EVE Online

i played the 14 day trial.

it takes a while to get used to, and coming from fps's and wow, the movement takes a while to get used to, but i liked it.

I tried it too, i really like the sci fi genre...

After 40 minutes of extremely boring tutorial, I quit the game and uninstalled it.. These guys should really learn something from blizzard... the trick to a great game is "5 minutes to play and have fun - a lifetime to master".

yes, it got me upset

I read some interviews with the EVE guys recently, and they said that it starts off boring and unapproachable by design. As dumb as it may sound, they want to restrict the number of people playing the game in order to keep the community of players they have somewhat elite and dedicated. They don't want millions of people playing it just because its the game everybody else is playing - they want hundreds of thousands playing it because its exactly the game they want to be playing.

They also said the reworked content - all new ship models, interiors of spacestations modelled and explorable, etc... - makes the current game look rubbish. Which is nice to hear considering the game doesn't look too bad from what I've seen of it as is.

Anyway, I've not actually tried the game myself, though it does sound rather intriguing. Might give this 14 day trial a shot for myself

Quote from ReNo

I read some interviews with the EVE guys recently, and they said that it starts off boring and unapproachable by design. As dumb as it may sound, they want to restrict the number of people playing the game in order to keep the community of players they have somewhat elite and dedicated. They don't want millions of people playing it just because its the game everybody else is playing - they want hundreds of thousands playing it because its exactly the game they want to be playing.

yeah I guess that makes sense...

not Sounds like a petty excuse for bad game design to me

I gave it a try one year ago and was really impressed by all the possibilitys you have. I think thats what makes the game so great. Building up corps, relations and wars between the big corps, it's heaven for people who love that kind of "sandboy style" game. Also, I have to agree with Reno about the fact that it's designed for people who love that amount of complexity.

I've played to eve-online for some months 2 years ago and my opinion about it is mixed:

- You MUST have a big guild (called corporation) if you want to have fun

- The game is very slow during "normal" gameplay...very very slow...i would even say "boring"

- The game suddently because incredibly fast when you're engaged in PvP. When i say incredibly fast, understand that Quake 3 is a game for grannies compared to eve in PvP. So if you're mining (probably the most boring thing of the game after travelling), you can't even go to toilet while your ship is doing his automated mining task because if someone come, you'll be dead. (you rarely die in this game, but death is a very big penalty)

- 80% of the time, your screen is just made of a spaceship flying all straight on with a nice background picture and you who rotate the camera around your ship while some little cross, circles and squares moves on the edge on your screen.

- The progression system is good and bad at the same times. As your character continue to progress offline, it's cool...but when you come back after 3 months without playing (for example, you stopped because you where bored but you want to try again as they released a patch), you feel very weak and bored because you can't say "ok, i'm gonna do some power XP all day long, and tomorrow i'll finally be able to test this new feature"...no, you can't...you have to wait something like 4 or 5 days IRL sometimes even more...and just for one skill level (on 5) so i let you imagine how long you have to wait when you want to test something that require to raise 5 skills up to level 3...you test it only 3 weeks/a month after.

On the positive points:

- The universe, totally driven by the players. Players have a real impact on the gameplay, on politic, etc...

- The content of the game is incredibly rich...hundreds and hundreds of items, guns, ammunitions, ships, etc....All these items contribute to create a very very large amount of combinaisons for your your ship, so the fight are never "rock paper scissors". You really have to use your brain during fights

- The size of the game is gigantic, so you have a lot of things to explore and it will ask you months, if not years, to visit everything

- The economic system is the best i've ever seen...but it's a complex part of the game, you'll need some time before understand it very well

- The politic system, with all the factions system is really great...once again, it's just the best i've seen so far

And another point i would classify as "neutral": The game is very "solo". Except PvP, you don't do much things in group. Some people may like it, some don't. For my part i like to play solo and in group, but eve online didn't offered enough group thing for me, that's probably why i stopped (this and the fact that the game is very slow)

Now, it's only my opinion and the best opinion you can get is yours, by try it by yourself

I played EVE during beta, so don't take what I say as gospel as it may have changed. When you first get it, it’s really cool, the music and graphics really draw you in, there’s a lot to aspire to and there is a feeling of "this is it! Elite online!"

But there’s a lot of gameplay mechanics I totally don’t agree with, mainly the ones that have new players playing catch-up forever. It has a lot of interesting concepts – such as the skill system, diplomacy and economy but their actual implementation I don't particularly care for. I imagine starting now would be somewhat suicidal unless they open up a new server.

I began playing EVE maybe a month ago, and it's been fantastic. I myself

didn't find the beginning tutorial boring, I thought it was rather fun. I agree

with Metal-la-la-la that you really need to join a big/active corporation to

get the best out of EVE.

