Tutorial, for people who ask questions that are answered in the tutorial are not tolerated (and usually get instantly black listed). You start off with just a ship with some civilian Weapons and are slowly introduced to the interface by the Tutorial robot. You will learn how to enter your ship, buy upgrades, place upgrades on your ships hard points, refine ore, sell items, launch into space, fly around in a solar system, warp to another part of a solar system, use a stargate to get to another solar system, use way points to change regions, meet up with agents, complete missions for agents, build items, do courier runs, use code breakers and scanners, attack enemy ships and more.
From there you are unceremoniously dumped into the thick of things with only you to figure out what to do next. This game is not at all linear like other MMOs. There isn't a main storyline quest to complete, there arne't side quests, there isn't a right way to play or a wrong way. You go about the HUGE galaxy doing what you want. There are agents that will give you missions for the various corporations, and there is a huge Market to explore and try to make your fortune with (either by stealing, mining, trading, or making things to sell). Theres a ton of ships to aspire owning. You can work on raising your fame with an individual corp, or many. You can even make the opposite reputation. There are law filled areas and unlawful areas and you can play the game leaning either way. Even way points can be set up to either play it safe, or avoid the law.
The biggest thing about this game is that most of it is player driven. Meaning not only do you do what you want, but that a lot of what you will do will be driven by other players. Players can and have set up huge corporations. Many of the space docks you will use are owned by players. You can, and will want to join a player run corp asap to give you direction. There are player vs player wars going on out in the reaches of space. There are player driven mining operations, that strip mine asteroid fields at a time. There are pirate organizations that make their fortune off the backs of others, who are often willing to recruit someone that can beat their own. Overall you can pretty much do anything you want in this game. Want to start your own mining corporation, go for it. Want to become a world premier inventory, go for it. Want to be a soldier in an intergalactic war, go for it. Want to be the one that reunites the waring tribes, give it a go. You are going to need some help along the way though, and that comes from the thousands of other players each playing with their own goal in mind. This makes the game a great reality engine, in the fact that it boils down to a bunch of people aspiring to greatness in the same world.
There are no levels in this game. The only thing that you earn is hard cash and new skills. Skills are learned in real time, where you pick one skill to work on at a time. When it is learned you pick a new one. Improving current skills takes time, learning new skills requires you buy a skill 'book' and takes time. New skills are usually learned in under an hour, but improving a current skill from level 3 to 4 can take 5 days. Each skill either makes your character better at something (each rank in Gunnery increases your to hit chance by 5%) or lets you do something new (Space Frigates level 3 lets you flight medium frigates). There have got to be thousands of skills you can work on. This is a major part of the game and your main goal for character development. There is no hard and fast rule for what skills to take, or when, so again it's open and up to the players.
Time: everything, not just skills is real time. Put an item up on the open market for 24 hours and it's up there for 24 real hours. Place a bid on an item and you have to wait for the market to close for the day. Set up a manufacturing facility to make your new ship (from the blueprints you stole from some pirates) and expect to wait 8 hours for this ship to be built, again real time. Want to fly to a system 9 sectors away, better have a book, or something running in another window. Most of these will run whether or not the game is actually running. This means that some of the gameplay in eve, will involve setting things up to run while you are away.
Combat: Combat in this game is handled mainly by the game. It's not a turn based system, but it's not lightning fast action either. It's more the case of spotting the enemy on your sector overview. Hitting lock target as you approach, then turning on your weapons when in range. Once firing back and forth you will activate various ship systems as needed (ex shield repairs, boosters, jammers, etc). This all happens real time, but fairly slow real time. This is nothing like having to hit skills in games like Guild Wars or even using abilities in WoW, you have much more time to react. You can manually turn your ship at any time, though most combats just have you either matching distance or orbiting your opponent.
I'm sure I missed 100 or more things in this long yet still too short summary. Eve is a massive game. There is just so much. So many systems, so many planets, so many skills, so many items, so many ships, so many variables.
