EVE Online: Worth buying?

[BonsaiK]

I used to play EVE. I'm on a break from it at the moment because I can't justify the expense currently. Also I wasn't enjoying it all that much, and I got sick of waiting for the developers to implement walking in stations, which was originally promised in 2008 and doesn't look like it's coming now until 2010. I'll probably sign up again once that feature goes online, and I get a job that can support my EVE habit.

So for starters, ignore the Yahtzee review. He didn't really get enough time with it to judge it thoroughly. I did.

The good bits:

1. When you do something like kill somebody there's a real sense of achievement.
2. Players can actually affect the outcome of things, politically, to a degree.
3. The backstory is excellent.
4. All players are forced to roleplay by the game design mechanics, whether they realise it or not, and whether they like it or not. So it's a heaven for RPers, at least on paper.
5. Death is meaningful, which means there is real risk, which means that you don't get players doing really really stupid shit all that often.
6. Skill training is genius and takes a small part of the grind out of "levelling up".
7. Intense difficulty curve locks out a lot of the 'omfgwoot' crowd.
8. It's kind of pretty, most of the time.
9. The market economics are fantastic, probably the best thing about the game.
10. You don't HAVE to shoot anything if you don't want to.
11. Combat and abilities are always getting rebalanced, so the lame people who don't understand the overarching RP-focused concept of the game and always go for the most powerful class/combinations are always getting penalised for their stupid trend-following power-gaming idiocy. The amount of joy this brings to the average player is so immense it cannot be quantified.
12. There's quite a lot of ways to get money in the game, but...

The bad bits:

1. ...all are boring. Sure, there may be no XP system but if you want more than the very basic toys you still have to grind for money which is needed for, amongst other things, buying skillbooks to train your character, so character advancement is still tied to grinding. Make no mistake there is grind with a capital GRIND in EVE.
2. The most powerful alliances and groups in the game are unquestionably the most immature and retarded.
3. Space flight is not realistically modelled. Dumbed-down physics, miniature astral bodies and an excess of nebula means that it feels more like you're underwater commanding submarines in a dirty fishbowl than in space. Space flight enthusiasts, look elsewhere.
4. The player-combat learning curve is completely soul-destroying. In fact all learning curves in the game are ludicrously steep, but PVP ridiculously so. You still still feel like a rank amateur after years of committed playing. If you're any kind of sore loser or you get easily frustrated don't even bother, stick to trading or something.
5. The dev team take ages to implement a lot of the stuff that they promise.
6. Most players don't know what roleplay is, or look down on it heavily (despite the fact that the game actually forces them to participate in it). Even most of the people who do RP don't really understand RP as a concept fully. This makes it really hard to stay in character, if you're into that sort of thing. You have to ignore a whole chunk of stuff just to keep the immersion going. And the RP alliances are all combat or production focused so good luck finding somewhere to RP if you want to avoid the worst of the incredible grind EVE has to offer.
7. You're pretty useless and ineffectual on your own, you really need a group to be strong and get to the game's juicier parts (the dangerous low/no security stuff). This encourages players to get together which is a good thing, however...
8. ...server-side, the game struggles to cope with the large fleets that you need for a viable existence in dangerous space.
9. It's buggy. Some small, niggling bugs have been around for years and will no doubt still be there when I return to the game.
10. Some ships truly have an attack of the fuglies. Very few ships look really cool.
11. The game's sense of scale is kind of botched. A battleship is a lot bigger than a cruiser but the size difference doesn't really hit home because both ships will stretch equal resolution textures across their surface, resulting in non-uniform window sizes and blurring on some of the bigger ships. What the battleship really needs is a greater amount/higher resolution of non-stretched textures to fill the equal surface. The stations are also far too small for the amount of ships that they're supposed to fit in their interior. These sound like small niggles but they all contribute to the "swimming in a fishbowl" effect mentioned earlier, which in turn makes you feel like you're not really flying a ship at all.
12. No first-person perspective, which would also have helped the aforementioned problem.

