"Timesink Online"

On one hand, EVE Online is the most realistic space sim out there, and represents an impressive achievement in software engineering - the ability to have thousands of characters in a single MMORPG realm without crippling the game or creating many independent realms.

Oh the other hand... EVE Online is also one of the most realistic space sims out there, and is crippled by the sheer amount of time involved. It all started trying ot get a free trial code. The website said it was sent, but it was three months before I got it - I'd forgotten about the game by that time.

The main economic drive in EVE is asteroid mining. Fly out to an asteroid, sit there a while wile ore collects (You can go away. I actually started mining and went to have lunch while it waited). Talking to players, many of them would start mining when they went to bed to maximize their play time.

It's hard to capture how boring this can be. If you've played World of Warcraft, Everquest, or even a game like Runescape, imagine if you will the only really profitable thing to do in the game is to run around mostly deserted lowbie zones mining all the ore in sight. Now imagine furthur that this mining takes a lot longer than the normal one click, few second cooldown and you're off again of most games.

PVE is virtually nonexistent. There's some NPC ships flying around, some of which you can shoot. The rewards for doing so are negligible, however, and the only real reason to shoot them is if they're in your way going to the asteroids to mine some more.

The rest of the PVE game consists of the random mission generator. On the surface, this is comparable to Anarchy Online's mission terminal system. However, the missions it spits out leave much to be desired. The vast majority of them are courier missions - take a load of (material) to (random space station). Occasionally that material is mixed up with interesting things like other materials or even passengers. There are some combat missions, sending you to shoot the braindead NPC ships, and that's as fun as it gets here.

The rewards aren't enough to justify the immense travel distances involved. See, just like space, EVE is empty. Very empty. There's a whole lot of nothing out there. Navigation at least isn't that difficult - your ship is equipped with detailed charts and course plotting systems, so you can plot a safe course and go to the bar while your ship flies it's way accross empty space. In fact, I suggest you have a hobby on the side - staring at an endless starfield - as beautifully rendered as it is - gets old quick.

And beautifully rendered it is, at least. The game is nothing short of gorgeous. Even on lacking hardware, it really delivers, although the game suffers from graphical studdering in some regions. As often happens in all MMORPGs, a great deal of the 20,000 concurrent users tend to gravitate to a relatively small region of the game, and all those sexy graphics in one place make for some heavy strain on your video card.

The gameplay itself will be familiar to oldschool players of Diaspora. It's heavily economy driven - wannabe daytraders take joy, I actually found this aspect of the game enjoyable, though separated by long tedious flights.

The worst part of EVE's immense timesink, however, is the skill system. If I had to pick one part of the game to be changed, it would be this. A major overhaul here would add three points to this review's score, easily.

The problem with the skill system is that it involves no player interaction. You pick which skill you want to train, and it trains. If you log out, it keeps training. If you're mining ore, it's still training (even if it has nothing to do with mining ore). This training process ranges from a few minutes to a few months - yes, I said months - waiting for your skill to improve. While the freeform system is refreshing and makes for infinite opportunities to pick and choose, as well as the ability to change your mind later and raise a different set of skills - say you start out mostly mining, and later want to get into more PVP combat - however, the time is just too much.

I'd much rather see a system like Ashen Empire's use-based skill system - perhaps an ideal system would be adding this on top of the automated advancement. If you want to be a better miner, you'd go mine and gain mining experience. If you want to get good at combat, you'd - *gasp* - get into combat and practice. This sort of system not only tends to be self-deciding, where your character will become suited to your style of play as a consequence of engaging in that play, but it also gives room for catchup. EVE does not. The number of days since your account was created is how good you are. You will never catch up with people who have been playing a year or more - not even in some nebulous endgame when everybody's level 100 and it's all equipment anyway. You'll just have to make due and hope you can compete.

PVP combat is where it's at in EVE. Player's can join Corporations - effectively guilds or clans, but as EVE is heavily economy-driven, they're called Corporations. Corps themselves align into more general political alliances and alignments, and spend a good deal of time fighting each other.

And here, EVE becomes a good space sim at last. The combat is a good mix of your character's tedium-induced skills and your own twitch reflexes, and it can get intense. The game shares many facets with other space sims, and it is one of the more fun.

However, all it's flaws aside, EVE is still an amazing engineering feat. This is where nearly all of the five points I've given it come from, for that matter. The ability to have the entire game population in a single realm without melting your database servers is level of complication that most MMO developers don't bother with. In the end, it's easier to swallow the extra cost and launch and have ten servers instead of one big one.

It all comes down to the database - the more characters and items, the more entries in that database, the longer it takes to find a specific entry, and the longer it takes to add entries. As a programmer, I'm in awe of what has been accomplished with EVE in terms of database speed and stability.

As a gamer, I'm deeply disappopinted in the appalling tedium it offers. I'd thought MMORPG developers had realized how much tedium sucks and started going in new directions, but not everybody has caught on, it seems. It's not even the constant clickie-click tedium of some MMORPGs, where at least I'm doing something. It's beyond traditional ideas of MMORPG tedium - a level of tedium so mundane it's almost entirely automated, and you can just go watch TV while your ship flies around, mines, and improves your combat skills.

AFK time is not fun time, and there's just not that much fun time in EVE Online.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/08/06