I’ve never been one for MMOs, for one I’m scared of them, what with all the talk about EverCrack etc, and for two they kinda sound like too much work. I’m not sure I want a game I can never actually finish playing. My only foray so far into the genre has been Dungeon Runners, which won brownie points with me just for sending up the whole fantasy genre in the old tradition of Bored of the Rings.
I can’t entirely explain therefore why I decided to try Eve Online tonight. I’ve always thought the screenshots looked a bit sexy and sounded like it might be a deviation from the usual grind-em-up fantasy gameplay. I didn’t have any intention of becoming a subscriber, I just thought I’d try it for an hour and see what I thought.
It turns out it’s the perfect thing to be playing before bed - I don’t think I’ve played anything quite as tedious as this for some considerable time. Space looks pretty nice, not as nice as the screenshots would have you believe and you can’t seem to go five minutes without tripping over ten nebulae, but the tutorials are full of the most mind-numbing, incredibly banal tasks I’ve ever seen - kill pirates by selecting a few menu items. Deliver documents, by selecting a few menu items. Mine an asteroid, by selecting a few menu items. Refine and trade the ore, by selecting a few menu items. Slap self to stave off catatonia - no menu items required, amazingly. I can’t help thinking that I could have written a script to click all the menu items, and gone to bed earlier instead. Throughout you’re guided by a monotone female voice explaining the tasks you must perform - now I know it’s supposed to be an AI or something, but I swear if I listened her for another ten minutes I would have ended up slumped across my keyboard, drooling over the space bar and snoring like a hill giant. And I actually think that had I done that, I might have ended up continuing to play via some kind of audio sleep-suggestion thing; her voice had precisely the kind of tone and meter that I imagine works well for those kinds of things.
My goodness, how could no-one at CPP realise how irretrievably, soul-crushingly dull that tutorial is? It’s drudgery at an Olympic level. One of the golden rules of game design is that you put one of your best levels / experiences right at the front of the game to hook people in. I spent my first hour in Eve utterly bored out of my skull, and as such I will never touch it again. I only played for as long as I did because I couldn’t believe it would continue in that vein, but by the fourth or fifth set of tasks I couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t think I have an overly short attention span, this is just dull. Maybe you have to really, really like spaceships to put up with all the meaningless crap you’re supposed to do in the initial stages. Or maybe you just have to have nothing better to do. Neither applies to me, I’m going to bed. 
January 31st, 2008 at 9:03 am
Well that tutorial is really better than the versions i tried maybe 2 years ago. Can you imagine?
EveOnline is excellent when you invest time in political actions (with the Corporations), and is verry strategic…. once you’ve got money.
Maybe the better introduction in this game is when you have friends helping you and introducing, or simply by entering a Corporation from start. But this way you will miss some control subtilities (by selecting a few menu items…) as it’s a verry verry strategic game.
Anyway, it asks for too much time to be enjoyed by someone who works aside his day job.
January 31st, 2008 at 11:01 am
I’m amazed you managed to get in - I had Eve Online years ago and last week thought I’d give the new-look version a shot only to find out that Guernsey get’s rejected from the most unfriendly and badly integrated payment I’ve seen yet.
They sent me an email saying they’d fixed it just a day or two before your post - perhaps good timing?
The graphics do look great - perhaps Braben will finally take such a look and make something that’s both multiplayer and quick and fun without the investment needed for Eve in Elite IV.
[)amien
January 31st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
It was their 14-day free trial so there weren’t any payment issues to resolve (unless it affected the free trial last week too). As it happens I’ll only use one of those 14 days
January 31st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
If your looking for a more short-term space-trading-fighting-flying-around kind of game you might want to take a look at the X-series by Egosoft. It actually has a story line that can be followed but you don’t have to. On the other hand, it tends to sport a “slow” gameplay as well (trying to avoid the word “boring” here because that’s up to the eye of the beholder).
January 31st, 2008 at 1:45 pm
I admit the tutorial is for the mentaly disabled people, but you can easily skip the tutorial and play along.
It happens that many people tryed to play eve and couldn’t understand how to do this or that (flodding the help channel with questions..) so this tutorial is the answer.
