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.

Comments

Where's my crew?

[billtom]

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.

About EVE

[ThomMust]

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.