Eve

[Dis]

My brother is saying this game is pretty cool.

It is a massive multiplayer online game though . But if it is engaging enough I might get it.

It seems to have a more realistic economy of buying and selling goods. You can manufacture stuff, trade stuff, smuggle stuff, or piarate stuff. And you get to have space battles.

It is set in space, and you command a space ship.

the only worry is there has been no advertising for this game. I have never heard of this game until today. They have 4 or 5 thousand people playing, but they probably need more. A game like this needs lots of people playing.

Only released in England and the U.S. so far I think, so maybe they will get more players.

[FrustratedPoet]

I was working at PC Gamer magazine for two weeks recently and they all said it was a brilliant game. They gave it a 90% review score too.

I've never played it myself, though.

[General Ludd]

I've heard only negative (but not very informative) things about it.

[Grumbold]

It is a slow paced game and needs to be played co-operatively. A solo player may be able to slowly earn the cash for a good space ship but one mistake (or bug that the Eve staff "can't" fix) could see you lose that ship. On my own I could conceivably afford to upgrade to a cruiser with the skills to fly it in a month of play. Lose it and I would lose about 25 hours of game time.
In a corporation, lose a ship and the whole corp loses maybe five hours of earning power or five minutes, depending on its size.

The game is not one that needs rapid manouevering, the combat largely involving clicking on an enemy ship to target it then clicking once on each weapon, shield or gadget you want to activate and watching them do their stuff. The skill is in acquiring the right character skills and equipment to maximise the potential of your ship.

The interface, especially chat, is utterly awful. Unless you have a huge monitor the text is going to be hard to read. There is no good place to put the chat window (or the many other windows it helps to have open) either. You can only read one chat channel at once, so if you are talking to your corp and someone flies up behind you and says "leave our space now or I shoot" you have no clue (okay, a tiny flashing light on your local channel, but that could be a message for anyone in the sector.)

You learn skills in real time, so you're always gaining a little even if you are logged out all day. The silly part is you only learn one skill, whether that took 20 minutes or 20 hours. The system won't pick a new one for you if you don't log in.

I'm spending most of my life mining asteroids or fending off pirates while my corp mates mine. Like everything else this is in slow motion, with a miner having not a lot to do for minutes at a time while their cargo hold slowly fills and the gunship idling until another pirate wave descends.

Still, the game as a whole is curiously compelling. We can buy blueprints and manufacture goods from the rare ores we mine to sell for any price we like anywhere we want. We can hunt for other goods people produce and haul them elsewhere for a profit. We can fight pirates (some are extremely mean) or even become one and prey on friendly shipping. Every individual has agents that will offer "missions" if you prefer a varied life of mixed travel, combat and cargo hauling.

The game has a lot of potential. In the longer term there are bigger ships, better tech and the mysterious fifth race to discover. CCP just need to get some of the little wrinkles ironed out first, like the way it is very easy for a player in a position of trust to completely gut their corporation, walking off with its goods and funds.

[Dis]

I'll bump this little thread. maybe in a couple of days I will make it over my brother's house and check out the game on his computer.

[Sarxis]

Definately let us know Dissident. I got into the beta test, but never actually got to play it (was at the tail-end of the test period, and I couldn't download the installer >:| ).

But I still have a passing curiosity for EVE.

[Dis]

well I finally got around to getting to my brother's house and checking it out.

I'm impressed for the most part. But I don't play many space games, so it is difficult to compare it to others. But it certainly looks to be the most sophisticated.

And I must say this is one of the best capitalistic games I have seen. The economy is interesting, and you can even buy shares in corporations. Most people don't understand the economy, and complain about it. But right now my brother operates as an independant trader and can make good money. In a few days time he can easily get 10,000,000 credits. And just to see if he can do it, he is selling it on e-bay. He got an offer of $60 for it! Although they want to use paypal- which can be abused by the buyer by cancelling the payment when they get the credits (the highest bid for his game has no prior e-bay ranking). He wants a money order or something. The prices used to be much higher for 10 million credits.

Most people do not take the time to learn the game, so they cannot make money like that. And many just start off mining which is kind of boring, and then they quit playing the game before learning the more interesting ways to play it.

One problem as I see it is the lack of a decent manual. True many people don't read them anyways, but many do, and many do reference it. If people don't learn to play the game decently, they will be bored and drop out.

Lack of good marketing and a good game title I think has hurt this game. I still think it needs more players. Maybe if some overseas people get into it, it could pick up. I think this type of game needs a lot of active players to really make it shine. The creators envisioned massive corporations fighting for solar systems and such and having massive wars.

As for the combat, I found it to be fairly realistic- as much as it can be considering the future tech is very high. It is complex (well it is easy at first, but there are different types of ammunition and various jammers and such), but I think that adds to the strategy. Although they have afterburners which is silly in space. But the movement and rotation seemed realistic.

So far, this has been the only online game that has interested me this much. I think it is better than Everquest because of the many different things to do. You don't have to "camp" for monsters to propel yourself higher in status. You can use your brain and social skills to do so. This appears to be the most intellectual mmorpg I have seen.

There are many different ways to make a living, but I'd imagine after a few months they would becoming boring. Although you'd think Everquest would be boring to most people, yet they are still playing that game. You can be a pirate, bounty hunter, miner, trader, manufacturer, cargo shipper, combat pilot, or just a basic administrator, or just mess around and do anything. You can join corporations and work as a team, or just go solo and do your own thing.