Anyway... yeah. It's not a bad game overall, but it's certainly not everything it could be. I'd still recommend it over WoW for the market and RP aspects alone, but it's not for everyone. It requires serious time investment to get anything out of it at all, so don't even consider it unless you've got lots of free time on your hands. Sure, if you're a busy person you can "set and forget" a lot of stuff but you still need to devote days of playtime to actually be able to do anything meaningful in those times when you can sit down and play the thing, because you need money and money takes time. Unless you buy ISK, but then there's the small problem of CCP catching you and taking it off you...

 

[BonsaiK]

I stopped playing a couple months ago. Just can't afford it right now given that I'm not having much fun with it lately. I still have my characters, I was waiting for Walking In Stations and got kinda sick of waiting. I'm still waiting, just decided not to spend money while I wait.

Eve is the grindiest of the grind. Just to get to the stage where you're a viable pirate or trader or whatever, requires doing repetitive stuff over and over and over and over... combat missions are all pretty much the same. Courier missions and trade runs are boring as hell, thank god there's an autopilot for that but if travel is that boring you need an autopilot that oughta tell you something. Wormholes aren't viable until you have the muscle to survive inside one, which takes time and money, which means... grind, and even when you do get in one you're just grinding enemy ships and structures for items. Mining speaks for itself. Exploring the galaxy is fairly grindy when it all looks the same. Even salvaging is just doing the same repetitive tasks over and over. Yahtzee got this part of his review 100% correct. The only part of the game I can think of that isn't fundamentally grind-based is playing the market, but for that you really need some capital to get started, which means... you guessed it...

Sure, you can solo PVP but you have to get on top of the learning curve first and have decent kit for your ship so you're actually effective (which means money, which means grind) and then you still die more often than not. EVE isn't really designed to be played solo though and it shows in many aspects of the game's design.

The Dominix is fugly. It's so fugly that Yahtzee thought that the front of the ship was at the other end (look at the animations in his review, it's obvious that he thinks the front is the back and vice versa) and who can blame him. Everyone has their own taste in ships of course but overall I've seen ships look a lot better than they do in EVE.

I can tell the size difference when a big ship flies next to a small one, yes, obviously. But if I'm out on my own somewhere in a battleship, my ship doesn't look big like it should because of the way the textures are stretched over it. When I look at a ship from the outside I want to be able to imagine the interior (seeing as how CCP locks players out of actually SEEING their ships' interior, argh) and the texture-stretching makes it hard to visualise exactly what does what, it makes it looks like the people inside the ship have grown too, know what I mean? (It's really hard to explain this point, but I think you get it.) The way ships bump around like toys when you bang them together also doesn't help add to the sense of scale.

I know about 'camera drones'. The devs didn't want to do first-person perspective so they wrote that lame 'camera drones' stuff into the backstory. It's obviously just an excuse after the fact. How come my camera drones can pass through solid objects? How come my camera drones can never be shot down? How come my camera drones are immune to every single type of electronic warfare? Etc etc. Camera drones are just an excuse because they had to explain the third-person perspective somehow and they didn't know how else to do it. It doesn't change the fact that for a game like this to be truly immersive it really needs first person perspective.

 

[BonsaiK]

I'm not saying that the third-person perspective shouldn't be there. Obviously it's more practical for combat when you have enemies all around you. But it shouldn't be the only choice, either. I want to be able to feel like I'm actually inside my ship at least some of the time. I could do first-person the majority of the time and swap to third when it's combat time or whatever, now that would be the best of both worlds.

In a fictional future setting, stuff like "lol" or "pwn" doesn't have to break immersion. Actually I wouldn't be shocked if that's what language will have evolved into by then. Mind you a good RP player won't feel compelled to use stuff like that.

Yes the ships in EVE are unique. They're also mostly ugly with a few notable exceptions. Many of them don't conform to good design principles, a crying shame and a missed opportunity especially given that spaceships don't have to worry about atmosphere resistance and therefore could look like practically anything.

Walking In Stations is the only thing that is keeping me interested in EVE right now. I want to see how the RP community uses it and if it's going to become a viable option for RP. Pods are only for flying in ships, there are parts of EVE's backstory which detail pod pilots getting out of their pods, which is described as a clumsy and somewhat humiliating process in one part of the prime fiction that I read (wish I could find the link). EVE's pod pilots are special because they CAN use pods, not because they're STUCK inside them!

