Morning!
I hope everyone had a great weekend. It appears that some of our World of Warcraft guild members were affected by the HUGE snowstorm that hit the Northeast. By huge I mean it barely even flurried. CRY MORE NOOBS! We hope everything is alright and be sure to take pictures of the snow. Some of us rarely see the white stuff. (So many joke possibilities there.)
Sorry I wasn’t online much this weekend. Very busy. Doesn’t look like there will be much time next weekend either. I’m having some visitors. Such is life I suppose. Maybe I’ll stay up late again and get Sivart a level.
Spent what little time I did have free giving Eve Online a shot. Here’s a quick rundown of the game:
1) Acquiring the game:
This part was fairly easy. I knew there were some free trial accounts available, but found that Eve’s main website was not longer giving them out. I typed in “Free EVE Online Trial account” and found one easily. You download the client and install the game. From there, you are sent a activation key via email. I decided not to activate it immediately because I wanted to have an hour of two to play it at one time. That turned out to be a good decision on my part. The activation key is entered in a website and you can start playing. If your looking for a boxed copy of the game, I’m sad to say they no longer sell them here in the States. When the game first was released it was a buggy mess. Not too many people stuck through it. Now they are growing and getting popular, they have digital downloads. Just FYI.
SCORE: 9 out of 10
2) Gathering information on the game:
Eve’s main website (www.eve-online.com) is full of useful information. Since you are not “buying a box” of the game, I’d make sure you visited the site to get your bearings. I found a lot of useful information there that helped me as I started the game. The message-board is full of useful information as well. Until you are registered, you are not allowed to post. I found that a little annoying, but I’m not sure I blame them. The forum community is VERY helpful and many people post different strategies on how to make money and where to start missions. If you are interested in playing the game, make sure you head to the site first.
SCORE: 10 out of 10
3) Character creation:
I spent about and hour creating the look of my character. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it is one of the best and most detailed systems I have ever seen. My wife watched me for about 20 minutes and I toyed with the system and thought it was pretty cool. You can make them look as kind or as evil as you can imagine. It is basically divided into 3 sections: Facial structure, Upper body aesthetics, and Background and Lighting. With your facial structure options, you are able to mold how your jaw, skull shape, head direction, and eye position and direction. With upper body aesthetics, you are able to control hair and color, eye color, decals (which are quite interesting), clothing, and your character’s eyebrows. With the background and lighting aspect, you are able to choose from around 30 backgrounds and 10-15 different lighting angles to change how your character appears. It was pretty amazing how much changing the lighting made a difference. I also just realized that the lighting would change color depending on where you placed it. Finally, you are able to change the angle of the camera to get many different “poses” of your character. By turning his head to the side and keeping his eyes forward, I was able to make some pretty creepy characters. I choose a pretty tame one however. The dark lighting made me feel he was hiding something. Role-playing 4tw. Sadly, after you have created your kick ass character, the only time you see him is in portrait form as your avatar. You don’t see him jumping around the world like you would World of Warcraft characters. Due to the fact that you never see your character again except for his picture, I can’t give it a 10 or a 9. I just felt cheated.
SCORE: 8 out of 10
4) Beginning and Tutorial:
There isn’t a cutscene to the game. You begin in a hanger of sorts in your POD. A pod is a gel-filled capsule that you are encased in to keep you alive in space. As the game starts, you are introduced to your environment via a female voice that starts the tutorial. Where most games give you little popup windows to explain how the game works, this game gives you a full-fledged voiced tutorial. And the tutorial is LOOOOOOOONG! I’d say from start to finish gets close to 2 hours. You can stop the tutorial at anytime, but I found it very informative. There is no way I could have figured 1/2 the stuff out without it. (I found it humorous how many people in the “noob” help channel were asking questions that the tutorial clearly answered. Lazy bums.) I said that you could stop at anytime, but you can also leave it paused. If you want to try some more stuff other than what it says to do, just do it. As long as you go back to the place where you left off, the tutorial will pick back up. VERY cool. When you start the game, you are placed in 3 chat channels: Local (chat within a solar system), Corp (where you can talk and be recruited into a corp; i.e. guild), and New Player Help. Each channel is pretty informative. I found noob channel very annoying at times though. Lots of chatter.
