EVE Online www.eve-online.com Review

Overall Rating

Massive community New player friendly Developers listen to players and care about the game Recent massive free update and regular small additions

Not really a bad point, but not a single player game if you are into that. To get the most from the game you really need to team up with other players, but it is worth it.

Where do I start with this review, because this game is MASSIVE!

Well, let's start at the beginning. EVE is a Sci-fi based MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that is set in a new region of space that man colonized thousands of years ago, after finding a natural wormhole from their own region of space. Unfortunately, after a few decades the wormhole closed, stranding those that had already crossed into the new region of space and forcing them to find their own way of life.

After thousands of years, the original pioneers have diversified into four distinct races;

Amarr - An Imperial race that cover almost 40% of the known inhabited solar systems in EVE.

Minmatar - A tough, no-nonsense race that values it's ability to look after itself. Although the highest population within EVE they are very fractured, with a third of the race still enslaved by the Amarr.

Gallente - French descendents and believers in free will and human rights has brought some other races to tag them as self-righteous and meddling. The Gallente also have a flair for showmanship.

Caldari - The ultimate capitalists, the entire society is run by large corporations who split the state between themselves. Fewer scruples than most, and slightly more aggressive, they are a race to be wary of even if small in number.

Each race has two sub races split into male and female, giving you a total of four to choose from in each race.

Once you have chosen your race, you need to customise your face and background, as this is what will appear to everyone in the game. Your image can be manipulated in any way possible from the shape and size of your mouth to the shading and background. One pointer here is make sure that you are very happy with the finished results, because you cannot change them once you character is in game.

You will then be launched into the game proper and be taken through a very detailed, yet involving tutorial that will show you all the basics of controlling your ship, how to mine and how to engage in combat. Once the basic training is over with, you will be passed over to an 'agent' to complete some basic missions and earn some cash. First tip here is to complete all of these missions as they will, 1: Give you a good understanding of how the game works and ease you into the play style & 2: Will allow you to gain some good 'faction' (more detail later in the review) with the agent.

You will be given a basic 'Frigate' style ship (more detail on ships later) to start with, fitted out with basic mining laser and offensive turret. As you progress through the game you will be able to upgrade to better ships and equipment with training and cash.


Training

Here is one of the most important parts of the game, Training. Your character will start with a basic number of 'skills' that he has already learned to a basic level. You can improve these skills by 'training' them, which basically just takes time and the time varies with the difficulty & level of the skill. As you gain 'isk' which is the money type in this game, you can buy more skill manuals from the market to train up and increase your abilities. As an example, you may start out with the basic Frigate skill for your race, which will only allow you to pilot your current starter ship. By training the skill to level 2, you will then be able to pilot a better type of frigate (although you will have to earn the money to buy it first).

As I said earlier, as you progress up the levels of a skill, the time it takes to train it will get longer. So, training a skill to L1 may take about 20 minutes, but by the time you get to L4 it may take over 24 hours to train. Although this sounds like a bit of a drag, it helps you to focus on the skills that you actually need to reach your desired goals within the game and one of the nice things about this game is that skill training continues even when you are offline. So you can set a skill to train for 9 hours while you are at work and when you come back and logon again it will have finished.

Each skill has a basic set attributes that affect how fast you can train it up, so the higher your personal attributes are, the faster the skill will train. Most skills need Memory or Intelligence or both, so the higher you can raise these attributes the faster the skills based on them will train. You can enhance your attributes in two ways, the first is through training the 'learning' skills and the second (and most expensive) is to fit yourself with cybernetic implants which will boost your attributes greatly.

As you train up more and more skills you will gain a great number of skill points, which you will of course want to keep. One thing to remember is that EVE is a real PvP (Player vs Player) game and especially with in low security areas you can be attacked at any time, which means you could lose you ship and escape in a pod, but at worse your pod could be destroyed with you along with it. To insure against this, you can purchase a 'clone' which will retain a number of your skill points and will be revived the moment you are killed. You will need to remember that your clone will need 'upgrading' as your skills increase or you risk losing skills when you die.

Money

Very, very important part of the game as you will need money for everything from ships to ammo. There are several ways to make money within the game, which are as follows;

Mining - The simplest way to make money is to take your ship to an asteroid belt and mine some ores. You can then bring those ores back and refine them into minerals that can be sold on the market (or used to build stuff)

Trading - EVE has a dynamic market based on the oldest rules of supply and demand. You can buy items in a low demand area cheaply and sell them on in a high demand area for a high price. As an example, I sell the shuttles that I build in High security space for about 9500 isk' but I have seen them sell for over 200,000isk in low security space, when someone has been blasted out of their ship and had no other choice.

