EVE - Day 2

Everything I said about EVE still stands. But today I am going to say that, in addition to being stunning, EVE sucks. Last night I didn't play EVE for over 30 minutes. EVE was being played however. My computer was quite occupied displaying in gorgeous detail the various other ships stations, planets and suns my in game persona was supposed to be passing through on some Journey.

Not always past however. All this watching the game play itself got me to thinking. And thats a dangerous thing for any game to allow. The moment you are thinking about playing, rather than playing, youve lost the whole immersion aspect, and that in theory is what keeps you playing.

So, while the game was activly ignoring me I realized some basic things in EVE that are the crucial immersion breakers:

1. There is nothing solid in the game. Upon activating Autopilot your ship will turn to face its destination, and fly towards it nomatter what might be in the way. Other ships. Space Stations. Asteroids - planets - your ship will try to fly through them all if they get in your way - AND SUCCEED. I have a hard time beliving in planets that I can fly through.

2. The "straight line no matter what" philosophy is preserved when interacting with beacons, other ships, asteroids, stargates or stations. Your EVE ship does not deign to actually dock with stations. No. Ships approach a station and at a preset distance - dissapear. Likewise, when using a stargate to travel to another system, your ship approaches the thing from whichever direction, and the stargate does its very pretty blast-a-ball-of-energy-into-space animation. Once again the ship being gated simply dissapears from space.

Given the total lack of ability to grab a joystick and fly the ship, and the total straight line nature of the autopilots movement, it gets very hard to think about the ship as "my ship". It feels a lot more like a very complicated looking "you are here" pin on some kind of abstract 3d map. It feels like an RTS - you the player, on the outside looking in.

There are apparently up to 10,000 other players concurrently online at any one time, but EVE so far is the most single player MMORPG ive ever played. The other ships that make appearances are total non entities - devoid of any personality or that there might be another player behind the ship. Without conversation an MMORPG is just a single player game with a lot of oddly named NPCs trying to kill you. And EVE makes it so damned hard to talk to other ships. Theres a chat window with channels, and one of those channels is called "local" which presumably refers to people in the local vicinity. However, the odds that anyone in the vicinity is actually watching their "local" chat traffic, just in case someone hails them on the way past seems pretty damn low. Plus, the only time during a trip that is spent in the vicinity of other ships is while closing on a stargate in order to jump to a new system. The rest of the time is spent entering, leaving, or just cruising in warp, and at warp speed - when travelling at au's per second, very little is in range of the 50 kilometer radius radar. So, any other ships encountered are likley just about to use the gate, or warp away. At any rate it makes attempting communication with other ships entirely pointless, which makes 10,000 other online subscribers feel like a giant $10 per month single player experience.