Posts Tagged ‘EVE Online’

Kotaku had a recent article that I quite liked: Space Games Don’t Have to be Cold and Lifeless. This article really got me thinking about why there is so much to like in games like EVE, and even STO – yet I have never really clicked with them. As much as I love the endless possibility that exists in New Eden, I just can’t find immersion in being a capsuleer. I need to be a real person, in a real environment.

Humans wouldn’t just exist in space, floating alone in some endless black starry void. They would live in human environments. Even if you were restricted to a ship or space station, it would still be a human environment. From a gleaming capitol station with shops and gardens, to floating rust buckets held together with wire and duct tape – you would still have  a place to work together, a bunk where you laid your head (probably decorated with pictures of family and pets and the odd religious symbol for luck), and a commissary where you ate together, got drunk, and bitched about your job. The sleeping quarters would smell of farts and the ghosts of food would haunt the mess hall. It would be real, not always pretty, and very human.

Give me a game where I can feel like a real person as well as a spacefarer or galactic warrior or whatever.

That is part of the reason why I loved Battlestar Galactica: the ongoing poker game in the common room, the ratty bar, the boxing ring where the aggressive would burn some testosterone. Yes, you would go out in your fighter, hopefully to return to life and friends and normal life. You didn’t exist only in a small box of instrumentation and endless vistas of stars. I would think that you’d go mad quite quickly if you were.

Give me this game, and I will be such a fan…it would be the game that I have been waiting for for a very long time.

I think I let too much time go by since I last played EVE. When I re-subbed, I did manage to get myself and my main ships back out of scary-low-security space without getting blown up, podded and teabagged, but now I’m at a but of a loss as to what I should be doing.

I’ve been flying around to some of the bases in the area where I’m located, but none of the agents will now talk to me. Since I happened to have a pile of stuff at that base, I’m assuming that I was there for a reason (prior to turning to piracy), but I’m evidently the red-headed stepchild of that region of space. Perhaps it has something to do with being flagged as having a low security status – I’m not sure how to check. Perhaps it’s just been too long, and I need to start over again and do lower-level missions? No idea.

Plus, the game client isn’t running well since I reinstalled the game and updated. I seem to remember EVE always being rock-solid, but I commonly crash to desktop (once rebooting entirely, which was a rude surprise) and I have intermittent glitches such as not being able to open the Market tab or not being able to see what I have fitted to my ship (not that I would remember why I had all that stuff in the first place!). Very frustrating.

EVE (for me at least) totally isn’t a solo-friendly game. You really, really need to belong to a corporation. Mining bores me to tears, and there are only so many missions that you can do…it really helps to have people to talk to while you’re jumping through gate 11 out of 25. Zzzzzzzzz…

I’ll need to see what happens with Rift, and barring getting totally engrossed in that game, perhaps start looking around for a newb-friendly corporation.

This is probably long after everyone else has seen it, but I just resubbed to EVE (couldn’t even remember how to fly my damn ship!) and I fell in love with the intro video when you start the game.