Eve at a glance

For a long time I have been reading articles that try to encapsulate the game I play oh too often, Eve Online, made by CCP.

I find that most of these articles fall a bit short and wanted to take some time, early in this blog to outline what I thought eve was all about and what made it so attractive to me.

First a little background on what other MMO's I had played before eve. I was deeply into Planetside first, directly after playing Call Of Duty. Spent way to much time on COD before planetside, but it was worth it. While I played planetside, I also got into City of Heroes, and then heard about Eve while I was on vent with some mates from Planetside. All I got was a very vauge description about spaceships and fighting, but it was enough to get me to download it. I left it alone for about 6 months before installing it and giving it a shot for no good reason while I finished up my Planetside and CoH addictions!

Now back to eve! I never even read the forums before I started playing, I just dove right in, as I do most times for most games. ANYWAYS, at a glance means I should come to a point soon!

Eve hooked me from the first second I made my avatar. All the options, being able to control where the person looked, I had no idea that would be the last time I would interact with my avatar in any meaningful way. Other than the old eve-version of hot or not where I am sure I had one of the lower "not" ratings. Why do I say this hooked me, because it was like creating a real person, not just some random costumed hero or troll or Nazi.

Then when I was dumped into space (pre-good tutorial) and left to figure most things out myself, it instantly made me work for everything I wanted, or thought I wanted, or had no clue I wanted. Not like work as in a job, but work as in engaged me on a level that most games never touch. Not everyone has this "level", hence why eve is still such a tough game to get into, but those that do, well then eve is their type of game. Even when I am not playing eve it trains my skills, so effectively I am still playing. I don't need to be level "80" to compete with people who have been playing the game since release, nor do I need epic items that take hours of farming. I just need a few friends, or rarely these days, solo to go out and cause some havoc. Eve just has so many facets to it. Just to mention a few that I have done in my now 3+ year eve career, 0.0 Combat including large fleet operations, Trading aka market pvp, Pirating, lowsec life, training of carebears into combat pilots, complexes, missions, and mining (briefly). And some that I have not yet ventured much into, Wormhole space, Sleepers, wormhole pvp, probing, scanning, 0.0 complexes, and POS management.

There are tons of other features in eve I have only glossed over a few times, but one of the biggest is the single shard universe. So you don't have to coordinate a server for you to make friends on and transfer if you have friends on another server, you can just head on over to the ONE server and find your friends (kill them a few times if you are smart).

If that can keep me interested for over three years, there has to be something to it. But don't just shake your head and move on, give it a try, the eve universe is always willing to claim another victim, Eve-online.com The worst thing about eve was the tutorial for me, and they even took the time to fix that, nice work CCP, if a little too late for me!