EVE is still a grind fest by design, period. When I played it I deliberately chose non-grindy ways to play it to maximise my enjoyment whenevre possible, but that means I made relatively little money and don't get the toys that others get. I don't mind this. Most people aren't happy with that though - the average player has to grind the crap out of themselves and do endless repetitive tasks that they really would rather not have to do, just to stay competitive.

 

[Valiance]

Probably one of the better MMOs but it is still an MMO and can get repetitive. At least you can level without playing.

Only in an MMO would this be a "feature."

Wait, you can pay sub fee with in-game cash?

I believe so. It costs quite a bit, but if you work hard enough, you can probably make enough in a month to pay for next month.

Once you're somewhat established, it's effectively pocket change.

If you're good in a cut-throat world of buy-low-sell-high.

 

[TOGSolid]

7. You're pretty useless and ineffectual on your own, you really need a group to be strong and get to the game's juicier parts (the dangerous low/no security stuff).

And this is one of the reasons I quit after three and a half years. The faction PVP turned out to be a massive joke, wormhole exploration equally so, and after dealing with BoB, the coalition, and a random bunch of 0.0 pvp twats who couldn't fight their way out of a paper sack, I had enough.
As I've discovered recently, the biggest problem with multiplayer games are the players, and in Eve this is doubly so, with a massive helping of developer incompetence on the side. To get anything done, you need to be in a corp, however most of the players are frankly total cockwaffles, meanwhile the devs are too damn busy just tossing in everything including the kitchen sink without any real attempt to refine their game.
0.0 life just gets more and more bogged down by the incredibly asstastic sovereignty system and the need for bigger and bigger server killing blobs. Low sec is fairly devoid of life save for the curious noob and the bored griefer, and high sec is land of the Caldari industrialist.

Abandon all hope ye who enter Eve Online. It's a damn shame too, when I started playing a few years ago I was sucked in by that rare feeling like I'm actually in a game world where my actions mattered. When I quit a month or two ago, the only feeling I had was massive boredom. Boredom from the grind needed to stay competitive in pvp, boredom from the idiots in charge of the major alliances, and general rage from CCP's refusal to fix the game's issues and insistance on adding more useless shit. I tried to strike it out on my own, but that sense of adventure just wasn't there. Nothing remained except endless space and the occasional gate camp (yay for my Arazu's cloak).

 

[Da pyro man 999]

No its not, get a life

 

[Cowabungaa]

Even if you are, the learning curve is murder.

Why does everyone keep saying this? I found it to be so much nonsense. The tutorial was very complete, and I found myself hunting pirates, doing missions and mining away about half an hour after starting the game. And it's not like the markets can't be understood with a high-school level of knowledge about economics, not that you have anything to do with the markets when you're not in a corporation, or you can just go for the mercenary path and say "screw economics!"

Here's another EVE question: Does it play more like hard SF, or space opera?

What I know is that the combat is tactical and not twitch based.

Anyway, sadly I can't play EVE apart from trials, but what I like about it is that it's definatly the best open-world/sandbox MMO out there. You won't find a better player-run universe out there, that's what made my short amount of time in EVE so immersive.

I'm a veteran space sim gamer, having discovered Elite a few years ago and working on from that. I've played space simulations that conform to Newtonian physics and that can be played in real time. Therefore, I consider myself quite informed when I consider EVE Online to be one of the most tedious space simulations around.

The scale is admirable, as is the user-maintained economic system, and there's plenty of things to do, but frankly, having to level up skills in a space simulator feels wrong, mining is just about the most boring thing I've done in a game for a long time and, now that my tastes in SF space combat tend towards the very hard [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.100198#1554585], the battles feel unfulfilling and tedious.

As far as I know, EVE was never ment to be a space simulator. The mining is extremely dull though, that's for sure. The only thing's worse, I can imagine, are cargo runs. Auto-pilot awaaaay!

 

[oneniesteledain]

Even if you are, the learning curve is murder.

Why does everyone keep saying this? I found it to be so much nonsense. The tutorial was very complete, and I found myself hunting pirates, doing missions and mining away about half an hour after starting the game. And it's not like the markets can't be understood with a high-school level of knowledge about economics, not that you have anything to do with the markets when you're not in a corporation, or you can just go for the mercenary path and say "screw economics!"

Here's another EVE question: Does it play more like hard SF, or space opera?

