This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

21 days ago I decided to dive into the Eve-Online Steam demo.

Steam — Just click to play

I knew that Eve was too big a pro­spect to be able to review in more than the light­est terms and indeed to cover everything would reduce me to bullet-points Power­Point style. I had avoided Eve for many years mainly due to tim­ing in that I was too heav­ily involved in other games to give it the atten­tion it cer­tainly deserved. I did how­ever try it about a year ago before the last major upgrade. I was fresh out of other MMO’s at that point but found the clash­ing change of style and the fam­ous learn­ing curve to be a major hindrance. Eve seemed to be inscrut­able, com­plex and baff­ling. The new­bie mis­sions proved too much for me to under­stand and the inter­face very badly imple­men­ted. I put it to bed after only a few nights struggle.

So why return?

Any­one pay­ing atten­tion to the MMO news and web­sites could not help but notice the shock­ingly high scores that Eve has and con­tin­ues to receive in the press. I looked fur­ther than just these. The strength of any MMO is in its com­munity and from some of the incid­ents I have read about it was clear that Eve pos­sessed a com­munity of spe­cial sig­ni­fic­ance.

In space no one can hear you Cha, Cha, Cha!

But would this com­munity be pen­et­rable by a new­bie? Eve has been out for a long time and large and power­ful guilds (cor­por­a­tions in Eve) have claimed parts of the game ter­rit­ory as their own king­doms. This would put off all but the most stal­wart of hearts as how can one start afresh when every­one else is so far ahead of you? I wanted to find out if this was true and my oppor­tun­ity to test the the­ory was gran­ted when Steam launched a 21 day free demo of Eve.

I am a big fan of Steam and, unlike the myri­ads mak­ing com­plaints on Steampowered’s for­ums, I have never had a single prob­lem with it. In fact I pretty much see such ser­vices as the only future path for gam­ing deliv­ery and com­munity build­ing. The abil­ity to click one but­ton and have Eve delivered to my desk, installed and ready no less, was too much tempta­tion for me to res­ist. So I clicked to install fully expect­ing to be as dis­ap­poin­ted as last time.

How wrong can you be?

A NPC Space Station

Much has been writ­ten about Eve’s graph­ics, and justly so as they are mind bra­cingly beau­ti­ful, but this is a facet of a greater truth: Eve is the best pro­grammed MMO I have ever played. I have never found a game, let alone an MMO, that is so alt-tab friendly. Diving in and out of Eve is not only smooth it is actu­ally a joy. It is quite pos­sible to set your ship on a jour­ney, alt-tab out to surf or write and then alt-tab back in when you get to your des­tin­a­tion. You can even surf in game through a basic browser win­dow built into the cli­ent. The prodi­gious pro­gram­ming skill demon­stra­tion does not end there. Eve fea­tures a single (cluster) of serv­ers. All play­ers are in one place and when log­ging in at night expect to be shar­ing Eve with over 30 thou­sand players.

That’s 30 thou­sand ways to die

The Space Jour­neys in Eve are amaz­ingly beau­ti­ful and all colours

Moreover, and often over­looked, the music and sounds of Eve are start­ling. Drums and bass tunes sound the com­ing of battle with a pulse quick­en­ing action tempo, which give way to Bla­derun­ner like soul­ful space-musings as you either loot the fallen or your­self get looted. Whilst in sta­tion the sound provides a much needed injec­tion of bustle, an atmo­sphere that would oth­er­wise have been miss­ing as sta­tions are essen­tially instanced and you can’t get out of your ship at all and walk around.

This is the first of the design decisions that one must get used to with Eve. You, to all intents and pur­poses, are your ship. You never get to see any­thing more of your­self than your por­trait. This may strike some as strange because, since your char­ac­ter can of course change ships mer­rily, this can lead to Eve hav­ing a sense of dis­em­bod­i­ment and dislocation.