[glow=red,2,300]The Good:[/glow] Addictive: this has the 'one more skill' feel, or the 'I'll just check X before I go to bed' I'm sure you all know what that is like. The best graphics I have seen in an MMO. This is mind blowingly beautiful. Sure there's no hot elves or mist shrouded forests, but the ships, the stations and the general colours of space all look amazing. Toss in a mellow soundtrack, and the female 'narrator' and it just feels magnificent. The character generation reminded me of Traveler which is a great thing. There were so many options. You could spend hours just making characters. The character portrait (all that anyone will ever see of you) had enough options and morphing sliders that I doubt you will find two characters that look identical. The player driven game is such a different concept that it definitely appeals to the PC gamer in me, and the roleplayer. Based on how the game is set up, roleplaying is almost natural. Even when not 'in character' you will be talking to other characters as if you were there. There isn't really an out of character way to say, I want to hire you to mine this asteroid field for me, or hey join my corp and make big bucks. Extremely helpful players. Eve does something different and the people that like it, love it, and they want to share that with other players. Everyone was uber helpful and wanted me to enjoy the game as much as them. The amazing amount of options will be a hardcore gamers dream. For people who loved designing ships in Masters of Orion, who thought that base building was the best aspect of Xcom, and who thought the original Elder Scrolls with the Hex based stats was the best one, will love this.
[glow=red,2,300]The Bad:[/glow] The amazing amount of options are the casual gamers bane. You can't get into Eve lightly. There is no quick pick up and play. This game is DEEP. With countless options, countless variations and no real overall goal, the casual gamer will be lost, frustrated and probably bored. Travel times are ridiculous. You should be able to log out when traveling long distances in safe sectors just as you can log out while waiting for skill progression or manufacturing. Having to sit and watch as your ship moved to a jump gate, jumps, warps to the next jump gate, approaches it, jumps, warps to the next jump gate.... it's just silly and takes forever. I got a lot of reading done which is nice, but I shouldn't need a book to read while playing a game. I also found the lack of direction disconcerting. I never did join a corp, which I hear from many people makes a huge difference (I had planned on it, until the Ugly happened). There are so many ways you could go with your characters, it's hard to decide what kind of game you want to play. Especially with your first time playing you kind of want to try everything, that could take a lifetime. Which is kinda cool, but also a bit much.
[glow=red,2,300]The Ugly: [/glow]
The devil is in the details. This is a personal ugly, as this is what made me decide not to keep playing the game. In one sitting I made two mistakes. The first was to be mining some ore while waiting for a skill to complete (a skill that would let me fly the new ship I spent half a mil. on). The skill completed and I was so excited that I warped back to the station with my new ship totally forgetting that I had a mining probe out, helping me mine. I never got this probe back. Meaning I wasted probably about 2 hours of my life getting that mining probe (1 hour of which was training the skill to use mining probes, the other getting the probe from a station 6 sectors away). This was highly frustrating. A warning would have been nice. The ability to go back and 'easily' find my probe would have been adequate. But no I got neither and wasted hours and still am without a probe. This wasn't nearly as bad as 2 hours later. Out with my new ship on a mission I get ambushed. The first couple of enemies are weak compared to my new ship with 5 turret mounts. I blow them away so quick that I fail to notice that another 3 ships have come in, big ones. I try to warp away, but then realize I want to go to the system with my contact. So I need to bring up the people and places window, click on my agents, click to open that menu, then right click on the agent, then choose dock. By then my ship is blown up. You figure it would be quicker to warp out. Slightly my bad, as I could have bookmarked the agent. Even more of a piss off though: I completely forgot one important detail when buying a new ship. Insure it. I didn't, meaning that now I am broke, and I have no ship and my character is basically useless as I can't afford to buy a new one. My one recourse is to beg, or take out a loan from another player. I can't bring myself to do this, so this character is toast. All because I fumbled with the interface to warp our and forgot insurance. The game has SO MANY nuances. So many little things that you can forget that it's overwhelming. This can lead to huge frustration when you forget the little, yet hugely important things. Also you can ruin a character. You can mess up so bad that your dude is basically useless. If you forget to update your clone and die, then you can loose tons of skill points. This could amount to days of real time playing, all for forgetting to update your clone. There are many things like this. I'm sure some people love the detail, and the fact that they do have to watch every little thing. Personally I found it too much.