I find the voice quite cool, reminds me on SHODAN
January 31st, 2008 at 1:50 pm
My mate at work plays it constantly, he’s an Eve zombie. Apparantly everybody IS running scripts all the time, to do their mining and stuff like that. I agree with Klaim, the political/social side of the game is massive and sounds interesting, but I also havent really felt the urge to click menus for the rest of my life so I’ll never know.
January 31st, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I work with a guy who lives and breathes Eve Online.
I tried it, didn’t like it. I’m a space sim fanatic, I want actual joystick control of a ship. For mmo space games, I’m more interested in Jumpgate Evolution and Infinity : The Quest for Earth.
http://www.jumpgateevolution.com/index.php
http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity
Infinity is the most amazing looking space game ever, but that means nothing if the controls aren’t good. Can’t wait to find out.
I was really looking forward to Space Force Rogue Universe (not an mmo), but a few minutes playing the demo completely put me off.
January 31st, 2008 at 3:34 pm
rotfl, it’s better you continue playing GH…
January 31st, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I really wanted to like eve. It sounds great and looks good. And I know a number of people who really like it.
But I’ve tried twice now and both times after about 2 days just gave up. I’ve no time to play it anyway with WoW and EQ2 as well
January 31st, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I think EVE is the ultimate Elite implementation.
I am subscribed to EVE for over 1.5 years now i think. But I don’t play intensively. I agree that there is a lot of boring elements, really. Moneymaking is work not fun. The only thing I enjoy is taking the spaceship, join some other people to form a “fleet” and have some PvP … or not
That’s what keeps me logging back in but sometimes I wonder why I don’t play something else where you get more fun in shorter time-frames…. I don’t know…
It certainly stands apart from the other MMOs. Maybe it’s some kind of “hardcore MMO” as if you loose your ship that it worth over 100 million in-game-money it hits you hard. This probably is also the reason why it might create intense thrills.
But that’s not all … it’s really, really complex.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:37 pm
btw. did I saw that I love space ships??!! hehehe might explain all!!
January 31st, 2008 at 9:44 pm
I can’t believe I actually managed to reply to this post before some EVE online fanatic has had the chance to tell you to “skip the tutorial, don’t do missions” and “go for the PvP build”.
Oh I have tried. I went with the perfect PvP build from the Wiki, which gives you the chance to compete with the pros (players with over 2 years of time invested), or so they tell you.
After 4 days of playing, together with a friend, I just couldn’t go on anymore, physically.
You end up spending 3 days training your skills and earning money to buy the best frigate you can fly. After that you spend hours and hours on finding a player target to destroy, only to be obliterated in 30 seconds by someone that has obviously spent 2.5 years mining and training to fly the heaviest cruiser out there. There’s just no way you can find someone in your league to do battle with.
EVE online is not a game, it is work. It is one giant spreadsheet.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:41 am
Clearly it takes a particular type of person to enjoy playing Eve - there’s a friend I haven’t seen for ages but I’ve heard through other friends that he’s an Eve fan too - and from when I used to hang out with him I know he does indeed obsess over spaceships and is the kind of person who will spend zillions of hours doing repetetive tasks to get the best things in a game. Not for me though, I’m not that hardcore.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:46 am
@Kojack: Jumpgate looks kind of interesting, Infinity looks like it has promise but is likely to take until, well Infinity to finish
February 10th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
As a former eve player, I can tell you a bit about it.
You’ll never be able to stand up to anyone within just 4 days of starting the game, no matter your build. Actually you won’t be able to do much of anything within just 4 days, other than some light mining, mission running and npc hunting. None of which are fun, and none of which will quickly get you rich enough to buy a basic battleship.
The fastest I’ve ever seen anyone start from scratch and become a decent pvper was in 3 months - usually it takes a year or more, not just to train skills and earn money for big ships, but to learn how to play the game.
Why I don’t play it anymore: It’s boring because the gameplay is very slow, by that I mean the action is far between. And the servers suffer from chronic latency issues.
Why I played it: Extreme depth that you won’t see in any other game. There’s so much to learn and so much to explore, and they’re constantly chaning and adding things. And of course the usual reasons; community, huge pvp fights, politics, spaceships and big guns.
September 4th, 2008 at 11:27 am
[...] blogged a little while ago about the soul-crushing tedium that was my brief, never to be repeated experience with EVE Online. [...]