You may not like aspects of EVE, but you have to admire what CCP is doing with both DUST 514 and its upcoming EVE-centric foray into the cloud and mobile spaces. That said, it is one of the very few MMO outfits that is not afraid to experiment, and in my estimation, any sandbox fan who doesn't give EVE a few months' time is doing himself a great disservice. The company is most definitely a boy's club, and it's made plenty of questionable PR and game design moves over the years. If it's difficult to review - let alone fully experience - a standard MMO in a few weeks' time, it's absolutely impossible to grasp most of EVE's gameplay in the same amount of time, which is why I don't put much stock in the opinions of people who label the game "spreadsheets in space" after a fortnight trial period (or even a six-month trial period, for that matter).įinally, no Why I Play EVE article would be complete without a mention of CCP itself. The UI is busy, I'll grant you that, (and font resizing would be swell), but tens of thousands of players make it work on a daily basis. Is it really, though? Seeing as how absolutely everything on it has a highly detailed context menu, and 95% of its functionality can be accessed by a simple right-click, I wonder whether short attention spans are the culprit instead of subpar design. Most of EVE's critics namecheck this complexity, and other supposed faults, when going through their list of things "wrong" with the game. But frankly that two weeks was orders of magnitude more enjoyable to me than spending a similar amount of time grinding faction for a "rare" armor piece in some other MMO. Yeah, I spent a couple of weeks going in circles as I tried to teach myself how to scan down both player ships and some of the game's rarer complexes. This complexity turns people off, but in my opinion it's the price you pay for a more meaningful gameplay experience. The exploration gameplay highlighted in 2009's Apocrypha expansion opened up plenty of new solo-player opportunities, with the caveat of a tricky scanning system that takes a bit of trial-and-error and plenty of google-fu to fully grok. My main has trained up all his astrometric skills to five, and he's got a spiffy covert ops boat that he uses to cruise around low- and null-sec, dodging red-equals-dead dingbats and uncovering dungeons stuffed with hackable containers, challenging NPC enemies, and the occasional rare blueprint. But you can go months without PvP if you wish, and no, I'm not just talking about grinding missions. Sure, PvP is a part of it, and even things like trading and manufacturing are basically more polite (or at least, more impersonal) forms of player competition. In my estimation, there are too few toolsets like it, but toolsets like it are what MMORPGs do best.ĮVE Online - Caldari capsuleer tweaking his OspreyĪnother misconception is that EVE is 100% PvP. EVE is simply a set of tools, he said, and it is designed to provide players with many different ways to make their own fun. And if you're willing (or able) to make that gameplay for yourself.īrendan Drain, Massively's resident EVE columnist, summed up the game better than I can in a recent edition of our weekly WRUP column. It has the most engaging gameplay in the genre - if you're willing to put up with the concessions to popular convention necessary to provide that gameplay on a large scale. Never mind that she's a 20-year roleplayer who excels at the imagination required by tabletop and text MUDs. When I tell her that EVE is the only game where she can actually smuggle (or run and develop actual trade routes), though, she frowns and says yeah that's great but I don't want to be a spaceship. She would die to have actual in-game trade routes governed by the laws of supply and demand, and she seeks this functionality out in every new MMO. She loves playing the rogue, loves trading, and loves making contacts both in and out of game. I have one friend, for example, who is obsessed with forming some sort of smuggling guild. They're mostly roleplayers, and they hop from game to game searching in vain for a title where their actions matter and where they can build something that affects the game world. They don't subscribe to the asinine less-is-more theory (oh no, there are so many options! That's bad design!). Like me, they are largely fed up with the casualification of gaming in general and with MMOs in particular. The thing that frustrates me the most about my inability to convince friends to join up is that I know they would enjoy it. EVE Online - Minmatar capsuleer boarding his rifterĪnd I absolutely adore that about New Eden.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |