The Alphaville Herald

Postcards from Eve Online

by Alphaville Herald on 15/06/04 at 4:14 pm

by Banshee

Following up on Urizenus? encouragement for a report on my experiences so far in Eve Online, I?m more than happy to oblige.

I?ve been playing Eve since about the middle of March 2004 (I played E&B before that, and TSO before *that*), and while there are certainly many aspects of the game that I have not experienced, I?ve gotten a pretty good flavor for most of the main areas of gaming experience offered in Eve, as well as a good deal of the background for the game.

Eve was developed by the Icelandic software firm CCP over the past 5 years, and the game launched to the public in May 2003. The game was originally published by Simon & Schuster, but CCP, unhappy with S&S?s commitment to their baby (sound familiar?) bought back from S&S the rights to the code and the game (I believe this happened in early 2004). So now, Eve is being controlled by the folks who created the game, and who are committed to the game, and who really enjoy the game, and this is really reflected in the overall gaming experience in Eve.

Eve is a multiplayer science fiction game in which you play as a spaceship captain. The backstory involves a once far-flung string of colonies of earth becoming cut off from the mother planet (a familiar enough foil), degrading in technology for a time and then gradually rebuilding in technology, with the various colonies emerging eventually as different races, expanding in the Eve universe and encountering each other. The backstory, which I will not detail here, is extremely well developed, and is an ongoing thing ? there are both regular, more substantial, additions to the backstory published a few times a month on the website, as well as smaller, news reports relating to the backstory, that are published in-game (and readable on floating billboards!) e! very day or two. The effect is to create an immersive alternative universe, and it?s been done very well because there are some people on the CCP staff who are dedicated to the story and content of the game, rather than only the programming of it.

Upon creating a character (an interesting exercise where an extraordinary degree of control is given relating to the appearance of one?s Avatar), one proceeds to a set of tutorial missions where one is taught the basics of the interface and controls. Following that, what you choose to do is really pretty much up to you.

The sense of progress in Eve is based on the familiar vectors of skills and money. Eve has an interesting approach to the skilling process: skills in Eve are learned based on simply the lapse of time ? that is training a certain skill to level 1 may take a small amount of time (say 15 minutes), while training it to level 5, for example, may take as long as a few weeks ? the catch is that this is *real* time, and the clock does not stop ticking when one logs off from the game. One effect of this is that it ?nerfs? the advantage of ?power players? in the short to medium term, because if you arrange your skill training properly, anyone can skill as fast as anyone else, regardless of whether you have the luxury of ! spending 15 hours a day at the keyboard. There are other advantages to being a power player (financial mostly), but it doesn?t have to impact the skill levels, due to a surprisingly egalitarian system of skilling. There are *no* skill caps, either, so you can keep skilling, skilling, skilling ? and there are over 150 skills and more are added periodically ? so that while power players do not have a skills advantage, long-time players *do*. This irritates some power players who would like to power play and catch up with more seasoned players (called ?vets? in Eve) in the space of a few bleary-eyed weeks, but otherwise the system works pretty well for most players.

In terms of making money, Eve offers a variety of means: mining asteroids for various kinds of ore (which can be sold as ore or refined to minerals and sold), trading goods from one system to another at a profit (provided one can discover profitable trade routes!), running missions for agents of various corporations in the game, training production skills and building ships and ship equipment to sell to other players, couriering goods for other players around the Eve universe ? as well as the more sordid business of intergalactic piracy, attacking other players and asking them for a substantial sum as ransom for their lives!

In terms of the latter, Eve provides a sliding scale approach of ?security?, with systems being rated from 1.0 (maximum security) to 0.0 (no security), and different rules of engagement applying at different levels. In levels 0.5-1.0, players who attack other players will be eliminated summarily by the intergalactic police, known as CONCORD. At levels 0.1 to 0.4, players are subject to attack by others as long as they are outside the range of CONCORD?s guards around stations and stargates, and the level of even that protection drops off as one ventures toward 0.1 space. And, in 0.0, the full lawlessness of space is experienced, as all bets are off, and one is vulnerable to attack by anyone at any time for any reason.

Eve is a very social game, and the game encourages this in several ways. First, every player is placed, by default, into a ?corporation? (the equivalent of ?guilds?) from the outset ? at first a ?newbie? corporation (which in reality is not only newbies but also filled with more senior players who wish to play more or less as freelancers rather than in more focused corporations and who like to help new players as well), and then, at the player?s option, joining a player-run corporation, either a well-established one, or a new one, having as it goals whatever the members decide. Some are orientated towards manufacturing and selling, others towards mining, still others towards exploration, while others are expressly pirate organizations, designed to hunt ot! her players for money. Second, the game play itself is balanced in a way that certain things are remarkably hard to do when playing solo, or at least remarkably less efficient to do. To take a common example, one can mine asteroids solo in fairly secure space without the fear of an attack, but the level of ore one?s ship can hold is fairly limited, as is the number of mining lasers one ship can mount. By contrast, a group of players mining together, where some players take the role of miner, some take the role of protector, and some take the role of hauler ? each using ships designed to be efficient at that specific role ? can mine a lot more ore, in a lot less secure space (thereby gaining more valuable ore, since this is conveniently located in less secure space!) in the same period of time. The game mechanics in this and other situations clearly support the multiplayer aspect of the game by rewarding players who can team up with other players to achieve a certain task.

In the course of acquiring skills and money, one advances in the game by purchasing better spaceships that have specific advantages, purchasing new skill packs and learning the skills associated with them, outfitting one?s ships to maximize their performance in accordance to one?s skill level, and so on, so that doing the rest of what one likes to do in Eve is facilitated and enhanced.

One final note, technically the game is a marvel. It sports really fantastic 3d space graphics that seem very realistic, and are rather varied to reflect the various races and factions present in the game. CCP also prides itself that Eve has what it believes is the world record for the number of players playing on one server simultaneously ? something above 10,000 ? and in early June just completed an upgrade of its hardware suite in London to accommodate 15-20k simultaneously. There are no shards or galaxies in Eve, everyone is on the same server, and so the community of players is not splintered at all (something that CCP considers important but which, admittedly, is only really achievable beca! use of the relatively small numbers of players).

On the latter note, it?s speculated that there are around 30k or so subscribers to Eve. In the past few months the number seems to have increased, and especially after EA cancelled EnB. On any given evening (which for Eve begins in the afternoon in the USA, since at least half of the regular players are Europeans) there is a constant level of between 8 and 10k players in the game (again, split between continents, which suggests a higher subscription number) with spikes on weekends (and, compared to the policies of some online gaming companies, the number of players online at any given time is completely transparent both at the time one logs in as well as on a player-sponsored website that has a CCP-approved link to the server log).

In all, if you like science fiction and outer space, and you are looking for a game that offers a wide variety of options, together with a good multiplayer environment, Eve offers that experience in spades.

I’ll give you some more of a flavor for how the game actually plays in future updates … but for now, pilot, be safe in space!

Banshee