Revisiting EVE Online

A Little Background

Participating in the Pirates of the Burning Sea BETA got me thinking about EVE Online (EO).  It’s been 18 months or more since I last played. Whew, that’s a long time.  2007 certainly went whizzing by quickly.  Having given away my original account and game CDs to an ex World of Warcraft officer and good online friend at the time, my only recourse to test the waters was the free 14-Day trial.

Many of the bloggers and podcasts hosts that I follow have all dabbled in EO at some point or another, but none stayed the course.  The longest that I can recall would be Ryan and Gary from MOG Army, whose retelling of their corporation’s exploits were quite amusing.  They’ve been long time fans of EO and CCP even when they weren’t playing regularly.  Earlier this year, Ryan actually joined the CCP staff and moved way down south to good ole GA.  *Hurl*  I can totally relate as I recently moved back to GA myself.  But he’s in a real city, Atlanta, while I’m cornered in small town USA, Augusta.  But I digress.

Recently, I’ve been reading about The Ancient Gaming Noob’s (TAGN) foray back into the EO’s universe.  It’s been interesting reading his posts regarding the amount of detail that goes into creating a successful existence for your characters in EO, even down to doing statistical research on which of the items he manufactures nets him the most profit.  This can definitely be a very cerebral game if you choose to make it so.  Or with enough backing and bodies, you can descend into the underbelly and setup a Mafioso style existence.  And as all sandbox games do, you can bet a portion of the population is going to do just that – sink to the lowest common dominator of human behavior.  Even The Sims Online community gave birth to gangs and extortion rings.  I was long gone by then from the complete bastardization of Will Wright's creation. 

In the case of EO which is after all a PVP (Pirate) game, you have to expect be hunted and killed many times over the course of your lifespan in the game.  If that’s not your thing, then this absolutely isn’t a game for you.  As TAGN can now tell you first hand, losing a prized ship isn't pretty thing.

How’s it Hanging Noob?

My primary objective in signing up for a trial account was two fold.  First I wanted to see if the memories of EO that I was using as comparisons in some of my impressions of Pirates of the Burning Sea were accurate recollections.  Second, I wanted to see if anything about the introductory new player experience had changed or been enhanced.

Game Mechanics & Performance

• EO isn’t a game that the average person can just pick up and begin playing.  I never found that to be a problem.  You’re flying spaceships so I expect that too be rather complicated.  There is an extensive tutorial system which unlike when I played before, has now been segmented very nicely so that you can do it as you progress through the relevant content.  No more sitting with the tutorial for 2 to 3 hours the first time you enter the game, which as you can imagine many people didn’t, and therefore had no clue what to do.  I love that the Tutorial actually has mission agents (quest NPCs) integrated directly into the stations.  This is a great idea and makes it feel more like an active part of the game versus sitting in corner learning, when what you want to be doing is playing.
• Everything you do or interact with in EO happens via a panel of some sort (windows/dialog boxes) therefore you encounter a lot of them.  If you’re not good at managing multiple windows simultaneously or if you’re easily intimidated by a monitor full of lots of boxes and humongous amounts of text (insert walls of text here) then you’ll be set back on your heels in EO.  For me, it’s not a big deal.   I spend the time to line up where I want each window to open the first time it launches so that my screen real estate remains manageable.  However, I do wish they had dock and undock commands like many editing tools do.
• I always thought the EO graphics were stunning well now they are simply amazing with the Trinity update.  So yes, the EO universe is as breathtaking as I remembered.
• The two negative aspects of EO’s mechanics are the same two that bothered me in the past: (1) Shortcut and key-binding is limited.  It’s restricted to which keys can be used and fixed set of commands that excludes some really basic ones like “launch drones”, and I don’t know of a macro language that lets you bridge the gap.  I’m not a clicker. Having to use the mouse for primary actions, especially in combat, makes me a sad panda.  (2) Window management can take work because there are so many of them.  I’d like more sophisticated docking and pinning options to ease the burden.  Things like auto-hide and un-hide options for things docked on the window perimeters would be nice, versus clicking or tying up most of my key-bindings for window management.
• Performance has taken a huge hit.  I don’t know if it’s the Trinity update, more people or what.  I have a much better machine now than when played last and I rarely had lag problems back then.  Now it’s a bit of a lag-fest.  It bordered on horrible at some points.  I lagged into and out of stations, into and out of jump gates, anytime I used the mouse to rotate my view and while chatting.  I lost a newly fitted ship because I lagged just as I approached a structure I was sent to investigate.  It was a trap and the computer system sent a warning that it was rigged to blow up and that I should warp out.  Unfortunately, I was lagged to hell and back.  When my screen unfroze and updated, my ship was already on fire and it exploded. *QQ big salty tears*  I don’t know what gives but the game performance needs to be addressed.  I saw many people complaining about lag in the chat channels.

