Testing...

There seems to be a few common threads between myself and the greater EVE community, or at least those who talk/blog about it. They are pretty much the reasons i keep finding myself coming back to the game, and apparently the reason everyone else does too.

Firstly, to date I have been playing EVE for roughly a month. I played for a week on a trial, loved it and signed up for the three month deal. Then had two more weeks, had no idea what I was doing and lost my original excitement and stopped playing. After a few months away I decided to get back into it. Apparently, this is not uncommon. I can't help but feel as though CCP have set the game up just so, almost as a way to ward off...how should i say it...slackards. (I know i just invented that word, but it does the job nicely.)

There is, regardless of this huge step upwards in difficulty (which I have been informed is the first of many) something mesmerising about the world the game is set within. It's like when someone asks you what you want to eat. If they give you two or three choices, you have no problem. If they ask you to choose from everything edible in the world, it's almost not worth trying to decide. One you get past this initial barrier there is the realisation that as huge as the world is, there is still only a finite amount of stuff you can do. Which makes the whole thing much more palatable. It's still a difficult choice, but not insurmountable.

Secondly, (this will probably make some of you stop reading altogether. I know what the deal is. It's OK) having come across from another MMO, the difference in...everything is very daunting to begin with. The other players, the style of play, the goals, the activities. Every. Single. Thing. More than any of those things though, is that by all appearances, the people who play EVE actually want new people to learn how to play and get involved. Other games, or rather the players of those games, have this weird idea that new players, more players, will kill the game. That somehow newer players have no idea what they are doing and will be completely unable to learn, so the game will have to be made easier. I understand that most of the reason new people are welcome is because it's easier to kill noobs. And I am fine with that. I am quite looking forward to it in fact. Just as I am looking forward to getting better and being able to do the same to future generations of noobs. But it is nonetheless refreshing and almost unsettling to feel welcome. Or at least as welcome as it's possible to feel.

Thirdly, this is the game I have always wanted to play. Since I was twelve and tried to learn to program in QBASIC in an attempt to program a game that was like Frontier: Elite II, this has been the game I was looking for. The idea that whatever happens affects someone else blows me away every time i think about it. The idea that the whole game is built on the premise that players run the systems, become the crime bosses, run companies into the ground and build empires upon the ruins of the old. I am not sure that anyone outside of the game (and even some of those inside it) understand just how fucking magnificent the idea is. It feels very close to how this sort of thing should be done. Once you get past the steep learning curve (we've all seen the XKCD strip right?) and appreciate just why it has to be like that (we don't want to be sitting around for a month of learning before we can get into a ship, of course) it's very easy to see, to me at least, that something of this scale is obviously going to be scary at first glance. But you just have to dive in and make it happen. And when it does, it makes me grin like a crazy person.

Something else that struck me as I started playing. In any other game I have played, with very few exceptions, you start the game as either someone who is destined to be a hero of some kind, or someone who has the powers/abilities of a hero thrust upon them and is forced to act for the good of others despite their own status or beliefs. EVE, on the other hand, abandons you in deepest space and that's it. You are not special or exemplary in any way save for the fact that you are a capsuleer. (Which I am given to understand is something special in itself in that you (plus the rest of the subscribers) are part of a group of people who are able to clone themselves and are gifted with the piloting skills that you will require.) But, aside from that, you are not the saviour of humanity, nor are you expected to perform any specific taks or fulfill anyone's premonitions of fate. In that way it is much closer to the pen and paper RPG's that seem so much rarer these days. There is no storyline (unless you choose to follow the missions) that is not created by you and the people that share the universe with you.

Strangely enough, it was just before all the controversy in the summer that I first started playing. And that whole rioting/subscription hemorhaging/anger but not merely in a typical, pointless, internet ranting way, that all made me even more excited about the game. The fact that people were so angry that they actually protested in-game. The fact that this was a world, not just a collection of numbers and textures. There was a power structure, a way for people to make their grievances known that was just as futile and impotent as protesting in real life, but looked equally cool and like something that you really wanted to be a part of. I wanted that from my games. I still do. If i'm going to be paying monthly, I want what I do to matter. I don't want it to be just busy work, like reading a book or watching a film. It's interactive for a reason, and although it may be more widespread than I am familiar with, EVE is the only example I've ever found of a truly living world in a game.

I'll see you in there.