What I know is that the combat is tactical and not twitch based.

Anyway, sadly I can't play EVE apart from trials, but what I like about it is that it's definatly the best open-world/sandbox MMO out there. You won't find a better player-run universe out there, that's what made my short amount of time in EVE so immersive.

I'm a veteran space sim gamer, having discovered Elite a few years ago and working on from that. I've played space simulations that conform to Newtonian physics and that can be played in real time. Therefore, I consider myself quite informed when I consider EVE Online to be one of the most tedious space simulations around.

The scale is admirable, as is the user-maintained economic system, and there's plenty of things to do, but frankly, having to level up skills in a space simulator feels wrong, mining is just about the most boring thing I've done in a game for a long time and, now that my tastes in SF space combat tend towards the very hard [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.100198#1554585], the battles feel unfulfilling and tedious.

As far as I know, EVE was never ment to be a space simulator. The mining is extremely dull though, that's for sure. The only thing's worse, I can imagine, are cargo runs. Auto-pilot awaaaay!

I meant the learning curve for the controls, from what I played in the trial seemed quite difficult.

I have absolutly no trouble understanding the markets, being one who believes in anarcho-capitalism myself.

 

[Cowabungaa]

I meant the learning curve for the controls, from what I played in the trial seemed quite difficult.

I have absolutly no trouble understanding the markets, being one who believes in anarcho-capitalism myself.

Shame the latter barely works in today's frelled up world, would've been nice though, afterall freedom rocks.

In any case, the controls just consist of...clicking. Can't see what's so hard about that. Or do you mean all the different screens and menu's? Or finding the optimal range in combat? I found it all quite easy really. Must be me I guess.

 

[oneniesteledain]

I meant the learning curve for the controls, from what I played in the trial seemed quite difficult.

I have absolutly no trouble understanding the markets, being one who believes in anarcho-capitalism myself.

Shame the latter barely works in today's frelled up world, would've been nice though, afterall freedom rocks.

In any case, the controls just consist of...clicking. Can't see what's so hard about that. Or do you mean all the different screens and menu's? Or finding the optimal range in combat? I found it all quite easy really. Must be me I guess.

It was all the menus, I think. That, coupled with the fact that my internet at the time was crappy Turkish satellite internet which didn't always let me log on, probably has something to do with it.

Also, nice use of "frell"!

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

It's a difficult question to answer. Eve is fairly unique in it's approach to gameplay and it has legions of hardcore supporters. After playing it myself for three years (I recently cancelled my account), I'd say that, in all likelyhood, the answer is no it isn't worth playing.

First off, the learning curve is painfully steep for virtually anything you'd like to do. This isn't much of a problem until you consider that in Eve, failure has some pretty severe consequences that can undo potentially dozens of hours of work. If for example, one is unprepared for a certain mission or PVP encounter and they end up floating in the void with nothing but the scant protection of their pod to their name, that ship is gone forever. Sure, a few parts will survive here and there and early on this isn't much of a loss. While replacing a well fitted frigate (the smallest and easiest to fly of the ships) might cost a mere million isk (the game's currency, actually a pittance for a veteran player), replacing a fully fitted Carrier can easily cost more than a billion isk (though admittedly this is mitigated significantly through the game's Insurance programs). Where this gets really bad is the game isn't terribly good at broadcasting to a player what is a terrible idea and what isn't. When you first start playing Eve and run missions, the first three tiers are incredibly easy. The fourth tier on the other hand is absolutely brutal in comparison, and success requires an extraordinary level of knowledge about the mission before hand such as types of damage being dealt (the only way to build a good tank with the handful of slots you'll have available is to protect against the most common damage types of a mission), enemy spawn patterns (often if one doesn't know this shooting the wrong enemies produces so many reinforcements up front that the player's ability to survive is quickly overwhelmed), objectives (the mission briefings often aren't terribly clear on what you need to do to flag the mission as complete) and so forth. I'd suspect that for most players, the first battleship they fly will be lost in the space of just a few missions, which is a pitty because that first battleship represents the cumulative effort of dozens if not hundreds of hours of gameplay (depending upon your route to said ship).

