Broken Toys

Please. Che would have lasted about 2 seconds in 0.0 space.

He’d fit in better in a game where there are lots of unarmed peasants to gank, and no npc police force to take him out.

Sorry, I meant 0.1/0.0.

I would warrant the reason most of those players didn’t stay is because the combat is ‘boring’ by modern standards, and because the client and UI are total trash. Let alone the physics. The game just isn’t intuitive in the most basic way. It’s painful to play and harder to understand, long before you ever get out to the PvP areas.

I’m willing to bet a retooled game which where the smaller ship classes operated under standard spaceflight sim fly-by-wire controls/weapon systems, larger ships using a similar to EVE tactical simulation via a WoW style customizable UI, and the EXACT same socio-political-economic-pvp-whatever implementation could easily get 1 million players. Add a sensible, well designed addition of ground and space infantry combat and you could possibly get even more.

I believe Eve is a sandbox, and I believe that’s one of its primary merits. I believe one of the reasons that is playerbase is so dedicated is because it’s a sandbox.

I also believe it’s a really really lousy sandbox.

Mist has it right; Eve is really not that great. It stands out because it’s the best sandbox around these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good sandbox. Eve’s problems are manifold; The most prominent being that it’s honestly really not that interesting. It has been the source of a great deal of interesting things to be sure. The societies and the wars and the factions and the corporations and all that. Even the moderator corruption is interesting; Imagine the real world if God could become a man, and everybody knew his name.

But as far as depth goes, it’s really not that interesting. Most of it seems to be number-crunching and waiting. Even the combat seems fairly monotonous, at least for the individual pilot. The game world is huge, but there isn’t a lot of interesting stuff in it. So yes, it’s a sandbox, and that’s where it gets its appeal. But as far as sandboxes go?

Well, I’d say “I’ve seen better”, but honestly? I haven’t.

Which is a shame.

They’ve always been pretty pretty serious about the game, and EVE is a pretty serious game. It’s just that it has a SERIOUSLY bad interface, and I don’t just mean the UI elements. The entire set of methods through which the player interacts with the game is flawed.

You don’t have to play EVE to play EVE. Just do what I do, log in, set your next skill to train, log out. Maybe do a mission if you’re really bored and don’t have any other games to play. Hell, you can even set skills to train while your account is closed.

One thing I will say about EVE, its one of the few MMOs that actually gets better with every patch and not worse.

You’re not hardcore enough, obviously.

blah… awesome… just awesome

More than 3 million people have tried EVE. A fraction remain. Why? Probably because most of them want to play a game. And EVE isn’t a game. Its a boring, tedious, monotonous, mind-numbing lesson in how not to design a UI.

Seriously, if your PvP focused game makes ATITD look exciting and action-packed, you did something wrong.

And this newly gayjaxed version of wordpress really sucks. It doesn’t just eat random characters in comments, it eats entire comments and then tells you that you can’t repost them because you already posted it.

I can’t help but feel it’s somewhat peculiar that the company featured in a socialist diatribe/game review would be CCP.

I would warrant the reason most of those players didn’t stay is because the combat is ‘boring’ by modern standards, and because the client and UI are total trash. Let alone the physics. The game just isn’t intuitive in the most basic way. It’s painful to play and harder to understand, long before you ever get out to the PvP areas.

I’m willing to bet a retooled game which where the smaller ship classes operated under standard spaceflight sim fly-by-wire controls/weapon systems, larger ships using a similar to EVE tactical simulation via a WoW style customizable UI, and the EXACT same socio-political-economic-pvp-whatever implementation could easily get 1 million players. Add a sensible, well designed addition of ground and space infantry combat and you could possibly get even more.

I couldn’t agree more, I beta’d EVE and did a ‘ton’ of feedback on their UI alone, but seems nothing was listened to. Even on the beta (pre-open beta) boards it was said that the UI and general interface and controls of the system were dire, but again nothing was listened to. I think the biggest draw to WoW is it’s ease of use for the new player, coming fresh into EVE is just not viable unless you buy a ton of ISK to start with or have friends in the game already… even then it’s still tough as nuts for a newbie.

What a breathless bunch of crap. Firstly, Eve is an evolution, not a revolution of gameplay which first seen in UO. And while maybe CCP made the game inaccessable to those not willing to put the time in to learn the interface deliberately in order to weed out those with a lesser commitment, I think that is after the fact rationalization. Finally, while I appreciate the attempt to utilize the “revolution” theme, he could have used someone who was less of a Stalinist murdering prick and spent less time slathering his own ideological spoor over the article to get the point across. Eve is less about a socialist upheaval than it is about unfettered capitalism gone Lord of the Flies. There is nothing equitable about Eve’s society.

I like the idea of Eve but I: A) already have friends, you know, in real life; B) already have a job working for a corporation; C) don’t feel the need to replace both of the former with an online variant. When a similar-themed game comes out without the need for the ultra-raiding time commitment, I will be there.

I thought that EVE was yet another demonstration that if you allow players to “win” a PvP game, eventually it’ll occur to a guild that maybe they should go ahead and do that.

I see a few people talking about that the game would be better with FPS style controls. Sure you could do that, but you could never get the number of people in the same system.
Deterministic controls are one of the factors that allow the single universe thing to work. Anyone remember Jumpgate? How many players did that game support in a single system?

Deterministic controls and combat that is more tactical than FPS is how the game was designed, you can complain all you want and say the game would be better as a FPS game… but is it possible to make a FPS game at this scale? Even with todays technology I think you’d be stretched to achieve what CCP has done if you started from scratch.

Personally I think complaining about the lack of FPS is like complaining that C&C doesn’t allow you take control of a single trooper in a squad.

Haven’t played the game for a few years myself, but I’m glad to see it do well.

The thing that killed Allegiance was a monthly fee where no monthly fee should’ve been.

because most people are not sci-fi fans, and because most people want insta super powers, also because for most people its easier to understand one guy holding a sword and running in the wilderness killing wolves and hairy stuff then to understand a force-recon ship fitted with a cloacking device, electronic warfare modules like a remote sensor dempners, a scan speed booster, a couple of capacitor boosters, a warpdrive and warp scrambler… navigating through 0.0 space solar system, scanning for intruders near all the star gates near to the corp POS.

yeah thats kind of fuzzy, but for sci-fi fans its a great deal.