The game starts you with a noob ship that’s good for the beginning tutorial and quest system. It is pretty slow with little cargo space. I’ve had it for some time now because it takes a little cash to buy an upgraded ship. It also takes skill. More on that later.
SCORE: 10/10
5) Gameplay and Interface:
Even though Eve is a space simulation (it is almost more of an economic simulation), you control your ship with your keyboard and mouse. In other words, THERE IS NO JOYSTICK OPTION. None… at all. So, try to imagine a space sim without one. I got a new joystick for Christmas and really wanted to give it a go. Sadly, Eve isn’t created with that in mind. You see, where games like Mechwarrior, Counter-Strike, Doom3, Unreal Tournament, and Battlefield 2 are twitched based, Eve was created to be something completely opposite. It is a “Thinking Man’s” game. From my experience, there are times when fast reflexes will pay off, but there is no cross-hairs to aim with or ziggin and zaggin. It’s a point and click affair. If you skip the tutorial, the UI will scare you. It is massive in the sense that there are a LOT of options present on the screen. If you have no idea what they do, you’ll get easily confused. Even with the tutorial’s help, I hit a lot of wrong buttons before I got the right one. The good news is that the UI (User Interface by the way) is very customizable. You are able to move chat boxes, inventory (or cargo) boxes, and the like. I really found this helpful.
Now the game-play. It isn’t as slow as watching grass grow… but it’s close. Since I had read up on the game, I knew what I was getting into. I thought they were joking about setting waypoints, popping on Auto Pilot, and reading a book or cleaning house. That was until I actually did both yesterday. So far, when you first get past the tutorial and start doing missions, there are a lot of courier missions. Go here, drop this off, la la la. The more you got into the missions, the further the locations were away from where you were. Luckily the UI allows you to right click on almost any destination and “set as waypoint”. This allowed me to quickly plot a course and turn Auto Pilot on. I then took out the garbage, cleaned up some clothes, and read a few chapters in my book (during the whole playtime that is. Not just one trip.)
But don’t let that scare you off. The complexity of this game is pretty amazing. It has it’s own economy where people’s buying and selling in different sections of the universe affects prices everywhere. If one place has a higher demand, you’ll get more money for the items you’re selling. And most of the stuff you sell goes to real players. Let’s say you want to become rich so you set out to mine. You take your ship (equipped with a mining laser) to a local asteroid field. There are many things to mine so you’re usually not going to have to fight people over minerals. You mine and mine and mine until your cargo hold is full and you head back to the station. You sell and make the big bucks. To make traveling easier and safer (I’m about to get to that), you are able to set “bookmarks” in each solar system you are in. If you set one to a spacestation and another one at the asteroid belt you want to mine, you can easily right click in space and choose “warp to location”. The ship’s auto-pilot kicks in and you’ll be taken there. Once out of warp, you’ll be able to mine to your heart’s desire. Mining is where you can make money. It’s just tedious. Another way to make money (which I haven’t even begun to figure out) is by creating blueprints and building ships. That’s usually where all your ore is going. People need ore to build ships! You can be a trader (buy low, travel, and sell high). You can be a pirate (attacking anyone you want and looting their cargo hold). Which brings me to… safety.
