The first two attempts were years ago, of which I don't remember much other than in the first attempt like many people I found it all too confusing and gave up in fairly short order.
On the second attempt I got a Drake, probably horridly fit and ended up getting bored of running missions and had little clue to what else was out there and so stopped again.
The third and most recent attempt began when I suggested to a housemate at Uni that we give it a shot, after all playing with friends and someone you know means you have that interaction and also someone else to talk to about it and work together to answer your own questions. It was in this play through that I moved from the comfortable relative safety of high-sec to low-sec and then rather rapidly to null-sec, and ended up flying and fighting amongst the massive blobs in some of the largest battles and more recent military campaigns of Eve Online history.
It was also during this time that I began to spend an increasing amount of my time reading up on the goings on across 0.0 and what other peoples views were of just about anything to do with Eve. However after a year of this I became bored and somewhat tired of the current state of null-sec, the experience started to become stale and I walked away again to try something else.
So when people say you always come back to Eve Online, I understand exactly what they mean.
Eve offers something which just seems to be so... missing from other mmo's out there currently and probably for the foreseeable future.
To me I believe that the things which keep on bringing me back are as follows.
- The sandbox nature of the game.
- A proper player run economy, where everything is constructed and sold on by players.
- Risk and Reward.
- Consequences.
- Space science fiction setting.
- The scope of it and its complexity.
A player run economy which actually runs pretty damn smoothly, with real progression capable in it. Being able to sell your loot from missions or ratting or from mining, and know that somewhere out there who ever bought it will actually use it and possibly lose it.
Going back to my bullet point, I added in the word, "proper". The reason for this is because I do not believe many mmo's have this as there is not anywhere near as great a sink for currency in them compared with eve, where so much gets blown up on a daily basis, and a greater majority of it is gone forever. Whereas in other games there isn't this loss of currency from the system and thus unless the game developers keep a weather eye on or have something in the workings of the game to adjust drop rates you end up with players amassing fortunes and not having anything to really spend them on but drive up prices or add to inflation.
Risk and reward, however much this gets a beating currently be thankful that it actually exists. We have to every time we undock gamble to a certain extent on whether whatever were undocking with is going to come back. This increases the further you go out from the centre of New Eden, as the controls of what a player can do with impunity increases so does that reward to a large extent.
I will say however that the rewards in high-sec are just about right, erring on the side of a little too good in my opinion and those in low-sec and null-sec are just pitiful. But rewards can also be fights and the experiences and whatever else you encounter, not just the ISK value of the activities.
Consequences, yes I cringe at CCP's Butterfly Effect video mainly because I as many others probably do wonder at how often this occurs or accurate how this portrayal of eve really is.
But they are right there are consequences to every action you take, more so in eve than in most other games. Yes 99.999% of the time those consequences of your each action are boring or don't actually travel that far.
But that possibility that you could cause a hurricane 200 miles away is still exciting.
Space science fiction setting. I would say that for the last however many years the mmo market has been saturated to a large extent by fantasy theme park mmo's. I would class Guild Wars 2 among those theme parks, but I'm veering off topic here. There haven't been that many great science fiction settings used in mmo's until just recently. Even then the big ones which spring to mind are trading off the name and lore established elsewhere and are attempting to appeal to an existing fan-base. The lack of originality in this regard is also something which grates on me, and probably is another reason I keep on coming back to eve, because until just recently you haven't been able to access the Eve universe any other way than via Eve Online.
The scope of it and its complexity.
First of all I would like you to take a mental step back, a few deep calming breaths and just think about what other styles of play are available, what roles you can fulfil, what other activities are available to you.
Once you have done that I can probably safely tell you,
"You haven't even scratched the surface, you will have forgotten so many other things."
As for its complexity I think this can easily be summed up by quoting something Ripard Teg posted on his excellent blog Jesters Trek, which I will be shortly adding as a link to from the side bit.
Back to the quote, it is something like this, "Each time I hit what I believe to be the bedrock in eve someone else shows me another layer to it." - That wont be it exactly I will have a look at finding the blog post in which it is in, if anyone is interested, but going back a couple of months on Jester's blog will take me through a couple hundred blog posts.
I first really started out my mmo experience in Anarchy Online (AO). Which to my mind is reasonably comparable to Eve Online, it was made by a Scandinavian games company, it had a futuristic science fiction setting, in which the human race as moved far away from Earth. And it had its own serious complexity, and grind. I'll go into this in more detail soon.
After getting annoyed with the complete stagnation of that game as the developers moved on to create Age of Conan and then Secret World, I left it. But I took away with me an enjoyment of complex gameplay, of which eve is the only other contender on the market.
To be honest with myself I could go on and write in far more detail about each of these points and probably develop each into its own blog post. I may keep that for a day when I run out of inspiration, or if I suddenly have masses of people clamoring for it. (Yeah right :P)
Hopefully this was an enjoyable read for you.
Fly dangerous out there.
No comments:
Post a Comment