Inside a Sta­tion — each race has very dif­fer­ent archi­tec­tural styles

Most MMO’s spend much of their design budget in mak­ing you feel ever more your avatar but here that is taken care of in the por­trait designer in the first ten minutes of play. I per­son­ally ima­gine that I am a ship “Mind” from Iain M Banks’ Cul­ture nov­els and play the game that way. This works sur­pris­ingly well since also like the Cul­ture I use a lot of drones to do my fighting.

My lovely Drones

So what can one expect in the first 21 days of play?

If you are a long time Élite or X3 player you will quickly find slip­ping into what is called “Care­bear” Eve to be very simple and wel­com­ing. The gar­gan­tuan amount of Space in Eve is split into core sys­tems (based on 4 fac­tional play areas) and the dan­ger­ous “low-Sec” space, which is sim­ilar to the Wild West in that the gun is the only law.

You have been warned

Stay­ing in “High-Sec” space is safe enough that one can play the entire demo and, with luck, not get into any con­flicts with play­ers at all. I say ‘with luck’ because Eve is per­man­ent PVP and play­ers can opt to become pir­ates earn­ing their liv­ing by the high­way rob­bery of other play­ers. This usu­ally revolves around camp­ing the large jump gates that con­nect all the zones with a team of spe­cially rigged friends and blast­ing any­one too slow to get away or defend them­selves. This is not only allowed in Eve; it is actu­ally pos­it­ively encouraged.

My Vexor Cruiser

How­ever as a “Trial” player I knew I stood very little chance in such scen­arios and so spent much of my time avoid­ing them. My plan was to under­stand the game before diving into PVP and thus I focussed on the mis­sions avail­able whilst improv­ing my skills. This is essen­tially because of the way pro­gress is man­aged. All of the game’s skills can be learned by any­one. Many have pre­requis­ites in the form of core skills and require skills books to be bought from Uni­ver­sit­ies or the Mar­ket­place, but there is noth­ing hold­ing you back in any other way. The catch is that learn­ing skills in Eve takes place in Real-Time™. So a skill that is 3 days to learn will lit­er­ally take 3 real days before it is ready for use. This means that a “Trial” player is com­pletely out­classed by play­ers with months into the game and has abso­lutely no chance of win­ning in PVP. On the other hand the game is impossible to twink and the old prob­lem of new play­ers with gear above their sta­tion is gone. The size of the skill tree is so large that it would take lit­eral years to learn it all and so there is plenty of room to spe­cial­ise in dif­fer­ent areas and indeed this is the way it has been designed.

My Char­ac­ter Sheet and skills

Com­plex­ity is the watch­word in Eve. Where some­thing could have been smoothed over and made simple, ala’ WOW, Eve has pur­posely gone more com­plex. Indeed inter­face is often viewed as being too com­plex, but I feel that this is entirely the plan CCP have fol­lowed. They want Eve to be deep in every way and hav­ing a large amount of inform­a­tion is an aspect of this. The whole exper­i­ence of play­ing Eve is alike to oper­at­ing Microsoft Win­dows. Sim­ilar to Microsoft’s approach, there are many dif­fer­ent ways to do any one thing. For example, lock­ing onto a ship; which requires that you are in range of your ship’s abil­it­ies; your own tar­get­ing skills, away from any inter­fer­ence; both yours and the target’s velo­cit­ies; any ECM act­ive in the area and finally that you haven’t used all your avail­able lock-on’s (which is based on your memory abil­ity); can be per­formed by click­ing on the tar­get in space and click­ing lock on or click­ing and hold­ing down the mouse and pick­ing lock-on from the pop up menu or click­ing with the RMB and select­ing lock-on or right click­ing on the tar­get in the Over­view and select­ing lock-on or throw­ing all that aside and fit­ting a “Auto Lock-on” mod­ule to your loadout. And that’s just to lock-on. To actu­ally shoot some­thing you need to con­sider your ships power capa­city, the range of the gun, the range of the ammo in the gun, the bonus’s of any mod­ules you have installed, both ships velo­cit­ies & facing, ECM again, your implant bonus’s and any pos­sible legal implic­a­tions of attack­ing this tar­get. Not for noth­ing did I play the game with a cal­cu­lator and a pad of paper next to me.