As a second flaw, one must know ahead of time that the PVE aspect is a monotonous grind. Eventually a player will find that there is no challenge to any mission - either because they have learned to read mission reports from eve-survival and take the warnings to heart, taken the lessons learned from past experience or even just flying a billion isk super battleship of staggering power. Once this stage is reached the player is finally able to really branch out and do those special things they dreamed of when they first downloaded the game, but since the most reliable source of good income comes from missions you're faced with a dilemma: in order to do what you want in a game you'll be forced to do something you hate. That said, missions are not the only road to wealth.

One can, for example, exploit the market, and while vast fortunes can be made doing this it takes a lot of knowledge about the game and commodities therein. Just like in real life, the budding merchant is going to have a hell of a time turning much of a profit when their stock of capital for purchase might equate to a few million isk and the biggest ship money can buy is an industrial. If one pursues this to it's logical conclusion, it's possible to make hundreds of millions if not billions in a single run in a well timed trade so long as one has the capital to invest (and the Freighter to carry it all in).

One can also follow the industrial route, but here the player is against incredibly stiff competition. For most ships the actual profit margin is just a few percent meaning that the budding player can only compete by selling at a loss. The real profits come from the largest and highest tech ships but the bigger or more complex the ship the harder it is to build - indeed there are few players who personally own the resources required to produce a single tech 2 ship from start (mineral and base material gathering) to finish (production of parts and final construction of the vessel), so a good chunk of potential profits are often lost to other players in the process.

The final route of making money relies heavily on PVP, or at the very least the threat of PVP. Eve online is indeed host to swarms of would-be pirates, and while it is potentially the most fun way to make money it is also the single hardest way to come out ahead. The problem of course is simply that player sill and ship design only go so far to deciding the outcome of battle, and at some points even a skilled player will bite off more than they can chew. Many players who start down the road of piracy find that they lose more than they make and quickly erode their player standing making it increasingly difficult to earn money the legitimate way.

The final note is PVP itself. PVP is, by any account, the reason you stick around in Eve. The problem is, while it's easy to get entangled in a fight with another player it's often quite difficult to find a fight that's actually going to be a lot of fun. If you fly solo, you run the risk of being ganged up on (and by risk it's often a guarntee - the minute you scramble another player you can rest assured if he has any friends online it's only a matter of time before they show up). If you run in a gang you risk losing out on targets as everyone starts docking up when a hostile fleet shows up. If you fly small ships you limit your target set significantly. If you fly big ships you rob yourself of the ability to run from a fight you can't win. This leads to the problem that made me leave Eve - you'll fly around for HOURS looking for a fight and when you finally get one it's often over in a few minutes. For some, this level of activity is worth the fee, but for me it eventually came to the point that I didn't want to make the time commitment to do what I wanted in the game.

Eve is a fantastic game, often because of the same set of problems I listed above. It simply isn't a game for most people. It's essentially a game where one engages in hours of boredome and tedium with moments of sheer terror. If that sounds like the kind of game you'd want to play, they do have a free trial and the client is fairly small (around a gig and a half these days I believe), so there's no reason not to give it a try.

 

[oneniesteledain]

I'm a veteran space sim gamer, having discovered Elite a few years ago and working on from that. I've played space simulations that conform to Newtonian physics and that can be played in real time. Therefore, I consider myself quite informed when I consider EVE Online to be one of the most tedious space simulations around.

The scale is admirable, as is the user-maintained economic system, and there's plenty of things to do, but frankly, having to level up skills in a space simulator feels wrong, mining is just about the most boring thing I've done in a game for a long time and, now that my tastes in SF space combat tend towards the very hard [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.100198#1554585], the battles feel unfulfilling and tedious.

Fascinating post. I take it you're a fan of hard sci-fi, then? I have mixed feeling on space combat. For example, I usually prefer it to be hard, but in certain cases of space opera, notable Star Wars, I don't look for real science (because there is very little).

 

[ItsAPaul]

If you want to put way too much work into an mmo, sure. Also, I usually hate the "second job you have to pay for" stereotype, but that's what those player corporations really are.

 

[Echo_419]

If you have no life, then go for it. Its a good game, but its huge... HUGE! I played it for six months and said to myself 'screw this. its Saturday night, i am going to the pub to see my long lost friends'

 

[Kellerb]

Just watch the Zero Punctuation review.

sheep! BAAAAA

kidding. eve online sounds epic though.