Well, I got another one of those emails that I regularly get from an MMORPG I once played. “We invite you back to … blah blah blah… free 14 day account activation… blah blah” If you have played as many of these games as I have, you get them quite often. And, sadly, I often take them up on it.
Such was the case with EVE Online (http://eve-online.com). I recalled really digging this game, if for no other reason than all the space eye-candy. This is a beautiful game, but only if you like spacey type stuff, cuz that’s all it is. One space-scape after the other, but with pretty marvellous variation.
I also recall that I stopped playing this game largely because of my then addiction to Second Life (SL), which at the time had me balancing over $150 a month in fees and (less) revenues from land sales, and digital entrepreneurship. Not that eve was a bad game, just I didn’t have time or money to keep it up. In fact, I have come to re-discover that it is a very cool experience, and actually, not entirely unlike SL! Very loosely speaking anyway.
Their common points are largely in the completely open-ended experience, and the player dominated economy and basic infrastructure. Obviously SL IS ONLY player created, whereas EVE is an MMORPG with quests, missions, NPC’s and such. But just read this from last year about the scale of control and economic capabilities that can be achieved in this game. There is some serious empire building going on in this game, eclipsing the likes that I have ever seen in an online game (save, of course, second life).
So what is this game? Hard to describe, and I guess you’d have to experience it, really, and be willing to overcome a bit of a learning curve. We don’t have the benefit of D&D RPG paradigm to natively “get” the underlying statistics. And not only are the stats unlike standard RPG stuff, but they apply against a dizzying array of technology and socioeconomic tools. This is some seriously deep shit. Just look at the ‘price history’ interface, and you can see that the galactic marketplace is a friggin complex statistical nightmare. But it’s somehow compelling enough to keep me because we’re talking frickin’ laser beams, man. On my very own space ship!
So the idea is, as I currently get it, you are a space pilot, and you can do lots of space stuff. Pretty much, it all centers around buying, building, and maintaining space ships to support your chosen career path. These paths parallel typical RPG stuff pretty closely, but go much deeper in every avenue. You have the basic option between Combat and Commerce (crafting?), which is common to all RPG’s these days. But the choices are vast and intertwined between the two. You will do both, but to varyinig degrees. But it all centers around 2 major interfaces - space, and space stations. Space is where you are real-time scooting around and doing what you do in your current ship, and each space station is considered the “Strategic” interface. It’s where you really do all the ship building/mods/planning/buying/selling stuff. So the game is really cycles of RPG(space) and RTS(station). First you blow shit up, or mine/gather/steal/pillage stuff, then you go back and play the market, mod your ship, buy new ones, learn skills and that stuff, just to make you stronger to go out and do more, bigger stuff. Same drill, different paradigm.
Combat careers can begin by doing Agent missions (quests), but are likely to not get on without doing some basic commerce tasks. Asteroid mining is the foundation of all resource harvesting, and is where every mining, trading, manufacturing, or researching-minded person would likely begin their career - but good luck getting very far without running in to Pirates. But either way, once you get some basic swag from your adventures, you break it down, refine it, and do whatever you want with it to make money: either by selling it outright, and focusing on grinding resources for cash flow; or learning how to make stuff out of it. And with all of them, there is always the element of the very intricate Players Market, which allows you to get a lot more money for your stuff, if you know how and where to sell it. So, bottom line is, you’ll find that you can make money lots of ways: Combat peeps just loot their victims. Miners refine and sell their ore and minerals. Traders buy low and sell high. In fact, the nature of interstellar trade in this game makes this trading option actually very cool.
Part of the fun here is getting to fly cool space ships, and explore the galaxy. Well, I have seen some seriously enormous giagantomungus fright ships that people use simply to trade stuff around the cosmos. So, literally, as you learn the market economy, and you figure out what resources are plentiful and cheap in one corner of the galaxy, and few and expensive in another, you figure out you can make money just by hauling shit around. But it takes a big ship to make the time worth good money cuz this cosmos is huge. It IS a galactic cosmos after all, with real distance measurements in Astonomical Units, and warp drives, stargates and such. Getting any good distance takes time “jumping” between regions, and warping between stargates, so you better haul enough with you to make some good cake once you arrive. But holy cow can you make some big money, and there is an exceptional array of ways you can spend it, and invest it… building your own for-profit companies, complete with your own space stations and defensive navies (yes you can build your own naval fleet, complete with your own ship-carrier).
But regardless of what you do, as you grow and want to pursue making more money, which IS the point, you have to venture into dangerous territory. Enter PVP. Like other PVP-enabled games, you have “safe zones”, measured by their “security rating” from 1.0[safe] to 0.8[NPC Aggro] to 0.4[open PVP] and below is chaos. As you get into 0.8 rated zones, you are likely to encounter hostile NPC ships pretty much anywhere you warp to, save directly next to a space station. Mining? Yes, pretty much every asteroid belt will periodically harass you with Pirates, but it’s totally fun to kick their asses.
Then as you descend into 0.4 rated zones and lower, you better plan your trip, and warp fast, else you will receive the space equivalent of a “corp por“, and find yourself floating in an escape pod, or dead. You *can* escape PVP pressures with good planning, but likely you are not going to entirely in this game, but I’m ready to expose myself to that risk. It’s funny, I think I’ve gotten soft over the years. I used to LOVE UO, and I even enjoyed the PVP end of things, more in terms of the thrill of escaping the bad guy than being one myself. But who am I kidding anyway. It’s not like my attention-span will see me play this game long enough to have the balls to go into one of these zones anyway 
If you 1) like space stuff, 2) like RPG’s 3) dig technology “RTS-like” strategy, 4) have the smarts and attention-span to grok space-tech, 5) have the patience to spend a day or two doing tutorials, and 6) never get tired of a cool space scene, then you might really enjoy this game. Now it’s almost a strike against it that it’s like the most popular RPG in Germany. Get out your slide rule, cuz it is an intellectual crusade, but at least it’s matched with some of the most wicked eye candy I’ve ever seen in a game. For once, all the pics on their marketing material aren’t bullshit cover-art, but all actual shots from the live game. It looks that good. All the pics on this post were shot on my machine - thats my just-better-than-noob mining frigate.
It’s a refreshing perspective on an RPG, there are more people in the same world at the same time than any other game (averaging ~15,000 peeps at a time with over 70,000 registered active - even WoW can’t say that, per-server.)
So, if it sounds cool, and in the next 10 days or so you find yourself with a free evening: download their (650+Mb, but about 1Mb/sec. D/L speeds) client from eve-online.com, do the 14-day trial, and look me up. Hey what’s the risk? They dont even want a credit card from you - instant grat, baby. There is strength in numbers, and I could use a good freighter pilot to help me haul ore around, or a battleship escort, and we could go to some seedy places to make more dough.
Wow this is a long review. Didn’t really mean for it to be
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