The many faces of EVE Online

Found an interesting article about how to put the strategy back in strategy games. Not sure how much of what he's suggesting could be put into an RTS before it turned into a civ- or social-management game like Civ IV, but he makes some interesting points about how one-dimensional and similar many RTS games are. I personally think that the model of victory by attrition needs to be questioned before quite such a sea change in RTS development is attempted. As much as I like them, the problem is the fact that probably 90% of RTS games are won by weight of numbers (assuming a slight troop mix) and not actual strategy OR tactics. That said, I come from a mostly single-player perspective on these, so until they get the AI up to a more adaptive level, I'm probably only getting about half the experience.

So despite my generally anti-MMO leanings at the moment I decided, about a week back, to give EVE Online another try. A little over a year ago I did the 14-day trial, and generally enjoyed it but wasn't enthused enough to start paying the subscription, and thusly my character was forever consigned to the bio-mass reprocessing station. Recently, however, I've been feeling an extreme affinity for sci-fi and space-based games and media: witness my recent glowing experience with Homeworld: Cataclysm and the resulting review on GGE). EVE had come highly recommended to me from several people, and the general concept - a starship-based, player-driven sandbox galaxy - sounded extremely appealing yet again, just as it did a year ago. And since I wasn't in the middle of researching for comps, I figured I might have a better time with it this time.

Basically, I did. The game is quite fun, and the sheer number of options for what to do with yourself is stunning. I did a little mining, a fair amount of combat, some team play and some soloing. I even moved all my ships over ten systems so I could be nearer the White Wolf Enterprises offices - a major impetus to start up again was hearing that White Wolf was teaming up with the makers of EVE and had an in-game corporation (guild). I was really fired up this time. But this afternoon, thinking about what awaited me a couple months of EVE-ing down the road, I just wasn't that jazzed.

What I wanted was something that would give a richer, more interactive experience than WoW while requiring less game time, or at least less structured game time (i.e. no raids). I figured that EVE would come with that, given that the main method of advancement is training up skills, a process which continues even while you're logged off (possibly the single best innovation in the game, and there are lots of them). But from what I saw, I'd still both need and want to spend lots of time mining or getting pirate bounties or PVPing my ass off, which is what this game seems to do best at. And at the moment, I'm not really sure I want that. It'd probably be fun and I'm almost positive that I'd freaking love it once I got past a certain point and moved out into 0.0 space (sectors with no NPC security, where literally anything goes; EVE's equivalent of end-game content).

But I really don't want to spend that month, or probably several months, getting skilled up and familiar enough with the intricacies of PVPing in an extremely unstructured world, just to spend the rest of my time in the game worrying about losing my ships at every turn. Because the game is VERY high-stakes for a game, and it encourages player piracy, skullduggery, and competition. This means that it also practically requires an active, supportive, and cohesive corporation to back you up, which is the part that appealed to me the most (other than the sweet spaceships, made all the more beautiful by the recent graphical redesign and upgrade).

So basically, EVE has lots of things I want from a game, and even more of what I want from an MMO. But ultimately, it's not what I want at the moment. It looks to be a fantastic game with more depth than you could scratch in a year, but I don't think that's for me right now. I have waaaay too many games on deck right now to get distracted with another open-ended MMO. So huzzah! I've resisted the temptation, for once, with the main thought in my mind that I want to play more games. I feel good. And slightly lame, since I'm blogging about this at such length, but hey. Like I've said before, I like to see myself write almost as much as Jack Thompson likes to hear himself litigate (unless he gets his contentious ass disbarred....we can only hope.

8 days until Sins of a Solar Empire...methinks this may quench my lust for epic space battles for a time.