In late October I started playing Eve Online. It’s a massively multiplayer online game set in space. I’d opted for Eve over other games because of some favourable reviews I’d seen floating around the intartubes. I was looking for something I could play with friends that would be easy to pick up and put down.

The Eve concept is pretty simple. You’re a pilot in a large universe. As a pilot, you get to do stuff: accept missions from agents (transport stuff from point A to point B, kill pirates, mine), hunt other players, mine asteroids, or explore. You can also join other pilots in a corporation for mutual aid. If you’ve ever played Homeworld, you have a good feeling for what this game looks like.

The Good

Some parts of Eve are really good. The game looks great, and it sounds even better. The skill system is also good. It’s biased to help occasional players: skills are earned by time training – if you want to learn the Salvage skill, it’ll take three days realtime, regardless of how much time you spend in game.

The Bad

Sadly, music and pretty pictures does not a good game make.

My first few hours playing Eve were great, if only because of the in-game atmosphere. It feels big, empty, and quiet. But after the novelty wore off, the game got boring.

One of the guiding principles in the design of Eve is that players should have to mindlessly repeat mundane tasks. Combat consists of the following loop:

1 – Enter unfriendly space
2 – Lock onto enemies
3 – Select one enemy
4 – Turn on your appropriate weapons
5 – Wait for the enemy to explode (if the enemy starts whupping your ass, warp away)
6 – While enemies persist, Goto 3

If you tire of that loop, you can try mixing it up by turning on and off support services in your ship (shield boosters, damage control, sensor boosters, etc). Whee!

After you kill some baddies and loot their wrecks, you can take their goodies back to a station and sell it. Even that is a painful process, as the UI doesn’t provide a “sell all this crap” gesture. Instead the user must select every individual looted item and sell it off singly.

If you’re fighting baddies in missions, or looking for random combat encounters then you’re fighting the game’s AI. Which was terrible. The sole strategy the AI uses during combat is “swarming.” All of the enemy ships fly toward you, firing whatever they have. They don’t seem to use any kinds of strategy or tactics. If a fight gets too hairy, you can always warp to the nearest base, repair yourself, buy some new weapons, and fly back. The baddies will obligingly wait in the same positions you left them in.

When I signed up, I had been looking forward to player-versus-player (PvP) combat. But my interest in that quickly soured. Why? Because there’s too much to lose. Ships are expensive, and money is hard enough to get that I don’t want to risk a few hours worth of work (and earning money really does feel like work) on a quick mano et mano battle.

The few times I did enter combat with other humans, it felt like the outcome was determined by the equipment that had been brought into battle. If my enemy had a more expensive ship with better equipment, he would win. If my enemy had a crappier ship, I would win (or at least that was my theory – the expensive ships took too much effort to get).

The Conclusion

It’s a pity that the game reduced to so much grinding. The interface is enjoyably atmospheric, but the game degraded quickly from “fun” to “work.” If you’re looking to spend $20 on some mindless enjoyment, buy yourself some second hand “Choose your own adventure” books: they’re boring and repetitive, but at least they don’t have a monthly fee.