[glow=red,2,300]Overall: [/glow]The most unique MMO out there. This is the something different that people either love or hate. If you are the type that likes to macro or even micro manage every little thing you will love this game. You can be working on many things at once, mining, building a corp, running a manufacturing empire, all while learning to fly the ship that just blew you out of space last week. The lack of direction is refreshing but disconcerting. The time system is real time, meaning that you can leave the game sit and still be getting things done, but that it takes what seems like forever to do anything. This game rewards clear thinking and patience way more then dexterity and a quick trigger finger. There are people that would love this. I can thing of quite a few off the top of my head including WGR members like GhostWes and Thardon. There are people that would hate this, again including members like Lobo and Gorechyld2000. You can easily get a 14 day trial that is a quick download, and I strongly recommend trying this game out. You may have found your new game, the one you keep playing for years, or you may have found a game that just ridiculously complex and takes way too much time to do anything. For a free download, it's worth finding out if it may be the first.
[glow=red,2,300]Last note: [/glow]Since I 'quit' after The Ugly I have been thinking about the game. How I should have acted during that fight. How I should have set up a bookmark to warp out quickly (especially when I expected an ambush). How I should have put both rocket launchers on my ship instead of a mining laser before going in. This makes me want to try again. To buckle down and spend the time needed to take on that mission again, to take down the pirates or at least escape in one piece. I sit here typing this wondering if I have enough for maybe a Civy shuttle, just something I can do a couple courier runs in to get a better ship back, a mining ship, that will quickly get me the money to buy back what I lost. Then I think seriously, how long that would take (hours and hours, some in game, some out) and I wonder if it's worth it. so even now sitting here, I may not have given up on Eve. WGR member MindMusic pointed out that he had a similar feeling. He did the trial and kind liked it, but decided not to keep it up with a subscription. But then he missed Eve, he kept thinking about Eve and what he would do next in Eve. So he relented and subscribed. This from a member who generally refuses to buy Retail software and thought he would never ever pay a monthly.
[glow=red,2,300]Summary: [/glow]
This is an MMO that has been around for a while and is doing something different. It's a space opera MMO that really reminds me of the Traveler rpgs (both pen and paper and the ones that have made it to PC).
You pick from one of 4 races, then 3 sub races, then a gender (so a total possibility of 24 different character types). This sets your starting stats. Now these aren't stats like in other MMO, not STR, DEX, etc. These are all metal and social stats. Things like Intelligence, memory, charisma, intellect, wisdom, etc. These stats influence the skills in the game. You next pick a heritage, what type of family did you come from. This gives you your first set of skills. The types are Agriculture, tech, military etc. You then pick a vocation for yourself, these are more specific, engineer, soldier, miner, etc. This gives you a further set of skills (or increases your existing skills). You lastly get some free points to spend to further increase or add skills. With a minimum of 3 choices at each of these steps plus the 24 different racial choice, added to the 'free selection skills' you can nearly guarantee no starting character need be the same .
You then embark on a multi-hour tutorial that teaches you how to play. This took me about 5 hours, and it was well worth it. Besides teaching you the basics, this also ensures you will get help by other players when done the Tutorial, for people who ask questions that are answered in the tutorial are not tolerated (and usually get instantly black listed). You start off with just a ship with some civilian Weapons and are slowly introduced to the interface by the Tutorial robot. You will learn how to enter your ship, buy upgrades, place upgrades on your ships hard points, refine ore, sell items, launch into space, fly around in a solar system, warp to another part of a solar system, use a stargate to get to another solar system, use way points to change regions, meet up with agents, complete missions for agents, build items, do courier runs, use code breakers and scanners, attack enemy ships and more.
From there you are unceremoniously dumped into the thick of things with only you to figure out what to do next. This game is not at all linear like other MMOs. There isn't a main storyline quest to complete, there arne't side quests, there isn't a right way to play or a wrong way. You go about the HUGE galaxy doing what you want. There are agents that will give you missions for the various corporations, and there is a huge Market to explore and try to make your fortune with (either by stealing, mining, trading, or making things to sell). Theres a ton of ships to aspire owning. You can work on raising your fame with an individual corp, or many. You can even make the opposite reputation. There are law filled areas and unlawful areas and you can play the game leaning either way. Even way points can be set up to either play it safe, or avoid the law.
