Ah, simpler times. That’s me in my Asp Explorer, approaching Boston Base in Barnard’s Star. The game was Frontier, easily one of my favourite games, and probably the single game I’ve invested most time in.
For some reason I find difficult to pin down, I’ve always found those games - we’ll simplistically call them ‘open-ended space trading games’ - fascinating. From Frontier to Hardwar to X - Beyond the Frontier, whether the game is represented by rough polygons or the latest in graphics technology, these games somehow fire the imagination. You can almost imagine you’re there and that these starships, pirates and orbital stations are populated by real people.
And so when Stan - vile temptress that he is - asked me to join him on a 14-day free trial of EVE Online, how could I resist?
Empty Spaces
EVE Online is a MMORPG - the largest game universe in the world, apparently. It’s set entirely in space, where every player pilots his or her ship across the vast game universe, making a quick buck while avoiding pirates and the law. It should be fun.
But it isn’t.
The first thing that strikes you about EVE is how empty it all seems. Of course, you encounter other ships as you fly about - they’re all around you, in fact - but it’s still dead and lifeless. Hardwar, still one of the best single-player examples of the genre, is teeming with life by comparison.
After a short time playing EVE, you start to see why it feels so dead. EVE isn’t so much a game to be played as a game to be left minimised while you, say, implement categories on your web site. You are perfectly able to let your ship ply the vast open spaces on autopilot. It begs the question, why are you - and these other people - here? Wouldn’t the game work just as well without you?
Nobody Home
It’s a sad conclusion to draw, but the answer is ‘almost’. For the first few days of playing EVE, I have to admit I was addicted. It wasn’t the actual game that made me stay, though; it was the potential the game had.
When I was pilfering cargo crates abandoned in space, the game warned me that the owner would be free to exact his grisly revenge. Well, bring it on. When I entered a dangerous system, the game warned me that it was an unsavoury place. I might get attacked here, too.
But did either of these things happen? Did they bollocks.
Hey You
In the mid-90s, when I was fascinated by Frontier and later Hardwar, the multiplayer potential of these games was clear to me even then. What if these other ships were being flown by real people from all over the world?
Unfortunately, EVE utterly fails to capitalise on the fact that this is now a reality. Your humorous ship name appears on no-one’s radar; instead they get your player name. Even the ability to role-play, by a mechanism as simplistic as sending out communications to nearby vessels, does not exist. Such additions could, quite easily, elevate EVE to much greater heights with very little effort.
Imagine being able to look around your cockpit. Imagine being able to use your ship as a taxi, or simply invite other pilots round to check out your fluffy dice. Wouldn’t that make the game that much more engrossing? Wouldn’t it make the ship feel like it was yours?
Don’t Leave Now
Sadly EVE does none of this. Most of the pioneering space stuff is still left to your imagination, and what’s left of the game - flying from A to B - manages to be so hopelessly unengaging you might as well not be playing. Of course, EVE has the usual set of abstract ’skills’, ‘equipment’ and ‘money’ that you have to clock up hours upon hours of game time to obtain, but is that fun? Could I even see the game becoming fun once I’d earned my millions? Not really.
You’ll notice that I’ve ignored the bread and butter of most online RPGs, the guilds. Here they’re called ‘corps’, and they’re rubbish. I don’t know this first hand, but I can extrapolate from my meagre experience. Stan and I tried to go mining in dangerous systems together, and it was hard. Not the mining itself, but sticking together. Flying in formation was impossible; even remaining remotely near one another degenerated into constant checking-up via the in-game chat.
Playing on your lonesome is boring, playing with others is boring and hard. All in all: lame.
Goodbye Cruel World
I’ve left the most damning condemnation of EVE until last. Stan and I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, at the end of our free trial period, and have a fight.
Even that was boring.
And if fighting is boring - surely the culmination of years of buying the most powerful guns, constructing the most pimped-out ship and fitting the strongest shields - what chance does the rest of the game have?
Having said that, 25,000 people can’t be wrong. Are Stan and I? Check out his review of EVE and then decide.
I’ll leave you with the final indignity - my death at the hands of Stan. The one and only public airing of my ship’s given name makes it all worthwhile.
