EVE Online

"Set it and Forget it!"

EVE Online is essentially the product of a brilliant marketing strategy, no matter how you look at it. The freelance space jockey genre lends itself well to massive multiplayer online gaming and there is a big enough target audience out there for it to work. The success of EVE is not due to its size or uniqueness or the number of possibilities available to players, but rather how it manages to keep people playing.

In EVE, you start out with a small ship, a mining laser, a weapon, and some credits, known as ISK, and it is up to you how you want to progress in your gaming career. More obvious paths include pirating, mining, and trade, but other possibilities exist, such as research and manufacturing. You can also run missions for NPCs to earn credits, and the missions usually consist of killing enemies or delivering special items for ISK and sometimes useful items. All of the possibilities that a player can aspire to are loudly advertised on the EVE website and easily suck in players who like such games but want the opportunity to compete against or cooperate with other human players.

The skill training system is what makes EVE so successful in keeping players. EVE gives interested players a free 14-day trial to show them what the game is like, and while a few skills are restricted from the player during the trial period, the player ends up investing so much time into advancing skills in the game that by day 13 he or she is convinced to pay the monthly fee to justify having spent all of that time advancing skills; by that point it's not a matter of whether they like the game or not. Once the trial period is over, that's it, NO EVE FOR YOU. Until you sign up and pay, you can't play with your character any longer. It is possible to buy game time with ISK, but it is very expensive; while rumors circulate that it may be possible to accumulate enough wealth to pay the monthly fee using game currency before the trial runs out, the exact method (if one exists) is a closely guarded secret.

While training skills in a multiplayer game may not sound so bad, as many other online games involve some amount of skill and level advancement, in EVE the only way skills are trained is to choose one skill at a time and it trains itself, whether or not you are actually logged on and playing. Each skill has five levels, and the first level of a skill can usually be trained within an hour. Each subsequent level takes more time to train, and skills can eventually take several days just to advance a single level. Skill training time is determined by how advanced the skill is as well as by related character attributes assigned at character creation based on the character's race, ancestry, and background. Characters may also "plug in" cybernetic upgrades which provide an increase to an attribute and train skills that increase a specific attribute with each level, thus decreasing the training time for other skills.

Only one skill can be trained at a time, and this goes for all of the characters on a single account. If you have up to the maximum of three characters on one account, only one of those characters can train a skill at a time. It gets to the point where you watch the clock wherever you are and race to the computer to set another skill to be trained so as to not waste any time that could have been spent training another skill. I like to call this method of training "set it and forget it," named after a popular infomercial slogan for a cooking device that could cook food on its own after someone inputs a few commands; there are some players who log on once every few days to set a new skill, but pretty much everyone who actively plays will find themselves taking a few minutes to log on and set a skill before bed, when waking up, or before they go out.

EVE prides itself on being a game that centers on a market-based economy, which is great if you don't like those multiplayer games where the best toys can only be had by the best players who set the prices themselves. Players will have you believe that the economy is highly complex, but in reality it is fairly simple. The economic system in EVE basically amounts to the free flow of goods as they transition from raw materials and are developed into finished products. Miners mine minerals from asteroids and then refine them into metals, while researchers develop the blueprints for an item or ship. Manufacturers then take a blueprint and use metals to create the finished product. Miners have to go out into space to mine minerals, but scientists and manufacturers can sit in a station or do something else while their work progresses. You don't actually make or research something yourself if that is what you are doing, you just go to a station that has space for work and set up the kind of job you want to do, then come back in a few hours, days, or weeks and the job is done. Combat oriented players can escort miners to dangerous areas in space or destroy them and pretty much give them a bad day, and thus they have their own niche in the economy. As in any other game, you only need patience and tenacity to get ahead, not the mind of a financial genius. It is possible to write up contracts with other players trading goods or services for ISK or other goods or services, however they only add to the illusion that EVE is something special; in EVE contracts pretty much eliminate the hassle of sales-channel spamming prevalent in other multiplayer games.