The biggest thing about this game is that most of it is player driven. Meaning not only do you do what you want, but that a lot of what you will do will be driven by other players. Players can and have set up huge corporations. Many of the space docks you will use are owned by players. You can, and will want to join a player run corp asap to give you direction. There are player vs player wars going on out in the reaches of space. There are player driven mining operations, that strip mine asteroid fields at a time. There are pirate organizations that make their fortune off the backs of others, who are often willing to recruit someone that can beat their own. Overall you can pretty much do anything you want in this game. Want to start your own mining corporation, go for it. Want to become a world premier inventory, go for it. Want to be a soldier in an intergalactic war, go for it. Want to be the one that reunites the waring tribes, give it a go. You are going to need some help along the way though, and that comes from the thousands of other players each playing with their own goal in mind. This makes the game a great reality engine, in the fact that it boils down to a bunch of people aspiring to greatness in the same world.
There are no levels in this game. The only thing that you earn is hard cash and new skills. Skills are learned in real time, where you pick one skill to work on at a time. When it is learned you pick a new one. Improving current skills takes time, learning new skills requires you buy a skill 'book' and takes time. New skills are usually learned in under an hour, but improving a current skill from level 3 to 4 can take 5 days. Each skill either makes your character better at something (each rank in Gunnery increases your to hit chance by 5%) or lets you do something new (Space Frigates level 3 lets you flight medium frigates). There have got to be thousands of skills you can work on. This is a major part of the game and your main goal for character development. There is no hard and fast rule for what skills to take, or when, so again it's open and up to the players.
Time: everything, not just skills is real time. Put an item up on the open market for 24 hours and it's up there for 24 real hours. Place a bid on an item and you have to wait for the market to close for the day. Set up a manufacturing facility to make your new ship (from the blueprints you stole from some pirates) and expect to wait 8 hours for this ship to be built, again real time. Want to fly to a system 9 sectors away, better have a book, or something running in another window. Most of these will run whether or not the game is actually running. This means that some of the gameplay in eve, will involve setting things up to run while you are away.
Combat: Combat in this game is handled mainly by the game. It's not a turn based system, but it's not lightning fast action either. It's more the case of spotting the enemy on your sector overview. Hitting lock target as you approach, then turning on your weapons when in range. Once firing back and forth you will activate various ship systems as needed (ex shield repairs, boosters, jammers, etc). This all happens real time, but fairly slow real time. This is nothing like having to hit skills in games like Guild Wars or even using abilities in WoW, you have much more time to react. You can manually turn your ship at any time, though most combats just have you either matching distance or orbiting your opponent.
I'm sure I missed 100 or more things in this long yet still too short summary. Eve is a massive game. There is just so much. So many systems, so many planets, so many skills, so many items, so many ships, so many variables.
[glow=red,2,300]The Good:[/glow] Addictive: this has the 'one more skill' feel, or the 'I'll just check X before I go to bed' I'm sure you all know what that is like. The best graphics I have seen in an MMO. This is mind blowingly beautiful. Sure there's no hot elves or mist shrouded forests, but the ships, the stations and the general colours of space all look amazing. Toss in a mellow soundtrack, and the female 'narrator' and it just feels magnificent. The character generation reminded me of Traveler which is a great thing. There were so many options. You could spend hours just making characters. The character portrait (all that anyone will ever see of you) had enough options and morphing sliders that I doubt you will find two characters that look identical. The player driven game is such a different concept that it definitely appeals to the PC gamer in me, and the roleplayer. Based on how the game is set up, roleplaying is almost natural. Even when not 'in character' you will be talking to other characters as if you were there. There isn't really an out of character way to say, I want to hire you to mine this asteroid field for me, or hey join my corp and make big bucks. Extremely helpful players. Eve does something different and the people that like it, love it, and they want to share that with other players. Everyone was uber helpful and wanted me to enjoy the game as much as them. The amazing amount of options will be a hardcore gamers dream. For people who loved designing ships in Masters of Orion, who thought that base building was the best aspect of Xcom, and who thought the original Elder Scrolls with the Hex based stats was the best one, will love this.
[glow=red,2,300]The Bad:[/glow] The amazing amount of options are the casual gamers bane. You can't get into Eve lightly. There is no quick pick up and play. This game is DEEP. With countless options, countless variations and no real overall goal, the casual gamer will be lost, frustrated and probably bored. Travel times are ridiculous. You should be able to log out when traveling long distances in safe sectors just as you can log out while waiting for skill progression or manufacturing. Having to sit and watch as your ship moved to a jump gate, jumps, warps to the next jump gate, approaches it, jumps, warps to the next jump gate.... it's just silly and takes forever. I got a lot of reading done which is nice, but I shouldn't need a book to read while playing a game. I also found the lack of direction disconcerting. I never did join a corp, which I hear from many people makes a huge difference (I had planned on it, until the Ugly happened). There are so many ways you could go with your characters, it's hard to decide what kind of game you want to play. Especially with your first time playing you kind of want to try everything, that could take a lifetime. Which is kinda cool, but also a bit much.
