Crayola Clan Blog

Before I wasted my money on WAR, I toyed with the idea of getting EVE Online instead.  The idea of a spaceship-based MMO is fascinating -- it harkens back to the golden age of TradeWars on the local dialup BBS -- and I've wanted to try it out for, well, years.  So now that WAR is gone, I went ahead and downloaded the 21-day EVE Online free trial through Steam and played with it over the 3-day weekend.

Pros

• It's very different from your typical MMORPG.
• The graphics are way cool, and pretty fast even on my pitiful GeForce 7600.
• It's actually massive -- all the players are all together on one server, like the good old days.
• Skills train even while offline.
• The market is very cool.

Cons

• The learning curve is pretty steep for a game.  It's not insurmountable, just don't expect to jump right in and have any clue what to do.  Do not skip the tutorial and read the banter in the "rookie help" chat channel -- there are actually quite a few helpful people in there (not to mention quite a few of the usual assortment of MMO dorks).
• Downtime!  It takes sooooo long to navigate between planets and solar systems.  It's like taking a WoW flight to go everywhere.  At first, it's cool to look at the pretty graphics while your Autopilot warps you around, but after the first few jumps it gets pretty tiresome.
• More downtime!  Fixed times to train skills, manufacture items and research technology means a whole lot of killing time while waiting for tasks to finish.
• I started an alt to try a different character, tried to train a skill, and it told me I couldn't because another character on my account was already training a skill!  (I left my other character training something that took over 24 hours so I could upgrade my ship.)  Only one character per account can train skills at a time?!?  That's beyond ridiculous.  I'd like to think that's just a limitation of the trial account but this forum thread confirms it's not just me.
• There's a staggering number of overlapping windows to manage in the interface.
• The font size is microscopic when you run at high resolutions, which is basically a requirement because of the aforementioned overlapping windows.

I'm not sure there's enough interesting things to do in this game to keep me beyond the free trial (or even to the end of the free trial).  In fact, it seems like once you finish all the missions from your first Agent, there's nothing to do except mining.  And mining in this game is about as tedious as you can get, at least at the newbie levels.  You have to warp out to an asteroid belt, find and motor over to an asteroid, zap it with your mining laser for what seems like hours even just to fill your tiny, tiny newbie cargo bay, then warp back to the station to move the ore to your "bank" before you can refine it.  It gets faster as you buy enhancements for your ship, but at no point does it become fun.  Agent missions are far more entertaining, but after the first series, the game doesn't lead you to any more -- you have to find them on your own, which is a rather daunting task.

Because of all the downtime, the only sensible way to play this game would be to setup a dedicated computer for it.  That way you can continue to work on your main computer, and only occasionally glance at the EVE screen to see if it's finished whatever task you started.  (Right now, for example, I'm training skills in the background while I get caught up on blog posts.)  Otherwise, you'll find yourself staring blankly at the screen as hours of your life disappear... sort of like watching cable news channels during the day.

P.S. Don't be one of those dorks expecting EVE to be a precise scientific simulation of astrophysics.  Yes, you can warp through planets and no there's no gravity.  I saw somebody even complaining about the lack of "blue shift."  Sheesh.