Missions (Questing)

• Subtle but great improvements have been made for new players in the area of missions.  I’m positive that I was Gallente before so it has nothing to do with starting as a different race.  No, they’ve definitely made some enhancements in this area.
• Building your character now includes selecting a Bloodline, an area of study and spending five attribute points, which combined, give you ahead start on skill training.
  Between the initial mission and the ones available in the segmented tutorial you’re given a lot more guidance in finding missions for the first several days of play, and there are longer mission chains which help keep you busy and earning cash.
• What I count as the biggest improvement is that the mission rewards are now more relevant for the new player – exceptionally so.  Instead of giving you junk to process and sell, or spam the chat channels asking if you need so-n-so, you’re getting skill upgrade books (nice introduction to the fact that not all available skills are sitting in your character’s skill list), minor upgrades for your ship (had this before but not this many) and the best…wait for it… YOUR FIRST SHIP UPGRADE.  Yep, a relatively early mission will provide you with your first new replacement ship.  Hell of a sweet deal.  Depending on which Tutorial Missions you complete, you can walk away with (3) free ships.  What more can you ask for as a new player???
• I have more money (ISK) this time around as a noob.  Honestly, I found getting ISK rather easy.  I'm not sure why people are buying it.  I don’t know if not having to search for missions made my time more productive or if they increased the monetary rewards, but I know I have more cash available at this juncture than I had in the past.

PVP

• Noob that I am in the game I can’t comment on any changes in this regard.  I’m still in high security sectors.  The only time I witnessed any PVP was exiting a jump gate where I was looking for a mission location.  I saw lots of yellow entities on my indicator (bad people) and lots of firing at things around the gate.  It appeared to be an ambush of people exiting the gate.  I put up my protective shield and warped back through unscathed.
• I wouldn’t expect much to have changed about PVP except more people with bigger ships and guns since I was last subscribed.  It’s a PVP game so you expect PVP. *shrug*

Community

• The Rookie chat channel had 700+ people in it at all times.  The chat was scrolling so fast I couldn’t follow most of the conversations.  It was very hard to read if someone had actually answered your question.
• People were very friendly and helpful about answering basic questions. There was the occasional, “do the damn tutorial”, “Go back to WOW noob”, etc.  Not sure why those people where in the Rookie channel if they didn’t want to answer noob questions.
• Worst thing about the chat channel – Help, Rookie Help and Local is that they are completely over run with ISK seller spam (EO in game currency).  People playing WOW you don’t even know what gold seller spam chat means.  It is brutal in EO!  At least in WOW they’ve gotten creative – dropping gnomes from the skies to spell website URLs, inviting you to groups and sending email.  In EO they just lock up the damn chat channel with spam reels.  It’s really bad and makes some channels unusable until you block them all, one by one and that only works until they log in with a new account and start all over again.

Ambiance & Role-Play Value

• EO oozes science fiction.  Everything about the experience screams deep space.  The impression is immediate, persistent and one of the things I enjoy most.  The official EO website remains one of my favorite site designs.  It is just what it should be for this game.  I like the intermingling of gaming news, images, video and fiction all right there on the home page.  I like that it’s windows and panels just like the game’s user interface.
• There’s back-story and lore, and you’re introduced to it in a casual manner during the character creation process.
• The missions are wall-of-text but when you take the time to read it, you’ll find a very engaging story that you can use as the background for whatever existence you’re attempting to craft for yourself within the EO universe.

Conclusion
I think I remembered EO accurately.  The things that I enjoyed were in perspective and factual.  There wasn’t anything in particular that I didn’t like about EO that led me to un-subscribing in the past.  It was mostly just a matter of time available versus what I saw as an insurmountable journey to becoming even mildly competitive.  I think that CCP saw the steep learning curve in the beginning as an issue as well, since they’ve obviously implemented changes to enhance the introductory experience.  I think this is an excellent step in the right direction. 