[glow=red,2,300]The Ugly: [/glow]
The devil is in the details. This is a personal ugly, as this is what made me decide not to keep playing the game. In one sitting I made two mistakes. The first was to be mining some ore while waiting for a skill to complete (a skill that would let me fly the new ship I spent half a mil. on). The skill completed and I was so excited that I warped back to the station with my new ship totally forgetting that I had a mining probe out, helping me mine. I never got this probe back. Meaning I wasted probably about 2 hours of my life getting that mining probe (1 hour of which was training the skill to use mining probes, the other getting the probe from a station 6 sectors away). This was highly frustrating. A warning would have been nice. The ability to go back and 'easily' find my probe would have been adequate. But no I got neither and wasted hours and still am without a probe. This wasn't nearly as bad as 2 hours later. Out with my new ship on a mission I get ambushed. The first couple of enemies are weak compared to my new ship with 5 turret mounts. I blow them away so quick that I fail to notice that another 3 ships have come in, big ones. I try to warp away, but then realize I want to go to the system with my contact. So I need to bring up the people and places window, click on my agents, click to open that menu, then right click on the agent, then choose dock. By then my ship is blown up. You figure it would be quicker to warp out. Slightly my bad, as I could have bookmarked the agent. Even more of a piss off though: I completely forgot one important detail when buying a new ship. Insure it. I didn't, meaning that now I am broke, and I have no ship and my character is basically useless as I can't afford to buy a new one. My one recourse is to beg, or take out a loan from another player. I can't bring myself to do this, so this character is toast. All because I fumbled with the interface to warp our and forgot insurance. The game has SO MANY nuances. So many little things that you can forget that it's overwhelming. This can lead to huge frustration when you forget the little, yet hugely important things. Also you can ruin a character. You can mess up so bad that your dude is basically useless. If you forget to update your clone and die, then you can loose tons of skill points. This could amount to days of real time playing, all for forgetting to update your clone. There are many things like this. I'm sure some people love the detail, and the fact that they do have to watch every little thing. Personally I found it too much.
[glow=red,2,300]Overall: [/glow]The most unique MMO out there. This is the something different that people either love or hate. If you are the type that likes to macro or even micro manage every little thing you will love this game. You can be working on many things at once, mining, building a corp, running a manufacturing empire, all while learning to fly the ship that just blew you out of space last week. The lack of direction is refreshing but disconcerting. The time system is real time, meaning that you can leave the game sit and still be getting things done, but that it takes what seems like forever to do anything. This game rewards clear thinking and patience way more then dexterity and a quick trigger finger. There are people that would love this. I can thing of quite a few off the top of my head including WGR members like GhostWes and Thardon. There are people that would hate this, again including members like Lobo and Gorechyld2000. You can easily get a 14 day trial that is a quick download, and I strongly recommend trying this game out. You may have found your new game, the one you keep playing for years, or you may have found a game that just ridiculously complex and takes way too much time to do anything. For a free download, it's worth finding out if it may be the first.
[glow=red,2,300]Last note: [/glow]Since I 'quit' after The Ugly I have been thinking about the game. How I should have acted during that fight. How I should have set up a bookmark to warp out quickly (especially when I expected an ambush). How I should have put both rocket launchers on my ship instead of a mining laser before going in. This makes me want to try again. To buckle down and spend the time needed to take on that mission again, to take down the pirates or at least escape in one piece. I sit here typing this wondering if I have enough for maybe a Civy shuttle, just something I can do a couple courier runs in to get a better ship back, a mining ship, that will quickly get me the money to buy back what I lost. Then I think seriously, how long that would take (hours and hours, some in game, some out) and I wonder if it's worth it. so even now sitting here, I may not have given up on Eve. WGR member MindMusic pointed out that he had a similar feeling. He did the trial and kind liked it, but decided not to keep it up with a subscription. But then he missed Eve, he kept thinking about Eve and what he would do next in Eve. So he relented and subscribed. This from a member who generally refuses to buy Retail software and thought he would never ever pay a monthly.