EVE Online is a massively multiplayer game that ( to me ) is created more as a Simulator, rather than a RPG type game. The object of the game is to create a name for yourself by fighting PvP combat against other Online Players via piloting various spaceships. Dogfights can be skirmishes or epic battles. You can be a defender or an agressor. Play solo or join a Corporation ( Guild ) and fight in small group or large groups. You can be a mercenary for hire, a space pirate, be part of a military organization... the possiblities is staggering.
If fighting isn't your main interest, you also have the option to become a Coporate big wig and deal in trading or other interstellular correcular activies or become a prospector or miner or industrialist. Mine asteroid belts for wealth and status by extracting common and rare ores to refine and sell back to Corporations or to put up for sale at the market. You can be whatever you want to be in this game.
EVE certainly starts off well. The character creation process gives you a lot of control over the look and background of your character. You can shape your character’s face, set the skin tone, select hair style, clothing, and more, all using high definition 3D graphics. You probably have more control in creating your character’s look than in any online game to date, and the character models really bring your creation to life. Once you finish creating your look, you pose your character just right, take a headshot, and then … freeze that look for the rest of the game. For all the great graphics and control the game gives you in creating your character, from this point forward your character will only appear as a small portrait. And that’s how you’ll see yourself – other players will see a tiny thumbnail image of your face (“pinkynail” would be a more appropriate term) and only if they specifically choose to download your portrait. In fact, you’ll spend little actual game time seeing other players at all. When in a base you see your ship parked in an otherwise empty bay, and in space you’re never really close enough to other players to gawk at their ship. Even if you make an effort to get up close there’s no real payoff as ships of the same class are essentially all look the same save for some armament graphics depending on what the ship’s owner has installed.
As for the background for your character, you have a surprising number of choices in this department. You select your race and faction, and even your school and major, and each choice has some interesting text associated with it that gives you a little background on each selection. Your choices are primarily used to specify your starting location and skill set, but how your choices affect these factors is not made clear. Be prepared to create a “starter character” to get a feel for the skill set that you need and then to go back and create the character that you really wanted.
This is my main charcter Solaris Centuri. She is created as a Prospector / Miner.
Once in the game you’re really on your own. There is a short text tutorial on the game’s interface, but you’ll still need to spend some time playing around with it and consulting other players and the game’s online help to figure it out. The complicated menu system has its strong points but being intuitive is not one of them. Once you get a feel for the layout you’ll be faced with the big question, “OK, now what?” The game provides little direction for new players – there is no initial set of goals, no story arc, and no sense of where you fit in the universe and what you’re supposed to be doing there. You can take on missions provided via email-like messages from NPC contacts, but these usually involve fetch and deliver type of missions which serve to give you something to pass the immediate time but not to give you a purpose in the universe. Whether you learn it from other players or from the realization that you won’t be able to do much without money, eventually you’ll figure out that a very large chunk of the very long initial period of the game will be spent mining asteroids. This is why I decided to start off with a Prospector/Miner as my first character. And since this game is of a Simulator, you don't want to get killed if you can help it. You will suffer a major penalty of you do. If your charcter/ship is not insured, you can respawn back into the game but with a major skill point hit to your character and perhaps with a basic ship again. You basically must claw your way back up the ladder to get to where you were before you were smeared across the galaxy. That can take weeks of gameplay. Fortunately, you can insure your character and ship for a rather costly fee, so when you respawn back into game, you can continue where you left off. I decided to "learn" this game in my trials and errors in a peaceful manner. Since you can have up to 3 characters in this game, my next charcter will be more of an aggessor. ( perhaps a space pirate? )
4 character classes of ships that can be obtained. The Gold colored ships are from my race 'Amarr'
Money makes the universe go round and just about the only way to get it is to mine minerals from asteroids. Mining is just about all that you will be doing for quite some time, and you’ll have to dedicate time to it throughout your character’s online lifetime. Mining involves flying out to a nearby asteroid belt, targeting an asteroid, and then waiting as your mining laser slowly fills your cargo hold. You don’t even have to worry about crashing into the rock as the game does not have any collision detection ( you can fly right through spacestations if you’d like ). Once you’re full you need to fly back to a starbase, process the ore, and then sell the materials to the market. Then it’s back to the asteroid belt to start the cycle anew. You can eventually afford upgrades to your mining laser, ship, and cargo hold, but when you reach that point the next tier of upgrades will be even more expensive so you’ll have to collect more minerals. The net result is that you always seem to spend the same amount of time mining no matter how much you upgrade. I've noticed in the Trial free period of this game that a number of your skills that can be trained to become a more proficient miner will not be available to you until the initial Trial period has elapsed.
My Rookie ship 'Impairor' for the Amarr Race, plus my homebase
The mining cycle is one of diminishing returns, so you’ll always be driven to system hop your way to rich mineral belts further and further out from the safer inner systems. Sooner or later, you’ll encounter pirates, bandits, and other renegades patrolling the asteroid belts while you’re just out trying to do a little mining. The good news is that this breaks up the monotony of the mining and may reward you with a little booty of your own from the remains of your attacker’s ship. The bad new is that you’ll no longer be able to take a bathroom break and grab a soda while your mining laser toils away because you could come back to find your that your ship is now debris. The battles themselves are pretty much automatic affairs in which the better equipped ship always wins. Lock onto your target and your ship will automatically maneuver to stay within firing range as your weapons automatically and methodically work their way through the enemy’s shields. Should you lose because you brought the smaller stick, you’ll be taken to the nearest starbase. If you remembered to buy ship insurance, you will have the money to replace your loss. Otherwise it’s back to a bottom of the line model and a lot of mining trips to work your way back out of the hole. The small ships are affordable to replace ( a few thousand Isk ), but you'll need to itemize them all over again. The bill can add up and takes time to do. Large ships can cost over 100 million Isk! Be sure to get the best insurance you can afford. It's valiad for 12 week intervals. I also recommend you cloine yourself in case you are destroyed. It will intially cost you skill points for the insurance, but you will not lose the skills you worked so hard to train.