That my friends: is DEPTH!

How­ever, one man’s depth is another man’s con­fu­sion and the new­bie help chan­nel is chock full of new pay­ers com­pletely lost. Moreover, most of the help they receive is also from slightly less new­bie play­ers who per­haps have only a few days extra play on them.

Rookie Help Chat in full flow

Many people have com­plained about the cliff-like learn­ing curve, but I prefer to think of Eve as an enorm­ous meal. Like a Christ­mas din­ner or ban­quet. Your eyes will def­in­itely be big­ger than your stom­ach and it takes an awful lot of digest­ing to get through the starter before one can even con­sider the main course. In fact even the volauvents are filling. This leads many new play­ers into a great feel­ing of indi­ges­tion and frus­tra­tion in that they are read­ing about all the fun things in Eve but that they can­not yet do any of them and will not be able for quite some time.

Relief con­ges­tion tab­lets come in the form of sur­rog­ate pro­grams and web­sites that sur­round Eve and are essen­tial to play. One such pro­gram is Eve­Mon that logs into your account while you are logged out and keeps an eye on your train­ing and when you can expect the cur­rent skill to com­plete. It also allows you to make a plan for the future of your char­ac­ter by pick­ing a job, ship, loadout or skill set and show­ing the cor­rect pro­gres­sion through to that glor­i­ous achieve­ment. This is only slightly den­ted when one reads that the best plans are all over 90 days of train­ing away and to fly a Titan is 250+ days itself! Another good sys­tem is that found at Battleclinic.com, which out­lines all sorts of use­ful inform­a­tion and has a pro­gram for upload­ing ship loadouts and review­ing pop­u­lar fits. Actu­ally being able to fit all you could want on a ship is an art form in itself and I have spend an inor­din­ate amount of time play­ing with my mod­ules to find the best bal­ance for my ship. For example: my level 1 des­troyer was paper thin but could mount an impress­ive 8 guns. Thus my fit was all about keep­ing a long way from the enemy and using mul­tiple long-range mods and long-range rail­gun ammuni­tion to blast them from afar. This is in con­trast to my Vexor Cruiser that spe­cial­ises in remote com­bat drones and so I was loaded with high end armour and auto­matic repair sys­tems that would keep me alive until my com­bat drones could des­troy the oppon­ents. This means that the ships it is pos­sible to fly all require a dif­fer­ent play­ing style.

Styles you will need to learn to avoid death

Caught in the rays of the pirates

OMG a pir­ate is on me!

Death in Eve is in two fla­vours. Firstly your ship can be blown up. Scratch that. Your ship WILL EVENTUALLY be blown up. This leaves you in a tiny little escape pod which is then your trans­port home to col­lect the insur­ance (that you really should take out) and buy another ship. If your pod is killed then you wake up in a clone, which is like life insur­ance, and it costs money to pur­chase a clone that is good enough to recover all your skill points.

Sys­tem Jump-Gates, often sur­roun­ded by pirates

Thus death in Eve can seem expens­ive and it is only in the supreme job of game bal­an­cing that has gone on in Eve devel­op­ment that means that this is not as bad as it first appears. Firstly, cash in Eve is every­where. Very soon it is pos­sible to earn a ton of cash from either min­ing or mis­sion run­ning and you can own any num­ber of ships. Secondly, the busi­ness side of Eve is even more advanced than the basic gameplay.

The mar­ket is vast and well designed

I am talk­ing here about Corporations

Most MMO’s have Guilds, but Eve has taken that to a new level. Here Guilds can actu­ally own (con­trol) parts of space and declare war on each other to con­test entire areas. Alli­ance tools and every type of Corp’ man­age­ment func­tion is avail­able and the entire pro­cess is very advanced. More advanced than even in SWG. There is even a sys­tem to cre­ate con­tracts that can be for any­thing at all. This means that the only real limit in Eve is the ima­gin­a­tion of the play­ers and the corp lead­ers. I have read of teams of play­ers that sell them­selves out as mer­cen­ar­ies and fight dirty little wars on a lar­ger corps behalf, or act as secur­ity for a min­ing corp that has been tar­geted by pir­ates. Massive fleet battles abound in “Low Sec” space as rival corps battle each other in hun­dred strong teams of car­ri­ers and even mighty Titans (which are 3 mile long super-ships).

