My EVE Online experiment has failed. I have not been able to force myself to log into the game for more than a week and a half; the thought of spending any more time "playing" EVE is utterly unpalatable.
A metaphor. Click to enlargeHow far did I get?
I finished all of the newbie tutorials as well as the three 10-mission career arcs. This gave me a chance to sample all of the major game mechanics: combat, travel, mining, trade, and manufacturing.
After completing the majority of the newbie content, I cooked up a plan on how to move forward: I would become a small time trader of light weight goods (skill books, implants, etc.), run combat missions, and perhaps knock out the 50-mission epic quest chain that multiple people had recommended.
In fact, going into my last weekend of play I was quite excited about the prospect of enacting my plans and getting deeper into the game. I understood the mechanics, had a handle on the complex UI, and could travel and fight proficiently enough to feel comfortable, and had a dozen website bookmarked to aid me in my travels. As a sign of my enthusiasm I even borrowed a couple of E:On magazines that Bill offered me so that I could get even more involved in the EVE universe.
What went wrong?
That weekend I played quite a bit of EVE Online - perhaps four or five hours. I ran some missions, flew around a fair bit, manufactured a few items, played the local economy in order to obtain cheaper materials, and chatted quite a bit with the people in the Rookie Channel.
As the hours slipped by I noticed that I was having less and less fun. It's not that I wasn't doing intellectually interesting things - in fact I was pursuing content that I wanted to complete. No - I began to notice more and more that the actual act of accomplishing any of my goals was very "hands off".
Travel in EVE Online exemplifies this problem more than anything else. If you want to get from System A to System B, here are the steps you take:
- Set your destination via a menu so that the game will calculate the path to get there for you.
- Select the first jump gate provided by the system, and choose the drop down option "Warp to within 0m".
- Wait a variable amount of time for your ship to fly to the gate (30s-2m)
- Wait for you thrusters to power down, right click the gate, and select "Jump" from a drop down menu.
- If you have arrived at your final destination, warp to within 0m of the particular part of the system you wanted to access. Otherwise go to step 2 and repeat for the next system along your path.
The game play mechanics used to travel from system to system are very similar to every other part of EVE Online. If you want to fight an enemy you target it, pick a distance to engage at, acquire a lock, enable your weapons/defenses, and then let the your ship fight the battle itself. If you want to mine you orbit an asteroid, lock on, enable your mining lasers, and then wait until your hull is full (3-10 minutes, it seems). If you want to manufacture goods you acquire the materials, select an assembly line, specify the quantity, and then wait a variable amount of time for the process to finish (anything from seconds to days).
EVE Online tries at every turn to eliminate the need for a player to focus on the game, and seems to encourage players to detach, tab out, read email, watch T.V., or otherwise do something that is NOT playing EVE Online.
While there is nothing wrong with this style of game play, it is decidedly not for me. When I sit down to play a game I want to immerse myself in the virtual world that unfolds before me, and really PLAY the game. I'm not saying that I need to be frenetically slamming keys the entire play session, but neither do I want to be twiddling my thumbs for 80% of my in-game time waiting for the game to finish playing itself.
Such a promising vision
My time in EVE Online has given me a new appreciation for the game and all of the innovations that it has made over the years. The player driven content that the game has to offer is compelling, deep, and subtly brutal. Simply put, it is a truly unique gaming experience in an industry that all-to-often looks for success by iterating over the same template again and again.
As much as I wanted to experience more of EVE Online and participate in the wars and intrigue that enthrall so much of the player base, I just cannot find peace with the game's lethargic and detached mechanics.
10 comments:
"EVE Online tries at every turn to eliminate the need for a player to focus on the game, and seems to encourage players to detach, tab out, read email, watch T.V., or otherwise do something that is NOT playing EVE Online."
Again, I can only re-iterate what I've said before: the game shines a lot more in the PvP side of things where not paying attention will get you killed in seconds and there is a lot more maneuvuring and coordinating between you and your wingmates. Eve as a solo game does not work unless you are a machoist.
That's the combat side only, unfortunately. Travel, mining, trade, manufacturing.... all of these things would still be painfully "hands off" in nature even if I were to PvP my brains out.
And pvp combat does not happen very frequently (in relation to other games I've played) - at least not from everything I've read. So even if that nugget of game play is a bit more active.... it's not something you can count on in a game session. (For example, just the term "gate camp" makes me cringe - it implies a lot of static waiting time relative to the amount of combat that takes place.)
Sorry to hear the wasn't a good fit for you, oddly enough the detatchedness is what keeps me playing. I have a 7 month old son who like to wake up every 5 to 60 minutes at night, which used to be my gaming time. Since I can't guarantee myself more than an hour's uninterrupted playtime, it's nice to play a game where I can leave the computer for a couple of minutes and not come back to a corpse.
Glad you gave Eve a try, and saw enough of the game that you understand what it's about. I can't really argue with you complaints about the mechanics. I've been having fun with old friends playing around in wormhole systems, seeing if there's a new style of game we can play for ourselves. It's keeping me sort of interested.
Kirith, while I agree that PvP is one place Eve really shines I'm not sure it's the action-packed fun Karthis is talking about. Most of my PvP experience was in 50 person fleets, where we spent an hour flying around, two hours of manning a gate camp, and then 90 glorious seconds of actual PvP combat. Well I think it was glorious, only the game (both client and server) lagged down so badly that all I know is when it was over my Raven was still floating in space.
Hi Nelson,
To address your points:
1) Yes, sometimes PvP is a lot of flying around looking for a fight. CCP has tried to address this with Faction Warfare a bit, and making probing deterministic instead of with a random factor.
2) Lag is continually being addressed. Complaints such as yours only happen with the biggest fleet fights these days. YMMV though.
3) I read a lot of pirate blogs that get into action of 1v1 or small gang versus others constantly in low sec. I mean every night. So it can be done.
Null sec does tend more towards the bigger groups and camping however.
Cheers!
Agree, I found it an absolute snooze fest.
I had a buddy pull me into Eve, and we had a fun time of it for the most part. we never got into the advanced parts of it and would normally get ganked any time we would enter a .4 or .3 system so we never went there. After a while we kinda got bored of it, and being in the military there would be times where we wouldn't be able to log in for a week or two at a time. Which made some of the higher learned Skills ideal for our play.
So we would do mining runs and the repetitive combat missions over and over and over, which was the one major turn-off about the game.
The people that seem to have the most fun with it are the people who are doing things in groups, and thus chatting with each other during the down-time part of the game - or you can get a group that can go into the more PvP areas and have a good chance of dominating. Or, organizing things where you end up having a lot more to do than just queue up some skills and go /afk for the rest of the day.
I'm happy to group and chat.... but when the "down part of the game" is literally 80-90% of the time.... well, that's just not for me.
Hi, this is the anonymous who had the 2 part comment on your Eve first impressions blog. Well at least you gave it a try. Only thing that can be said is, your right, playing the game is pretty boring, playing the people is what makes it great. Which is mostly the pvp side (solo roams, small gang roams, fleet roams, pirating, anti-pirating, bounty hunting, dueling, tournaments, faction warfare[good god]) but also includes things like manipulating the market to maximize profits, ninja mining in 0.0, and being persuasive enough to get people to help you advance politically. And those things are not skills you can work on in the game, they are your skills as a person in real life. It really is awesome when you get things to work your way, because it wasn't the amount of time you put into the game that did that, it was you.
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