Eve online is pure PVP. Anyone can attack another person at whim. Sounds harsh huh? Well CCP (creators) are way ahead of you! They have created a pretty cool safety net for newer players or those not wanting to get blown out of the sky(?). The Universe is HUGE. There are “5000″ systems to explore. Yeah, it’s that big. Each system you visit has a security rating. it goes from 1.0 to 0.0. In systems from 0.5 - 1.0 you are relatively safe. The closer to 0.5 the less quick the galaxy police are to respond. (Guess their out eating Star Wars Burrito Donuts.) So the big bad security force keeps pirates out of the system and other players from attacking you. Once you start dipping into 0.4 and below, you’re on your own. Funny how the further into insecure space, the better the rewards for mining and such. Just the way it is. The safe area is about 25% of the game so there are a LOT of areas to explore. Here’s an example of how PVP works in the secure areas: Yesterday I was mining away. I noticed a few cargo containers floating around in space. I flew over to one and opened it. Some ore! Woot. I went to loot it and got a warning telling me that I was about to “steal” this ore from another player. So you can keep ore floating around. Cool. Well I didn’t have the guts to take it. I’m a wuss, but I didn’t want the damn Galaxy Guards of Doom to rip into me. Stealing is bad right? So I float over to an asteroid and start mining. I’m not sure what exactly I did, but another player started opening fire on me. WTF? My shields started going down and I wasn’t sure what I should do. I decided that I didn’t like being picked on, so I returned fire and killed him pretty quickly. EAT THAT FLY BOY! I looked at the top of the screen and it said I have 10 minutes until Whatever his name can’t attack me again. Apparently I was attack flagged. Apparently I did something that allowed me to be attacked. Because space stations are safe zones, I docked and waited for my flag to disappear and went on my way. Once again, I’m a wuss.
So how do you stay safe in dangerous space? Corporations my friend. Corporations are a type of guild. Once you are apart of it, fellow corp members can’t attack you so that’s someone who won’t attack you. Also, you’ll have more people to fly with and there are safety in numbers. Corporations allow CEOs to create an atmosphere where each member can play a part. Like to mine? Do it for the corporation! You’ll get paid. Like to fly a HUGE cargo ship? Get certified and fly that puppy! Wanna be a fighter pilot? There’s always room for escort ships! However many things can destroy a corporation. Greed, sabotage, anger, and stupidity are just a few. Some corporations are so large that they are able to claim sectors of space! If you’re not in their corp and you’re in their space… it’s not pretty. Corps also can declare war on each other flagging the warring corp members PVP no matter what zone you’re in. Police won’t interfere. I hear it’s hard to get into a good corp because everyone is paranoid. There are been too many accounts of agents from another corp getting into the fold of a rival corp and totally destroying the thing. Some even waited months and months just to earn trust and stab them in the back. I’m not sure I’ll be in a corp ANY time soon. Oh well, gives me more time to make the $$.
Finally, let’s talk about levels and such. Back in 1997, Ultima Online was the MMO to play. It didn’t have a level system at all. It was skill based. The more you used a skill the better you got at it. It really worked well, but it was abusable. CCP created a pretty awesome advancement system. Like UO before it, Eve has no levels. Each player starts with base skills. Depending on what you choose in character creation, you have a little head start on some skills, but nothing too major. To learn a new skill, you go to your character sheet and then to your skill tab. Right click on a skill and tell it to train. You’ll notice a timer on the skill. This is how long it will take you to figure out how to upgrade your skill. Most games require a LOT of time to level or get high skills. CCP decided to do things differently. Once you select a skill and it begins, you can log off the game. I’m at work, but right now, I’m learning how to use Drones better! When I get home, I’ll be able to pick up another skill. Oh, you can only train one skill at a time. It’s still a pretty cool system. It appears that the higher you get in skill the longer it will take you to learn. I went from an 8 hour skill time to a 2 day skill time on another one. =( It’s just time. The only problem with leveling skill and not being online is available funds for the ships and other items better skills unlock. So… let’s get to the score.
SCORE: 9 out of 10
I’m out of time, but I’ll come back to add more information when I can. Who knows, by this time tomorrow, I have have turned into a pirate ship killa! ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
KittenKiller