It is all amaz­ingly com­plex but far away from a 21 day account

A mighty trans­porter ship

Com­plex­ity is like Mar­mite then. Myself I love it in a game and those without it such as WOW turn me right off. Eve has it in spades and one can com­pletely envelop your mind in the deep waters of Eve’s game­play, only occa­sion­ally sur­fa­cing for air and to remem­ber that you were married.

How­ever no good corp touches a “Trial” player and so I spent my 21 day’s solo’ing mis­sions and build­ing my skills up to the point I could fly some­thing worth­while. The mis­sions are all given out by NPC fac­tion based agents of vary­ing qual­ity and level. High level agents give harder mis­sions and it was not long before the search for new agents became a high­light of an even­ings play. Even­tu­ally I found 3 good level 2 agents in one star sys­tem and could take 3 mis­sions at a time. This quickly boos­ted my ISK (cash) reserves and I was able to gradu­ate to a cruiser and thence to a Battle­Cruiser. Some of the mis­sions were very hard indeed and required I took time off to think of the best approach to beat them. This was all great fun and I hap­pily salvaged the wrecks of my fallen enemies while plan­ning my next mis­sions and help­ing out on the new­bie boards.

Accel­er­a­tion Gates lead to “dead­space” and your missions

I must admit how­ever that in all that time I haven’t died once (more through luck than judge­ment): so I can­not quite explain the nuances of that to you all.

Each red cross rep­res­ents an enemy ship, the lar­ger the cross the higher the class

Of course Eve can be bor­ing at times but this is actu­ally vital to any MMO. An MMO is not a flat line of high excite­ment, like say an FPS, an MMO is some­thing you live in. Some­where you go to relax, to unwind. Eve is a great tool for unwind­ing after a hard day at the office. A little min­ing, a little mis­sion or two, just check those blasters you put on the mar­ket have sold, make sure the skills are learn­ing cor­rectly, yadda yadda yadda. You can spend ages in Eve just ‘liv­ing’ through your char­ac­ter. Then sud­denly and without warn­ing a simple sys­tem jump can turn into a vicious battle for your ship, your life and everything in your hold as you are ganked by a group of player pir­ates. Like a cold bucket of water to the face, you are sud­denly broken from your slum­ber­ing idle­ness and thrown head first into intense com­bat. That means that the line of Eve is more like the EEG graph of a heart attack patient at times and the EEG of a stoner at oth­ers. I am sure that this has led to more “the-dinners-in-the-dog” scen­arios for mar­ried men than people realise.

So Eve is tough like EQ1, deep and player led like SWG, graph­ic­ally ahead of Van­guard and fun like WOW.

Battle!

Is it there­fore the per­fect MMO?

No, it is also like a mega-tsunami of com­plex­ity that is split very firmly into two camps of “Care­bear” space and “YArrr!” pir­acy. If you give it enough time to win you over you will learn to love it with a pas­sion, but if you try and run before you can walk, or even walk before you can crawl, you will only be frus­trated and lost in a com­plex­ity of options and depth the like of which has not been seen before in an online game.

I have only scraped the top off this game; truly my review could be 20 thou­sand words.

A Sta­tion up close

The same sta­tion as I warp away

I have really enjoyed Eve. If I was single, and not about to go swan­ning off around the world for a year, I would play it every night. As it is I have to step away as it is quite the most life suck­ing MMO I have ever encountered. That is for me its greatest achieve­ment and it’s greatest fail­ing. If you have the time and the love of learn­ing to play this game I can assure you of almost lim­it­less adventures.

I award it 9/10

Regards,

Basho

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