Hey everyone, I just felt like posting today really. It’s odd, I don’t have anything new to show off to any of you, but that doesn’t matter. I would like to talk about EvE Online today and since I’m ill I don’t have anything usefull to do anyway.

So, for anyone who knows what MMO games are, but don’t know EvE, click here. That is a link to the EvE Online homepage.

You may think something like this: “Well, EvE online is just another MMO game”, but I think differently about that. I’m not going to say that EvE is the only decent MMO game out there, but it surely unique when compared to most others. Unlike most MMO games, which have a more or less medieval-ish setting, EvE is a futuristic sci-fi space set game. Most games use a level based character system. For example in World of Warcraft (WoW) you create a character and grind it up to max level (70 at this point I think) and then it’s all over. It’s more or less a single player experience which has a very clear goal and once that goal has been reached it’s over. You can continue playing in the world ofcourse, but you can’t build up your character anymore, or you must eliminate certain skills to make room for others and more or less start over. Or you can create a new character and do the whole thing just once more. I picked WoW as an example here, because it’s one of the most well known MMO games out there. I figure that games like Guildwars and City of Heroes/City of Vilains aren’t very different from that same concept, but EvE Online is different.

Like in any MMO game you create a character when you start playing EvE. You choose your race (there are four) and then you choose your bloodline, background, ancestry and all that stuff and you answer a series of questions. This will result in a list of skills you will start off with. But unlike other MMO games you don’t level up your character. In other MMO games you will get experience points (XP) by running errands for non playable characters (NPCs) and killing NPC enemies and things like that. In EvE you can’t gain XP by the so called grinding I just mentioned. Instead of grinding there is a learning system. You have five attributes: charisma, intelligence, perception, memory and willpower. There attributes determine how quick the learning will progress. You buy a skillbook on the ingame market en start training a skill. Depending on your attributes this will take a certain amount of time. The first level will usually take only up to an hour to complete, but the final level (level 5) can take several days, or even weeks to complete. This may seem long at first, but it’s something you get accustomed to very quickly and it will put you up against important decisions like: “Am I going to wait 3 weeks to get 5% extra damage on my guns, or is it not worth the wait and should I continue with another skill?”. Even though 5% may seem just a tiny little bit, the percentatges of upgrades and skill level percentages will often result in this little 5% making a big difference.

While playing you won’t really get to see your character though, but you can customize it’s portrait which will be visible to anyone and will be something of a trademark for you character. You will create this portrait just before you will enter the game for real the first time. This can be done only once, so you must be really sure that it is just as you want it to be, because the possibilities of deforming, morphing the face are nearly endless and you can add accesories like sunglasses and doodles like face tatoos and weird haircuts which makes it even fun to play around with that for a while. Here are some examples of character portraits. I’ve sized them down a little though, because the captures you can make in game are pretty large.

The first one (top left) is my character, which is a Minmatar Brutor male, the second one is a Minmatar Vherokior female, the third one is also a Minmatar Brutor male, then an Amarr Amarr female, then a Minmatar Sebiestor male and lastly a Gallente Intaki male. Now since I have started talking about the names of races and bloodlines I might as well tell you which ones there are. The races are Caldari, Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar. I’m not going to tell everything about the bloodlines and such here, because you can read the basic information about this here.

As you can see the variety in possible portraits is huge, even the two Brutors look distinctively different even though the base of both was exactly the same. In most of the footage that I have seen from other MMO games like WoW most characters look basicly the same anyway, so not being able to customize the rest of the characters looks which you don’t get to see anyway doesn’t matter in any way. At least, not to me. Something that would be nice though would be the ability to customize your ship’s look. So a bunch of 50 Rifter class frigates will all look exactly the same. But this lack of customizability is greatly compensated by the sheer number of ships available for you to use. Beginning at the frigate class which are small and fragile ships mostly used by beginning players in the protected empire space, but also used by experienced players as cheap expendable ships to use to tackle bigger enemy ships so they can be taken out by the larger craft in the fleet. All the way up to the Titans which are the largest of the largest ships in the game. In between are ship classes like destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, battleships, dreadnaughts, carriers, motherships which are all more or less suitable for combat. Besides that there are also ships that are not suitable for combat, but are industry based: industrial, mining barge, capital industrial. And then there are tech 2 variants of many of the ships, like assault ships which are stronger versions of frigates, heavy assault ships which are superior versions of cruisers, command ships which are specialized versions of battlecruisers to boost a fleet’s abilities and so on… The protected empire space I mentioned earlier is more or less the controlled environment of the game. The is police here in the form of Concord ships which are ships that are not available as playable ships. The come as frigates, cruisers and battleships and customs, which are ships that are available as playable ships. In this space you can mostly fly around safely without the risk of being attacked by another player, but the possibilities to develop your experience are somewhat limited. On the edge of the empire space there are the low security systems. These do still belong to the empire, but there is little to no Concord or customs here to protect you so it’s a potentially dangerous area. But it also enhances your possibilities. For instance capital ships (dreadnaughts, carriers, titans and capital industrial ships) can’t enter empire, because they can’t use stargates and need to use so called cyno fields which can’t be raised in empire to lock their jumpdrives on to jump into another system. And then there is also the 0.0 space, which doesn’t have any form of control by customs or Concord at all and is mostly dominated by alliances made up of actual players who really control the space there and enforce their own laws and rules. Of course this space offers the best opportunities in the game as it is here where you’ll find the most valuable ore as a miner or the best NPC enemies to fight as a so called ratter. Also if you’re looking for intense fleet warfare this is the space you’ll want to be as it is here where the big fights are taking place to conquer or protect a piece of space against the enemy, which is not NPC controlled in this case. Ofcourse you can join an existing corporation (corp), which is more or less the same as a guild in WoW for example, or you can create your own and start building it up and then you can either create or join an existing alliance to protect your assets or to create a bigger operation for yourself as well as your members.

And then there is the market, this is really something completely different as seen in other games as it is almost completely player controlled instead of NPC seeded. You can build ships and other items and offer them for sale on the market. The prices fluctuate just as they do in the real world and good ore prices for example can make you very rich if you play your cards right. The entire economical system is watched by guy with a ph.d in economics and he even releases regular reports on the game’s economy and the developer only interferes if things are getting really out of hand. But that is really something that you’ll have to see for yourself.

Anyway, I think I’ve typed enough for now. I haven’t told you but a fraction of what you can do and see in this game and talking about it like this can fill an entire book I think, but you’ll just have to see it for yourself. And why not try a mere 14 day free trial. Not that you’ll see that much as even some features are locked during the trial period to protect the game’s balance and all that kind of jazz, but it can give you a very good impression of the game’s possibilities and the great community behind it. As a last thing, here are some screenshots I’ve taken over the past few days. No combat is displayed in it, as I’m not a combat player, but you can see how great this game looks while the interface is hidden. Please note these shots are fairly large (1680×1050).

Now, after seeing those images you’ll surely want to play, so click here and set up your free 14 day trial

And if you’re looking for me ingame, my character’s name is Zhooibaal