Player interaction is key in the game, and there are many people out there who play EVE just for the sake of ruining someone else's day, whether by destroying their ship and their escape pod or by gaining their trust only to bilk them out of a fortune. Players have been known to lose billions of ISK to con artists. However, there are just as many people out there who are willing to help newbies advance in the game. EVE has an elaborate system of tutorials as well, and they are helpful enough to get a player over the learning curve without much trouble. Contrary to popular opinion, learning how to get around EVE doesn't take long between the tutorials and the huge player community if you are willing to take the time to learn the game. Within a day or two a smart player should have a good idea of how to accomplish various mundane tasks in the game, such as moving between systems, reloading weapons, or navigating the market.

Aside from the shady way EVE sucks you in and gets you to pay, the biggest problem with EVE is the interface. There are windows for almost everything, and they tend to clutter the screen. Half the game involves dragging windows around or closing windows or opening them or minimizing them and it can get a little overwhelming at first and pretty annoying as you go on. EVE does come with a small built-in web browser (with its own window, of course), but while it can be sluggish, it makes accessing the EVE website and EVE-related websites that much easier. Every item, skill, and ship comes with its own info page to describe what they do or how they work, but if you want to compare two or more items that have detailed information (such as ships), you can't go back and forth between them. Opening a new item info page replaces the current info page, so you'll have to navigate to the first item and reopen its info page, and with so many windows, it can be a hassle.

A significant problem with the game is its flight controls. To fly somewhere, you need to give your ship a destination by right-clicking a target, such as a space station, and selecting an option from the dialog and it will fly you there. This isn't so bad most of the time, but in combat it makes it difficult to do anything but fly to your target; for example, if you have a fast ship and afterburners and want to lure a couple AI enemies away from the rest you could, but you have to find some object in space to align to (again by right clicking it and choosing the "align to" option) that happens to be in the direction you want to go. There are commands to orbit a target in combat or set a distance that you want to keep between yourself and the target, but you are at the mercy of the game's flight mechanics. It's also annoying how every time you destroy a target your ship comes to a stop, even if a dozen enemies continue to fly around and shoot at you. Combat is resolved by various statistics, so you don't have to expect to do your own fancy flying to avoid missiles or lasers. You also can't crash into asteroids or stations, and it is quite amusing to see your ship warp directly through a planet, but only for the first 29 times. You cannot fly with a joystick, but many of the game's star ships are much too big to fly around like an X-Wing anyway.

Another problem is that everything takes so much time to do. As I made quite clear, training skills can take a really long time, as do mining, manufacturing, and research, but flying anywhere can take a lot of time as well. One or two jumps may not be so bad, but it gets old really fast when you have to jump from system to system by warping from one point to another within each system before you can even jump to the next system in your flight plan. If you're traveling through high security systems, it can be uneventful, but sometimes jumping through not-so-secure systems can be an exercise in futility if you aren't traveling in a fleet made up of the best ships, as you'll likely be blown to bits if you're not careful. Distance is measured in metric units and the space between jump gates in a system can be thousands of astronomical units (AU); warp helps you move across a system in seconds, but you still have to wait for your ship to prepare to warp, enter warp, exit warp, come to a stop, and then prepare to jump through a gate to the next system.

The graphics in EVE are good enough, and the ships are detailed. You can see lights flashing on the ship and turrets move to aim at targets as they fly by. The sound effects are adequate, and the music provides some atmosphere to the game, though with a little too much reliance on distorted guitar riffs in battle.

When it comes right down to it, EVE is a game played by people who may or may not actually like the game. It can be a fun game despite its flaws and joining a corporation can really improve the quality of the gaming experience, but one has to wonder how many people end up continuing to play past the trial period with paid membership just to justify having spent so much time spent advancing their character in the trial period. After playing for fourteen days it is really difficult to throw it all away, and that is where EVE makes its money. The longer you play, the more you are trapped in its spell.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 11/17/08, Updated 12/01/08

Game Release: EVE Online (US, 05/06/03)