So I recently signed up for a free trial of Eve Online made by CCP games. Best known for Eve Online, best known as "that Icelandic company." I have it from a reliable source that Icelandic Bacon Chips are incredibly tasty. You can sign up for the 14 day free trial here if you want to test it out yourself.
I will be honest, I spent a total of 3 hours playing around with it. That's typically not enough for a review, but when you get as bored as I did... Obviously Eve Online has a ton of people who love it, according to Edge Online they've surpassed 300,000. I did have the game on my system for over 48 hours, I just spent about an hour when I initially downloaded it, and then another 2 hours the next day. I then went about cleaning games I consider bad off my system and well, Eve Online was one of the many.
I had heard a few months ago that Eve had put together a tutorial for new players so they wouldn't be bombarded by all the info. I still felt bombarded. The tutorial was okay, but the pacing was very off. I was trying to complete the "learn a skill" quest and I had to sit there for 20 minutes inside a space station waiting before I could continue down the tutorial. This is not good, because as I discovered, once you log out in the middle of the tutorial, it can get hung up and you will never be able to complete it. I logged out after finishing the first Agent mission, and then logged back in the next day and tried to complete the second Agent mission. I hadn't even accepted the second mission before I logged out previously, but the Tutorial completely bugged out on me and I spent another 20 minutes docking in and out of the space station trying to fix it. It never fixed. I ended up having to cancel the tutorial and miss out on whatever information there was after it. I did complete the second mission.
The quest system is so straightforward that it begs the question of how can it even be considered a quest. In most MMO games, and I know that's the cream about Eve is that it isn't, but bear with me. In most MMO games when you are given a quest, you have to work your way towards the destination, fighting through mobs, doing Something. In eve online you right click on an empty piece of space, scroll down to the Agent option, then left click... and you warp to your location and yay, it's all done.
If only navigating space the rest of the time was that easy. I was very disappointed that the camera is not a full rotational camera. Yes you can look at your ship for all 360 degrees, but the camera hits a wall and you have to go in the opposite direction 359 degrees to get to that new angle. When I discovered that, the flat plane of space suddenly felt much more confining. And Eve is flat from what I could see.
Also, playing the game at a resolution less than 1440x900 is not recommended. I prefer to play games windowed and smaller so I can do other things during the boring bits, and while this is my own fault having a monitor that only allows me 1440x900 or 1040x800 or whatever, trying to play Eve at that small of a resolution was near impossible. The menu's take up the entire screen, and there are a ton of them. Just doing the tutorial I was dealing with 5 menu's open at once, as in, the entire screen was filled and all the menu's were overlapping. At one point the game kept telling me to open my cargo bay and I kept clicking on my cargo bay but nothing would happen. Turns out the button I was pressing was from the chat menu that had been placed exactly on top of where the tutorial was telling me to click. Once I minimized it, there was my cargo bay button. Now, there's nothing wrong with Menu's like this, except that they don't function how you would expect. Each menu seems to have a layer value, and so if you open a menu that has a lower layer value then what you have already open, you can't see it, it just opens up underneath everything else and you can't interact with it. Very... very poor vision there, or something. I felt that 1440x900 was also too small to really play the game, but it felt more manageable.
Combat in Eve Online is not the high point, at least from what I gathered. The entire concept of getting your things looted, your ship destroyed, are what you try to stay away from. Even in the 3 hours I played it felt like there wasn't going to be any PvP. Perhaps after people get the in game currency to the point where they can afford a million deaths, they don't mind PvP'ing. But if that's the case, then why does it matter if someone blasts down your cargo? The core of Eve Online is definitely the interaction aspect. The Massively part. Making corporations, Alliances, etc... They could have called it Space Guild Wars and it probably would have made more sense... in no reference to the game Guild Wars, but because your corporation is basically just a guild that fights over imagineary monetary property with outer guilds.
Normally I would never try to review a game after just 3 hours, especially an MMO. MMO games are known for taking 20 hours or so to get to a point where it really kicks in and bites you, and then you still have 100 hours to go before you really get the game. Even though it's an MMO, for every hour the game taxes you instead of bites you, you're going to lose more interest. There was one MMO that I logged into and logged out less than 30 seconds later, it was just that bad. One of those Freemium MMO games.
Finally. The game looks pretty for the most part. Except when I warp drived through a planet. Scale is incredibly off, planets look like nothing more than asteroids that you aren't allowed to get closer to, there's no real sense of depth to the game. Sometimes you'll see something floating in outer space and you'll fly 30 seconds to get there just to discover that it barely grows in size. The lack of interactivity with a lot of the game is truly annoying. Finding a mining colony space station and then having zero interaction with it? What the hell is going on, I can't even fly my tiny little ship to it because my ship is just as large as the entire asteroid field apparently. And I know the ship is just supposed to house one person. It's not like there were any other ships flying to this remote mine field station in the middle of nowhere, so what were they mining and why?
Eve is a game where there is no story for you, you have to make your own story. The problem is that the tools you are given are incredibly shallow for game interaction, and really only work towards social interaction. If you enjoy that kind of thing, table top role playing, RPG's like dungeons and dragons, except doing it on a large scale, kind of like LARP'ing without the L, if you always find yourself on the RP server of an MMO, then Eve may be for you. You have to make your own destiny, and it will be interesting to see how Biowares new Star Wars MMO completely crushes Eve's free mode with their over the top drawn out story telling just because they have an iconic name behind them.
And one last thing. Seriously? No WoD? WoD actually sounds awesome. Vampires and werewolves as playable characters? How many MMO's have that? Everquest and like, that's it. Dust 514 just doesn't look to me like it will be noteworthy. It's an interesting tactic, but I feel the problem is that the majority of xbox gamers who enjoy the FPS side of things in Dust, aren't going to enjoy the free mode lack of destination Massively part of Eve.
It's one thing to play with other people in a game. It's completely different to be expected to talk to them.
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