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EVE Online Beta Reviews
LevJohnson writes "KCGeek gives a gushing review of EVE Online, the new MMORPG space opera for PC by CCP Games, with screenshots from the beta. From the review: 'It's like Trade Wars 2002, had it been designed in 2002.'" Now the NDA is lifted ahead of its release next month (press release), there are some great guides and handy previews to this intriguing title.
Look at the number of people accepted for the beta, look at the number of people playing it. Yes they did a wonderful job on the graphics but that is it. The game is a nicer looking version of Jumpgate, asteroid mining and all.
I guess it's time to bring religion to EVE...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
One thing that has been sorely missing from space multi-player games has been the option for several players to be the crew of a ship. In all the one's I've seen, once you leave the planet/station/whatever, it's everyone in their one-person space ship.
Now, I'm not in the beta for Eve, but from the previews it looks like Eve follows this trend and only has one-person ships. Can a beta tester confirm/correct this?
Now, don't get me wrong, it can be fun to fly around in formation and all. But the usual SF template for this sort of thing is a small group that's the crew of a ship (the Falcon, the Enterprise, Moya, etc).
Now, I guess that the reason for this is technical. Having one-man ships makes the coding similar to wandering around the landscape in a fantasy game, but with one more dimension. While multi-person ships would add a whole new level of interaction to be coded.
But I wish some company would break out and make multi-player ships. I've got four friends would would love to be sitting around the mess table while the ship cruises to Alpha Something III, when the proximity alert goes off and we all run to our battle stations and man the helm, the guns, the engines, the sensors.
I've been beta testing for about a month now, and I just wanted to add my two cents. When I first started, I had the same reaction as many of the others: "What the heck do I do now?". They teach you extremelly basic mining, refining, and combat, and that's it. At that point you are expected to figure out how everything works and what the next step is. That said, once my head stopped spinning I actually just decided to dive into mining and started to piece things together from there. Once you learn a few systems, the rest work in a similar fashion, so it's just a matter of experimenting and building on past experience. I will also say that I am a member of a corporation, which helps tremendously. If one person experiments with something, they can share their knowledge with the rest of the group (our beta testers forum is quite large, containing many hints and tips on what to do and not to do). You will probably read in many places that this game is a mining sim. I would have to agree to some extent. You will spend much of your time mining, but if you join a corporation you can specialize. I actual am playing the role of a scientist, so I will mine for much of the time, but there was also a period of about 2 days where I didn't leave the station I was in, I just kept changing what I was researching. As far as the buggy patching system, yes I too have had that problem several times in the past. All you have to do is keep your installation software handy, and if that happens start over from scratch. Your characters are all kept on the server, so you won't have to spend much time backtracking. I do agree that the problem shouldn't even exist, but I haven't had that problem for several weeks now, so I'm satisfied. All in all, I would say I am tremendously pleased with their progress. I have my copy pre-ordered. I do think they should delay for a couple of weeks, but they seem to be able to do some great things in a short amount of time, so they may get the game set to go in that time.
I've been in the beta for about two weeks now. I was hoping for an experience along the lines of the early days of EverQuest, when it was more about exploring and experience than the acquisition of phat plat. What I got was a very pretty game with very little to actually do.
The UI for character creation is fun enough, though I suppose one could dismiss it as a virtual version of that old Barbie head my cousin used to abuse. After picking your race and bloodline, you alter the look of your character by tilting the head to and fro, changing the eyes, applying a beard, placing a scar and so on. It's a neat use of the 3d engine, but really all you're doing is making a static avatar for in-game chat and to appear stamp-like in the upper-right corner of your HUD.
The game itself is admittedly gorgeous. At times, it is like playing in one of those Astronomy Pictures-of-the-Day. But you know, that can get quite tedious, feeling more like a Photoshop image with too much lens flare. The ships are unique, not drawing too much from existing and standard sources like Star Wars or Star Trek and so on. The stations and jumpgates all are built to the standards set by the creating race, from rusty i-beam industrial for one to shining gold and glass for another. Out from the stations are the asteroid belts, huge hanging semi-circles of boulderous rock, around which lurk the occasional pirate.
And that's about it. You have two choices of action. You fight pirates or you mine asteroids. Fighting pirates is far too risky at first, so you spend a lot of time mining asteroids. So much time that many on the boards of the beta suggest having a book handy to occupy your mining time.
The comradery in the beta has been good and I've had a couple of good nights out in the higher yield mines with fine folks from Toronto and Europe, still awake at 4am their time when I'm just getting started at 10pm EST. But really, it all comes down to the acquisition of more cash to get a better ship to use to then get more cash.
And I won't go into the massive bugs that still exist this late into the beta, many that result in a sudden crash to the desktop and others that have managed to lay waste to a few users' harddrives (but not mine.)
All in all, I think I prefer old Norrath to the new coldness of space.
"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
-- Aldous Huxley
I guess you need to ask "what is the point to my real life existence?" and apply the answer to your game play. I'm sure everyone who ever played Elite knows the answer to this - Elite had no plot basically, but was one of the most successful and popular pre-PC/decent console games that ever existed.
Your goals are your own to invent. The innovation is in not succumbing to some lame contrived and artificial looking "reason" for your actions such as "missions". The holy grail of mmorpg (in my opinion) should provide the universe. Nothing more. Nothing less. If there are "missions" then they are for other players, with no "official" way of doing things (player A hires player B by just chatting to him, to go take some cargo someplace for example. If Player A doesn't pay up, player B will come looking for him etc etc)
That's what I want! Just an alternative universe to the one I really live in, but with things like space travel, and such like a possibilty (and death not being such a problem etc)- I don't want the game to spoon feed me little tasks - I have my own private schemes to implement - muhahahah!!!
I'm using AC, since I'm at school and all but I think that's actually a really great idea. Just think, vast galactic religions... it _would_ give newbies a sense of direction for a bit, and they may choose to continue in the religion or leave or even become instrumental players in it. All I want to see are vast, intergalatic conspiracies, like a giant Illuminati. I've been betaing EVE and have been enjoying it, and hope it becomes even more vast and in depth.
The responses I got... generally boiled down to "Whatever you want!" Okay... but give me some idea of a goal or a point to my existence.
A lot of us want to provide our own goal or point to our existence.
It's thrilling to hear this "what-do-i-do" versus "whatever-you-want" debate. The "gamers" want a game, where the goal is specified by the devs. The "worlders" want a world to live in, where goals are specified by each player. (Applications of this concept to politics are left to the reader as an exercise.) Worlders have been hoping for a long time for a game that would provide a minimal framework and let them create the social structures within that framework. Someplace a gamer can stretch their imaginative muscles.
Who expected what from EVE is a little unclear. Personally, I can only take so much Tolkien-inspired pseudo-medieval fantasy, and went to AO for a sci-fi environment[1]. I've been waiting for EVE for the same change in venue, so I'll play for a while no matter what happens, but the fact that EVE is self-structuring enough to fan these particular flames is really encouraging.
[1] Imagine my apoplexy when Funcom announced an expansion in which the corporate bad guys looked like demons and the rebel good guys looked like angels.
mods metamodded as "Unfair"