So....just over a month ago I was reading through my normal news items and saw a story about EVE, the space-based MMOG, now being available for Mac. Hmmm, I thought, that sounds interesting. I had a mild interest in WoW but had never pulled the trigger to check it out. A space based free flowing game seemed right somehow for gaming on the computer. I decided to check it out.

WOW

Can we say hooked?

The game has been in existence since 2003. The programmers are based in Iceland and their servers are in London. The "EVE Cluster", the star system that is the EVE world, is some 5000 star systems.

There are a few differences with WoW.

First, the EVE "playing field" is not broken into shards like WoW. When 30,000 players are in the game they are all playing in the same world, not copies each containing a few thousand players.

Secondly, the game is not a face to face game like WoW. EVE players all fly ships and interact ship to ship, ship to station. The EVE builders have stated that a later addition to the game will give players the ability to ambulate in stations.

Third, there are no "levels" per se in EVE. Players train skills and advance in proficiency in that manner. Skills are ranked, some are harder to learn than others, and the more advanced skills have other skills as prerequisites. Skills give players bonuses in game play, both in running and maintaining your ship(s) and in dealing with the NPC world of the game. A player can train one skill at a time and the skill trains in real time. The beginning skills can take as few as 15 minutes to train. The higher level (proficiency in a given skill from 1 to 5) of skill and the higher rank (difficulty of the skill relative to other skills from 1 to 12), the skill will take longer to train. The longest training time I have seen so far in my month of play is 8+ days. Skills continue to train when you are logged out of the game. So you can set a long skill to train when (if?) you go to bed or if you are going to be away from the game for a couple of days. Even when not actively playing, if you have a skill training, there is this background connection to the game, you "know" that your character is still working at something.

Most importantly I think is that in EVE there is no "one" story path to follow in the game. You can be anything you want. A fighter, a good guy, a bad guy, a miner, a tradesman, a bounty hunter, a corporate megalomaniac bent on taking over the whole cluster. Whatever floats your boat. You can play against the computer, receiving missions from agents or fly in to low security (sec) space and take on other players in direct Player vs Player combat.

The game also provides for voice capabilities so when you are in a fleet with other players you can talk to them in real time.

I have no vested interest in this plug. If you were thinking about trying a massive multi-player on-line game, take EVE for a spin!

eve-online.com

Oh yeah, one more thing....the graphics are un-fucking-real.

Bill