(EDIT: Don't know of EVE Online? This article sums things up nicely.)
In order to top my mistake of signing up for World of Warcraft I recently signed up for EVE. Warcraft was getting too repetative and simplistic. I'm sick of the hand holding. Its too easy. EVE offers a much higher level of complexity, player control and open ended gaming. Combat? Mining? Trading? CEO? Spy? Con-man? Scientist? Trader? Manufacturing? Explorer? Bounty hunter? Whatever you want. No classes. No levels and experience points (and thus no grinding or level cap). A player controlled market. Player built space stations, ships. Player controlled star systems. And if your ship gets destroyed... well, hope you had insurance.
I'm also sick of learning I have friends who play WoW only to find they're on a different server shard. The fractured universe is, I think, Warcraft's biggest drawback. EVE has just one universe. 15-20k people playing together at any given time, largest ever. This, plus the much steeper learning curve, I think makes the EVE community a tad more mature.
So... anyone play EVE? Its a big black out there and its a big, complex game to learn. I'm on as Stainless Rat (just as soon as I put my PC back together).
And its written in Stackless Python! Wow! An enormous, graphic intensive PC game, client and server, written in a dynamic language. Gives me hope, folks.
Re:Darn...
schwern on 2006-03-08T19:50:21
The nice thing about EVE is its very low intensity. Lots of time spent on autopilot or mining. Maybe I'll start programming Perl between programming the jump computer.
EVE
pjf on 2006-04-06T04:13:55
I played EVE a little bit a year ago. I'm playing occasionally now (character: "Teellox"). However I don't consider the low intensity a feature. When I play a game I usually look for high-intensity and high excitement. That probably means I should be spending more time in 0.0 space.
My biggest problem with EVE is that I've found it lacks the Crushbone Factor. Many zones, stations, areas, missions, and operations just "feel the same", regardless of where they are. This is a hard thing to get right in a large game world, and is notoriously difficult for space-oriented games.
To EVE's benefit, the economy appears to be well thought out, especially considering the original vintage of the game. I'm a stickler for game economies, as poorly designed ones tend to suffer from boundless inflation which can have a serious impact on the rest of the game mechanics.
