Don’t Make Me Play – Eve Online

Eve is big and scary.  At least that’s what I thought before I began my 14 day trial.  I started playing a week ago for reasons of ‘journalistic enquiry’, now I’m worried that it’s become something more.  I swore I wouldn’t fall for it, I’m almost certain I haven’t, but Eve and I have already developed something of a close bond.  I’m not an MMO fan, you see.  I’ve played them in the past; there’s the honeymoon period: all is glorious novelty, exciting adventure and rewarding progress; then the hollowness sets in, next thing you know you’re making up excuses to your guildmates before you finally disappear forever and spend the next few weeks trying to stop your brain from adding up all the hours (and currency) you spent on that other life.  I would almost certainly be fluent in French by now, just saying.  So it’s more than simply not wanting to play Eve – I don’t want to start enjoying it; I don’t want to start thinking €14.99 a month is acceptable.  I’ll admit: I’m a little bit scared.  Suck it up, Millen.  Let’s see how we get on.

Me!  Pupil direction options rolled back into head – will certainly scare away all potential threats

Eve is not big and scary.  At least, it isn’t at the start (I guess if you’re the head of a massive corporation, after years of effort accumulating vast wealth and influence; balancing a complex structure of alliances, treaties and economic policies; with tens, if not hundreds, of potential back-stabbers and usurpers under your command, and solar systems full of enemies baying for your blood – then – then I can see it being big and scary.  Lock-the-door-cover-yourself-in-tinfoil-and-start-weeping kind of scary).  I logged in and created my character.  I was borne into the universe and deposited at a random world in my chosen race’s empire; that being Gallente, a race who possess strong senses of liberty, democracy and tolerance.  It was an easy choice; I’m totally all about the tolerance and stuff.  I read the Guardian.

Failing to take a ‘non press-shot’ screen capture

Before I could begin wondering what to do, an email blipped into my in-game inbox.  It invited me to attend the University of Caille ‘tutorial agent program’.  Good call.  A series of tutorial pop-ups and menu ‘welcome overlays’ helped me launch my little ship and begin the short journey to my, soon to be, alma mater.  Getting by in Eve is really pretty easy; most things revolve around right-clicking and selecting context sensitive options, or they simply have their own icons.  All very un-scary.  I clicked to undock.

Uh oh.  Falling into space for the first time in Eve Online is one of those gaming moments.  You know – the marines shooting the air vents in Half-Life, or the first time you step out of the Vault in Fallout 3; the moments that take your breath.  Against black space and thousands of stars, a station and its many tiny lights sit dwarfed in the shadow of an enormous planet; the glinting hulls of space craft drift around, all lit by the expansive, red rays of the system’s sun.  Zoom out and I’m a tiny little blue thruster flame to all this celestial magnificence; delicate ambient music finishes the scene.  As far as trying not to love the game goes, this may be a fairly big problem.  All my childhood Elite fantasies come flooding back.

To the University of Caille.

Agents are Eve’s quest spitting NPCs; they’re in stations all over secure space, it seems, providing players with missions and rewards of varying difficulty and value.  My career agents at Caille take me through all the basics, from military to business, in painlessly simple steps.  They provide me with equipment, ISK (the game’s currency) and, to my immense glee, new ships.  I get one that looks like a B-wing; this makes me happier than I thought I could ever be.  Perhaps most importantly, within a couple of days I’d picked up all the game’s fundamental principles and I could go off and forge my own path be it mining, exploring or continuing NPC combat with agent missions.  I feel a spot of exploring is in order.

Space stations – home to agents, commerce and industry

Fitting my ship with a ‘core probe launcher’ allowed me to fire probes out into space.  These are teeny scanners that can detect any cosmic signatures within a solar system; signatures which, when pinpointed, reveal the locations of rare mining sites, salvageable archaeological ruins, radar stations to hack and other curious anomalies that can be exploited.  It’s a neat mini-game: on your space map, you have to overlap the spherical radii of the probes around a faint cosmic signature, slowly increasing the probes’ scan strengths and rearranging their positions as the signal gets stronger and its location more accurate.  When you hit 100% signal strength you can tell your ship to warp there.  I indulged in this activity for a while, enjoying the sense of doing something advanced so early on in the game.  Within a couple of hours I’d uncovered several wormholes, pirate hideouts and something called a ‘Haunted Yard’.  A little research revealed that visiting any of these locations would offer only swift and certain death.  I made a noise that sounded like ‘hrrmph’ and decided it was time I found some friends.

The Spectre Assault Fleet.

So far, I’d not interacted with any humans, other than through the ‘Rookie Help’ chat window, where my many naive questions were answered quickly and with patience.  Eve’s not a game where you can sidle up to a ship and start chatting as you would if you were all humanoid avatars, standing next to a bank in a town, or something; it’s a bit more abstract.  You have chat windows which you open to communicate with players who are often many millions of light-years away.  I found the ‘recruitment’ chat with the aim of joining a Corporation, Eve Online’s player run space guilds.  “Rookie, new but fast learner.  Interested in exploration.  Looking to learn the game with friendly Corp” I typed, feeling a little like someone submitting an ad to the personals.  A guy called Kinovic messaged me, he seemed amiable and after a brief chat I’d joined his Corp, the Spectre Assault Fleet.

My B-Wing.  I love her dearly.

He was very helpful, of course, but with the advice of more experienced players comes ‘the right way of doing things’.  ‘The right way of doing things’ is another of my MMO turn-offs.  It spoils the adventure.  When you know there’s already an ultra-efficient path, deep trodden by hundreds of others, to whatever objectives you’re looking to achieve, some of the magic evaporates.  I was immediately told I was training the wrong skills, instructed to buy and learn the right ones (you have to buy skills in Eve, then dump them in a training queue as if your character’s revising them; this ticks away whether you’re logged in or not).  Kinovic casually tossed me more ISK than I’d managed to accumulate in a week: “This’ll cover them”, he understated.

Scanning for cosmic signatures

The exciting Eve stuff I’ve read about; the PvP ship battles, all the inter-corp intrigue – that’s not for rookies, it seems.  I imagined I’d be doing something crafty as an Eve noobie; accompanying fleets on enigmatic missions at the beck of an unseen and shady superior, a disposable employee waiting for an opportunity to prove myself.  Quizzing my corp mates about this lead to cheerful rebukes and instructions to continue doing the NPC missions for a while.  That’s the thing with Eve, ya see.  It really isn’t all that different from other MMOs.  There’s the gold grinding which takes the form of mining, a lucrative but dull activity, and there’s the NPC missions, which are RPG staples but in spaceships.  Although it’s certainly a little more sophisticated than your average sword wielding MMORPG, it’s not hard, but the really interesting stuff is just a faint glimmer on the distant horizon for a rook like me.

The number of times I’ve said ‘target locked’ out loud would horrify and depress you

So.  I spent about half an hour before I knuckled down and wrote this looking up ship load-outs for my Gallente Catalyst.  And I’ve been searching Ebay for cheaper alternatives to a monthly sub directly from CCP (this is above board – it’s just the odd person selling off unwanted game time top-up cards).  I’m about 70/30 pro continuing Eve after my trial runs out; is this just the expected MMO addictiveness taking hold?  I am keen to explore the Corp structure further – all those amazing stories I’ve read still entice.

I’ve been MMO free for about seven years now, dear Gaming Daily reader; my soul hangs in the balance.  After a few months in Eve Online, will I find unparalleled gaming adventure, or that sickening MMO hollow feeling? Unnervingly, there appears to be only one way to find out.