posted on Monday, April 24, 2006 3:12 AM
by
Endie
Eve Online - Impressions
A very long time ago, there was a game called Elite. Elite was special for a lot of reasons. It was a gaming sandbox before (if the head of Mythic is right in claiming to have invented it) the term existed. It had freeform gameplay before most of the people who play GTA were even born. It was even persistent. I say "persistent", meaning that you could save the state of the world and of your character, which for a micro-computer game was unheard of. It was about 1984, and it ran on the BBC micro. Which meant that the galaxy, with hundreds of stars, dozens of spaceship types, 3D (albeit wireframe) graphics, spacestations, pirates, police-enforced law, trading, asteroid mining and even a few missions all fitted in 32kb of RAM. It shared that 32kb memory space with the screen memory, of course, meaning that the actual code was more like 20kb. Fortunately, the opsys and language were stored in a separate 32kb of ROM. If you are interested in how such miracles of terse coding and compressed data were performed, Ian Bell posted his code at his home site. Particularly impressive is the use of two screen modes to save memory, the lower of which (see right) was a colour mode.
When I first heard about Eve Online, I was told that it was the Elite sequel we had dreamed of (the actual Elite sequels tended to be pale shadows of the real thing). I looked at it, found it to be buggy, boring and unbalanced, and decided against it.
Now, the game has survived the terrible word of mouth and is steadily carving for itself a solid niche in the MMO marketplace. It is a hardcore, lose-millions-on-death PvP game in a world of consensual PvP titles. The game is unbelievably beautiful in terms of the visual design. It is rich in player-created content. Huge player corporations and alliances struggle to hold vast tracts of space, often controlling hundreds of star systems. Mercenary teams are hired by clients to take down opponents, and will even infiltrate their marks from top-to-bottom over a year in order to do so utterly and completely.
I fly a Merlin frigate. It's as good as Caldari frigates get, but it's only a few metres long. I fly past player-controlled Apocalypse battleships, hundreds of times bigger, and dock at 30km-wide space stations. The sense of scale is staggering.
I don't know if it is grindy. It can be repetitive. On courier missions across high security space I leave the sound on (to warn me of missile locks) and do other stuff. In kill missions I don't. Crossing low security space I am utterly attentive, because I know that I can be killed in a seconds if I get careless. Jumping across 14 star systems would be boring if I had to watch the whole process, instead of PvPing on f13. But training skills is just click-and-forget, even when not logged in. I am training my frigate skills up to level 4 as we speak, having set it giong last night before logging off. I like this approach a lot, and it spares me the pain of the Kosterite barrier to advancement of actually puttnig in the hours doing mundane time-sinkage.
I'm having fun, although I don't know for how long that will last unless I get into some heavy-duty corporation action. I don't mine. I like fun but if I end up being ganked too much I'll probably give up. As it is, I've been lucky so far, and haven't died in my first few days at all, despite being in 0.1 space (very scary missions) and ending up down to about 15% structure, 0% shields, 0% armour when the stargate kicked in.
Ultimately, though, just look at it! Look how far the second screenshot (in-game footage, mind!) has come from the first! I dreamt of something approaching this when I was playing the original. I dreamt of having an on-board computer that talked to me; of asteroid fields and kilometre-long freighters. So for now, I'm having fun.