The one thing that CCP could do to help people get started is to put out more game guides - specific ones like "Outfitting Your First Ship", "How to Plan Your Skill Upgrades", etc.  They have some guides out there and the gamer population has created some very informative ones but I always think the developer should be filling the gap to ensure accuracy and timeliness.

In conclusion, I saw two significant changes which have the potential of helping to retain people who come in on the trial, assuming they were genuine trial attempts:

• Increasing the initial attribute (skills) trained eases the burden in the beginning.
• Providing more relevant mission rewards: (3) ships, skill books, cybernetics and useful ship modifications is huge in a game like EO.
  

Regardless, the road to getting started in EO isn’t trivial.  I’ll do a separate post with some good noob resources and tips I found this time around.

Comments

[Van Hemlock]

Some tips on performance I noticed with the Trinity upgrade that might help. In the graphics options tab, try turning HDR off, and Shadows to None. Those two don't seem to make it any less pretty, but did seem to help a lot with framerate.

Other than that, basic lag can't be helped, but is less of a problem out of the starting system - sheer number of players in the Local list does it.

[Saylah]

Thanks. I will try that and see if it helps. Someone else said to close the Rookie channel when I log on and that seemed to reduce the lag a good bit.

[Stemline]

Why does Eve have such a great rep for graphics? It's a deep game, but the graphics are just mood setters; like painted backdrops for a play. Take another look a the planets or moons - bare basic colored baubles (which you can't even orbit properly). Compare how EQ2, GW, LOTRO do the graphics for their game environments (the water, hills, trees, cities) and how Eve does its stuff (moons, asteroids, stations). I used sometimes to wander round EQ2 or WoW or LOTRO zones just for the sightseeing - never do that in EO! Sadly..
And, it seems to me, that a sci-fi space game, even if aimed at pvp, should encourage exploring. (A five year mission...)

[Saylah]

I guess because they've found a way to make the black void look good. Most of space is just blackness but I find the overall affect spectacular. The other games have a harder job yes, especially if they're going for photo realism like EQ2. Mood settings or no, the average player finds EO graphics rather impressive. :-)

[CCP Hammer]

Stemline,

We're going to be overhauling the planets and other celestial objects later this year to go along with the overhauled ships, stations and stargates that we released in the Trinity expansion. But I think our reputation for good graphics comes from how the "classic" graphics looked in 2003 when the industry standard was DX7. We were doing a lot of tricks on the CPU to simulate pixel shaders which are now standard fare and hardware accelerated.

Saylah,

I've been enjoying the blog. We're working on a lot of things related to the experience of new players. We've actually got a scrum team consisting of 2 designers, 2 programmers and a QA engineer dedicated to the new player experience. We realize the initial complexity puts off a lot of pragmatic new players who just want to have fun and can't be bothered to work for their fun like the diehard sci-fi fans were willing to do when the game launched.

We're working on the other things you mention as well such as hot keys for controlling drones and battling the ISK selling spam without over restricting trial accounts as well. I'm actually pretty excited about the things we have in store this year.

Keep up the good work.

Noah "Hammerhead" Ward
Lead Game Designer EVE online

[Stemline]

Thanks Hammer, that’s good news :-)
Can I make a suggestion? Surround the team who will work on the celestial objects with print-outs of pictures of each the moons of Jupiter and Saturn; especially the awesome, awesome stuff from Cassini. Get your crew to compete to find the most amazing astronomical pictures they can, till they know intimately just how beautiful and humbling the universe is – and till they realise just how much of that could realistically be implemented in, and add to, the game.

And I hereby announce I’d be willing to give a (small!) prize to the designer of the best planet or moon or multiple star or nebula ... to be called the Slartibartfast Prize in honour of the late Douglas Adams. I’ll put the ISK in escrow...

[Saylah]

CCP Hammer,

That's great news. And wow, just wow on commenting on my blog! Sure I notice the planets go use some work but as I've said, the overall affect is so brilliant that I barely notice. Personally, I can't wait for the avatars and being able to walk around the stations.

CCP has made some significant strides toward enhancing the new player experience. Keep up the good work and I look forward to seeing the changes.