Build & Sell - EVE has a resource based building system, where you can buy blueprints for items, gather the resources required to build it, rent a factory and build away. These items can then be sold on the market at a profit if there is a demand for them.

Bounty Hunting - The EVE universe is full of undesirable NPC's (non-player characters) that the authorities have placed a bounty upon. Take your ship out into the void and hunt them down for money, as well as ransacking their ships for equipment after you have sent them tumbling into icy depths of space.

Piracy - If you have no morals or just like the idea of a life on the edge, you can become a pirate and attack innocent (and not so innocent) passers by. If you are lucky, you will get to take their cargo's for a profit and if you are very lucky they may even eject before the final blow and you can take their ship as well. But beware, this life is a dangerous one and the authorities will not take your actions lightly and worse still, players have the ability to put a bounty on your head for other pirates to collect on.

Again, a nice feature of the game is that you have the ability to put things on the market for other players to buy and this can happen even when you are offline, so you can put items on before you log off and come back to a nice fat wallet next time you log in.

Teamwork

Being an MMORPG, there are thousands of other players from all around the world online with you, so to this end the game is very team orientated. There are many chat channels to browse through and learn from and many people on hand to give advice.

You are not going to get the best from the game and there will be a lot of things that you will not be capable of doing on your own, so to that end there is the 'corporation' feature. Corporations (sometimes referred to as guilds in other games) are basically teams of like minded people that get together and play towards a common goal within the game. You will see many adverts around the game for different corporations and also within the details of players that you come across, so they will help you choose which corporation to join. Do not worry about joining a corporation and that you may make the wrong decision as you can leave a corporation at any time and join another more suitable one.

Corporations are headed by a CEO and there will also be directors that are assigned certain responsibilities with the corporation, like looking after the manufacturing or security of the corporation. Corporations can rent offices at space stations where they will have shared hangers for people within the corporation to share equipment, ships, ammo or even bookmarks to locations within solar systems.

Greater than corporations, there are alliances, which are basically a collective of corporations with a common aim. Alliances will usually control a number of solar systems and defend them against other alliances and hostile corporations.

Corporations and alliances can declare war on other corporations and alliances if no diplomatic solution to their dispute can be found, at which point it becomes a matter of shoot on sight and vice versa.

Ships

As mentioned earlier, you will start out with a basic 'frigate' style ship and from there you can work your way up. A player may own as many ships as they like, but can only pilot one at a time and when not in use the remaining ships will stay wherever they were left, so if you wish to switch you must return to the station that the ship was left at.

There are six basic styles of ship, but each race has its own style of ships and there are usually several in each style;

Shuttles - The most basic type of ship in the game. Shuttles have almost no cargo space and cannot be fitted with weapons or equipment, but they are very, very fast. These ships are basically used for getting from one place to another very quickly and are generally cheap or even disposable.

Frigates - These are the basic multipurpose ships and the second fastest in the game. Good for basic combat, lower yield mining operations & getting from place to place quickly. Some are also very good for running missions.

Interceptors - These are very fast and agile frigate type ships used primarily for combat strikes and supporting larger ships in battle. Their speed is a big advantage as they can evade the tracking of all but the fastest gun turrets and with micro warp drives installed, could even outrun a missile. One thing to remember though is that they are not the strongest ships when it comes to shields and armour, so if they do get hit with something heavy, it is all over.

Cruisers - Much larger and generally slower than frigates, cruisers are good all purpose ships and are a very common site in the EVE universe. Used in many roles from high yield mining, to combat support and patrolling dangerous regions of space.

Battleships - The ultimate ships in the game, heavily armoured and shielded with guns coming out of every port. These ships are not very fast, but then again they rarely need to be as they are the usually the ones dealing out the damage.

Industrials - These are the haulers, with masses of cargo space to carry all of the ores you have mined, but very little in the way of defenses. If any trouble kicks off, these will be the first ships to be warping out of the way. Size also gives way to speed and these ships are generally the slowest ships in the game.

Every ship will have it's own unique qualities as far as speed, cargo space, shields, hull & armour are concerned as well as a number of other properties like targeting range and resistance to some types of attack. All ships (other than shuttles) can have their qualities enhanced with various equipment that can be bought from the market or looted from npc's that you kill. Some 'named' equipment (usually looted) will be like the basic equipment that you can buy, but enhanced in some way, like it will fire faster or do slightly more damage.