PvP in EVE is so different from other MMO games I've played.

In EVE, most PvP fights that occur between a few players are

over before you can say Ijustgotpodkilled. The first volley of fire is very

important in small fights. In addition to pvp I enjoy the superb economy

system in the game.

Only time will tell how long I find it interseting to play.

woah, Metal-la-la-la , nicely written

Maybe I could do another try, if I could play with you people!

Some of Eve sounds pretty cool, but I just don't want to waste several hours of my time on a game before I can enjoy it.

Bit off topic but interesting anyway...

I was at Nordicgame this year and CPP had a whole booth showing off EVE Online with a lot of their dev-team giving demos.

Their main guy gave a brilliant seminar/presentation of EVE and the history of it's development. One story stood out though which gives you an idea of what goes on in the universe.

You start off with a central "safe" part of the universe where you can learn your way around and things are generally kept in order but AI NPC "police". Beyond this safe zone are unpoliced parts of the universe where they hoped people would explore and basically start-up their own empires.

What they discovered is that players started to group together based on their home countries and culture and so in the "south-east" of the universe map you had the Russians, the "south" the Scandinavians, the "north" held the North Americans and the "west" the French and Germans.

The Russian players had hacked their client so that they could talk to each other using cyrillic characters but as a result, any other messages came out as junk so they effectivly isolated themselves from the non-russian speaking universe.

So the russians would often stard conflicts and wars with their Scandinavian neighbours and were baffled as to why, time after time despite being better armed and with superior organisation they couldn't defeat the comparibly weak Scandinavian forces.

After some time it was discovered that the North Americans in the "north", who claimed to be a peaceful alliance were in fact secretly supplying ships and ammunition to the Scandinavians and shipping them in long freight convoys "south" through the safe zone.

When the Russians found out, they negotiated and formed an alliance with the French/Germans in the "west" who ran intercepting missions to attack and destroy the supply convoys being sent to re-inforce the Scandinavians. As a result, the Russians, temporarily, won control of the Scandinavian controlled part of the universe.

What was a suprise was that CPP had no idea this was happening. Their universe was so large that it was hard to monitor what was going on and they actually found out through player communities. They said they might of spotted it if they analysed their server logs but of course this would take a lot of effort to extract anything useful.

As a result, their considering opening a community EVE-TV portal where players can submit news on whats happening in the universe, as much so CPP know whats going on as well as the people playing the game.

Other random facts - the EVE servers user as much power per-player as a single chinese person in one day (which led to an awkward question from the audience if they were going to try and make EVE more "green").

Oh and EVE Online contributes somthing like 45% of the total economic income from Information Technology in Iceland.

/end

I played EVE for a half year before. And I could say that EVE is probably one of the best, most massive and deepest games I've ever played. I'd start again if I had the money and the time for it. It's unbelievable awesome.

EDIT:

Quote

- You MUST have a big guild (called corporation) if you want to have fun

That's not true, smaller corps or smaller player groups are also lots of fun.

EDIT2: @ Wunderbody

Haha, hilarious. Didn't know that. I can remember that I and a friend of mine were pissed off by some guys in the south-east in a 0.0 when we were hunting Goons.

Very interesting story there Wunderboy, stuff like that could really make me pick up the game.

Quote from Zacker

Very interesting story there Wunderboy, stuff like that could really make me pick up the game.

What got me is how it parallels the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII where you have Britain fighting off the Germans, the US shipping supplies by sea and then the convoys being intercepted by u-boats.

Talk about history repeating in a different context.

I have played eve, and I have to say... it's the best mmo I've played. The world is huge. Everyone is on a single server. TONS of diversity. Each ship has a different roll inside of combat/economics. There are a potentially limitless amount of ship loadout combinations which makes for a very unique gaming experience.

Once you get passed the nooby stage, things really heat up. Enter 0.0 space... Where corperations fight for sovereignty over a solar system, by building massive player controlled outposts. PVP is where it's at in eve, and it's everywhere. The first thing I did once I built up a nice bankroll, was to investigate the player corperations. I did, and then became involved in an all out war between two alliances fighting for the same system. It was truly awesome. The battles have the potential to be gigantic!

If pvp isn't your thing the economy of EVE is entirely player driven. Miners get ore, the ore is sold or refined to minerals, players buy minerals, and use blueprints to craft anything they want. If there was a player with the drive to do so, he/she could become an economic superpower very quickly.

EDIT: The bottom line is: players control everything.

What I've started to do is to buy batlecruisers cheap, and then sell them for a profit. I make millions. Hit me up in game if you like: captainMabufo.

Aww. All those reports make me want to pick it up again.