MMO Gamers

Third times a charm, or so the saying goes.  I downloaded the 14 day trial for EVE Online again.  This will be the third time I’ve had a crack at this game.  There’s been some changes since my previous trials.  For instance, the load screen declares APOCRYPHA, which I assume is the latest expansion/game update/version of the game.  The character creation seemed a little different also, a little easier and not so overwhelming.  That’s generally how I felt about EVE the first two times, overwhelmed, a little confused, and bored.  But I’m itching for a space sim MMO and EVE is at present the only alternative.  Part of EVE’s success is no doubt due to the lack of competition.  I also think one of its strengths is one of its weaknesses; its complexity.  EVE doesn’t portray itself as a casual friendly game, but then, not everyone wants an “easy mode” MMO.

There are generally two types of MMO.  You have the “Theme Park” model, which takes you to the places where things happen and fun is to be had.  These type of games direct you to quest hubs and dungeons etc, guiding you through the game.  The other model is the “sandbox” game, where you have an online world and you have to make your own fun.  EVE is a sandbox game, and it’s a PvP game.  It does feature missions (quests), harvesting (mining asteroids for ore which you then process into usable materials), and crafting.  There are no levels either, you have an enormous number of skills you can train and as you advance these skills it opens up new options, such as being able to fly bigger and better spacecraft or being able to outfit your craft with certain things, like bigger guns.

One thing I do find interesting is when I log in it tells me how many people are on the server at the present time and how many of those are trial accounts.  There were over 40,000 people on the server, and of those, a little over 2,000 were trial accounts.  Interestingly I only saw about 10 people the entire time I was playing, but it’s a big galaxy I guess.  I’m accustomed to game developers keeping their cards close to their chest when it comes to server population, so for a company to outright tell me how many are on the server is a welcome change.

So far I’m finding EVE to still be complex and some things are a little vague, even the tutorial quests.  I had to create something using a blueprint and it required tritanium, pyerite, and mexallon (did I say those right?).  I knew that I could get tritanium from harvesting veldspar and reprocessing it, but I had no idea about the other two.  I hadn’t seen any and the only asteroids I saw that I could harvest were the veldspar ones.  I ended up buying the other two on the market so I could complete the quest, but that’s what the game is like; a lot of head scratching.

There’s also a lot of times where I’m doing nothing but watching my spacecraft fly.  I had a fed-ex quest to another solar system that was six jumps away, so I set my destination and then put it on auto-pilot and watched my ship warp to a jumpgate, then jump, then warp to another gate, so on and so on until I reached my destination.  Luckily the game looks good and I didn’t mind staring at it so much, but I went and made a coffee during the return trip.

The thrill of getting better ships is there and I’ve been training my skill to fly a better frigate, which took about 10 hours.  That’s how you learn skills, you queue them up and then play, or log, and when you come back, they’re trained.  You can queue up 24 hours worth of skills so there’s reason to log in every day and queue up more skills, but this is not a casual game where you can log in for an hour and achieve something.  Deep space is a big place.

Deepari Space Station