One very important thing within the game which should not be dismissed is that you can insure your ship against destruction. This is important because the last thing you want to do is spend your last 6,000,000 isk on a nice new cruiser, just to have it blown away from underneath you and not be able to replace it. There are varying levels of insurance from basic, which will usually get you about 50% of your ship value back, up to platinum which will usually pay for the ship and some of the equipment you may have lost.

Weapons

There are a variety of weapons available in the EVE universe like, projectile weapons, lasers, missile launchers and hybrid turrets. Not all ships can use all types of weapons, it will depend on the type of fittings that they have and of course you cannot use large Battleship weapons in a tiny frigate.

Turrets are split into small, medium & large types with varying types of ammo that have their own unique qualities and damage types. Missile launchers are split into standard, large, cruise and assault types, each using their own size of ammo.

As mentioned, each ammo will do its own type of damage, like EMP damage, which affects shields more than hulls or explosive, which is the other way round. Some enemies will be more resistant to some types of attacks than others (which you will learn over time) so it is important to load up with the right mix of ammo when out hunting. There are middle of the road ammo's that will do a good mix of damage, but will not be as effective as using specific damage types.

The stuff you really want to know!

All the information above has been a slightly detailed overview of the game, but there is much more to learn about and you can only really do that by playing the game. But what is the look and feel of the game and how much is it going to cost me, well here you go.

Requirements

Minimal Hardware:
PIII - 450Mhz or above
128Mb Ram (256Mb for XP/2000)
1Gb hard drive space
56k modem or better

Operating system:
Windows '98, ME, 2000 or XP (Win '95 & NT not supported)

Video Cards:
Geforce2 or better, Radeon 7200 or better & Matrox Parhelia.

The minimum resolution is 1024 x 768
Soundcard must be Directsound compatible

Recommended for optimal performance:
1Ghz processor or better
256Mb Ram or better
64Mb 3D accelerator or better.

Graphics

What can I say but 'out of this world' if you will excuse the pun. The detail of the ships, space stations, planets, moons, asteroids and just about everything is breathtaking to the point where you can almost get dizzy from the height whilst holding position over a planet.

You can zoom right into the hull of your ship to see that satisfying shine and even switch the camera to the enemies ship when attacking to watch your weapons do their thing or the shockwave spread as your torpedo strikes home.

Sound

Very detailed from the sound of the workshops in the space stations to the boom as you cross the warp threshold and the BOOM as your missile smashes into the enemies hull.

Control & Playability

The vast majority of play is taken care of by the mouse, although keyboard shortcuts can be set up to make other tasks easier. The interface is well laid out and customizable to a degree, in that windows for scanners or targets can be moved to make your view better for you.

Community

The community is massive, with loads of sites available for information, although the home site for the creators is great anyway (see http://www.eve-online.com). There is even an online eve-radio site that is run by players of the game playing a good mix of music and giving live in-game news while you play.

Cost

The game is a bit difficult to get hold of in the high street, although most online games stores are selling it and play.com are currently selling it for £6.99 delivered. If you buy the game boxed, you will get the first 30 days free of charge, although you will need a valid credit card which will be charged monthly after that period.

Alternatively (and the way I did it), you can download the game from the website and pay to activate an account for 19.95 Euro, including the first months subscription.

As mentioned, after the first month you will be billed monthly to continue playing the game and there are three plans available, which are;

1 Month - 14.95 Euro
3 Month - 35.85 Euro (11.95 Euro / Month)
6 Month - 65.70 Euro (10.95 Euro / Month)

So basically the more you pay up front, the cheaper it is to play. You can switch plans at any time, so you can pay for a couple of months to see if you like it and then invest in a 6 month plan if you do.

So why pay to play? Well, unlike the normal game you buy off the shelf, this game is constantly evolving with developers working on extra storylines and content all the time. On top of that there are the servers that you play on and the bandwidth involved to keep play as smooth as possible, which all costs money. On top of that you have constant support around the clock if you have any problems in game.

Longevity

So, has the game got a future?

Well, with the rise in the player base that I have seen in just the last two months (EVE holds the record for most players in game at any one time in one persistent game worlds @ over 10,000 players) and a massive 'free' upgrade to the game due in the autumn I would say yes. The developers are looking to introduce not only enhancements to the game but whole new avenues like player owned structures and new ships. This is on top of the content that is added regularly by the devs anyway and you can keep up with what they are up to in the dev blogs.

If you can find someone that is already in the game, they can invite you to a 7 day free trial, which is well worth it if you are still unsure if it is for you. Give it a try, you won't regret it.