Introduction
Now I know some of you have forayed into the Eve forum down there from time to time, so I'm here to tell you what you're missing by not playing this awesome stunner (both visually and content-wise) of a MMONG.
Gameplay
The Eve universe is massive, with over 5000 star systems, 5000 stations and 250,000 moons to potentially explore. You will most likely start the game in a station in '1.0 space', the highest security-rated area (1.0 is the highest and is closely monitored by police to stop naughtiness, 0.0 is basically lawless). All of this space is split into administrative 'regions', controlled by different factions, mostly to aid navigation and trade.
To the uninitiated, even the GUI can seem a little intimidating, and that's even before you undock for the first time. Thankfully, there's a handy little Tutorial to help you take your first steps into a big world. You'll start off in what's often lovingly referred to as a 'Noob ship', a small frigate with very limited firepower and defensive capabilities. Even from there, it's completely up to you what you do. With a non-sharded world that can have upwards of 20,000 people online at any one time, there's a career to suit anyone, from mining to trading to production to piracy, you name it, it's there.
Most new players will start off either mining or doing agent missions in order to earn ISK (InterStellar Kredits) to spend on bigger and better ships and equipment. When enough ISK has been earned, you can buy your first 'real' frigate, a small ship with more space to install guns, armour and whatever else you might fancy. All of this purchasing, by the way, is done through the regional market, where people can buy and sell things to each other, and people can also buy from NPC characters.
Now don't think you can come into the game straight away and think 'I want to fly X ship', cause it ain't that simple. The skill system dictates what ships you can fly and what modules you can use, what bonuses your ship gets (or doesn’t get) and, in some cases, how fast other skills train. It's all time based and is independent of the time spent in-game, so for example a 3-day skill can be set to train, and you can come back 3 'real-life' days later and it will be finished (I say 'real-life' because when you start playing Eve, you forget you have a 'real-life'). However, once a skill is trained, it cannot be 'un-learned', so there's no need to train it again. Some skills require other lesser skills to be trained as a pre-requisite. Skills are trained in 5 levels, training level 1 takes about 15 minutes, where training from level 4 to 5 can take a week or more.
New content is brought into the game via a patching system, and unlike some other games *cough*WorldofWarcraft*cough* these are all free to download from the Eve website. This makes sure that people can still be kept in the loop without having to trudge down to Game and shell out for an Expansion Pack. This generally works very well, with only some minor problems, like we have experienced in the past few days.
There is a 1 hour daily downtime at 11am GMT, but this is usually shortened if they get everything done in time. This is the usual time for Eve-players to bombard the forums with useless posts about random crap, and I'm usually glad when it's over so I can get back into the game.
Sights and Sounds
The graphical interface for this game is nothing short of awesome, with graphics that will take your breath away, even with a crappy graphics card like mine. There is next to no graphical lag, except, perhaps, for 50+ fleet battles, and most of the time everything runs as smooth as, erm, something with Vaseline on it.
Soundwise, I would definitely recommend getting 5.1 surround to enjoy this game to the fullest. I didn't have it for my first two months of playing, and I immediately noticed the difference the first time I booted it up.
Stuff that sucks
As mentioned above, sometimes there can be server side hardware issues that can mess up the gaming experience entirely. The server has just been upgraded to 64-bit, with a new patch this past Thursday, and there are teething troubles, but I would expect these to be ironed out in the next few days to a week. This, all things considered, is rare, and a small price to pay to enjoy such a great game.
Also, this game is on a subscription basis, currently about £8.50 per month. This amount is cut down if you pay for several months in advance. Again, this is a small price for such a great game.
Conclusion
Even with this long post, I reckon I've barely even scratched the surface of what Eve is about. I reckon the best way for you guys to understand this game is to experience this game for yourself. Eve does a 14-day free trial, just ask one of us Eve players and we'll be happy to send you a trial key through to your e-mail inbox. The client is about 500MB and can be obtained from the Eve website at www.eve-online.com.
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