My 2nd ship / a Frigate - 'Tormentor'
Unlike most MMOGs, your actions do not translate to experience points or higher skill levels. You can mine or fight all day and you’ll have the same skills as when you started. Instead the game attempts to even the playing field between casual gamers and those who really should get a life, by tying skill advancement to real-world time and not time spent playing. You can train one skill at a time by simply selecting the skill you want to improve. A clock is started in real-time and when time runs out you will gain a level in that skill. Lower level skills require minutes and then hours to train, but before long it will take days and even weeks to train up to the highest levels. The good thing is that you can select a skill to train before going on vacation, and when you get back and log in your skill will be improved. The bad thing is that this hurts the average gamers the most by penalizing them for the habits of a game-obsessed few for the sake of those who don’t play that much anyway. It also takes some of the fun out of the game. In most MMOGs, destroying a tough foe has the immediate and gratifying payback of a nice big experience payoff. In EVE, there’s just some potential financial gain that really does not justify the time spent seeking out and fighting your foe. A tip for getting maximum skill time in is to log-in to game just before bedtime and choose a skill that needs alot training time. Then log-out. Even when you're not playing the game, you skills are being increased in game. During a free day to be able to game more, I chose skills that require less training time. So I'm basically skill training my character 24/7.
Mining and skill leveling; EVE is a game of waiting … and I haven’t even mentioned the long travel times yet. EVE features a convenient auto-travel system that allows you to select your destination and click go. The game will automatically route you through the intervening systems, taking the shortest path between each in-system warp gate. The problem is that even with the ships’ high speed warp engines it can take some time to cross a system from warp gate to warp gate. If your journey has you passing through several systems along the way your travel time can add up quickly. There’s not much you can do while in transit other than watch the pretty graphics and chat with other players, so you may as well enter your destination and then do a few chores while waiting for your ship to finally get there. Another tip you may want to try to bypass this feature is set your ship to go the it's destination or waiting for your cargo to fill with ore is 'press the left bottom window key on your keyboard' Doing so will minimize the game, leaving you free to surf the web, write a review ( like I'm doing ) or pl;ay with a program or what have you. I leave the speakers on and listen to the music and sound affects. You can hear when it's time to check up on your game again. This approach makes the game alot less "tedious."
EVE offers player interaction through a player-driven economy in which you can buy and sell items that you acquire or manufacture on an open market. The interesting thing is that the items remain at their physical location, so you must either go get the item after you buy it or pay another player to act as a courier. The manufacturing aspect of the game seems to work for only a few players, though, as you must use a manufacturing slot at a starbase to make items. The manufacturing stations only appear at a limited number of starbases and the slots at those bases are limited and inevitably full, so good luck in even finding a place to manufacture an item. Players can also form corporations which serve as the game’s guilds, but the main focus of these is to pool resources to make more money. All of these features would be interesting ways to round out a deeper RPG, but they just don’t stand up well on their own as the primary focus of play.
One day I'll own this!
If there’s one area where EVE absolutely excels it is in the area of graphics. EVE is one of the best looking space epics ever. The swirling gases, star fields, amazing planets, and detailed stations make the game almost fascinating to watch. The warp and weapon effects are worthy of a top-tier sci-fi movie. EVE also captures a true sense of scale, filling you with a sense of awe as your small ship approaches a giant station or you fly by a large battle cruiser.
I named this review Revelations. Trinity is the latest expansion from Revelations ( Dec.05/2007 ) In the expansion, the designers of the game ( CCP ) have given the game a total graphical overhaul. Graphic options will be available to you ( in game ) if you have an relatively updated videocard. In that regards, I mean a card with shader 3.0 or better optimization. Shader 2.0 cards ( like mine ) are optimized for DiectX 9.0. Shader 3.0 supports DirectX 9.0c. Shader 4.0 is for DirectX 10.0. So without this key feature, you will not see any graphical enhancements in this title. I also left review entitled Revelations due to the fact that most of the pics supplied for this review are in game screenshots taken with my dated card. I will be updating this review with another review in the near future and will entitled Eve Online : Trinity. I'll be changing out my videocard.
Eve Online is strangely addictive, considering how slow the in-game pace is to advance yourself. The learning curve to this title is steep. Real steep! I've been an active gamer for the last 10 years and this is the most complex game I've ever had to learn ( and am still learning ) However, once the time and effort is initiated in it's basic core gameplay, it will slowly draw you into it's vortex and you'll actually start enjoying it. Take in mind, you must invest a good amount of time and be patient with this game. If you're looking for a MMO for the long haul, this game will suite the bill. I don't see it falling flat anytime in it's distant future. This game has been out since 1997. The lastest expansion/upgrade has been implimented and there are no signs of CCP sitting back. I believe they will continue to provide this game and continue to improve it visually as well work to keep it as bug free as possible. Every time I log-on, there is anywhere from 24,000 - 35,000 players at all times. Never fear of this title crowding either.... there's over 5,000 solar systems to explore! ( the largest MMO to date )
Do the math and these guys are making a pretty good profit. It is predicted that each year the number of player's will slowly grow ( not diminish ). If you're looking for run and gun, twitch shooting meyhem, you won't find it here. I consider this game, a game of exploration, a game of mico-managing your ship, a game of becoming anything you want to be ( be it an Ace starship pilot or Captain of your own vessel ) It's Eve Online. Adventure in Space.
