Thursday, January 28, 2010

EVE Online: Sky's the Limit



In CrazyKinux's The EVE Blog Banter Special Edition: Why we love EVE Online , CrazyKinux asked all EVE players a very important question:


“Why do you love EVE Online so much?”


Would you like to know what the beautiful thing about that question is?


The number of answers.



You see, there's so many things to love in EVE, simply because there's so many things to do! Missions, mining, pirating, exploring, conquering, scamming, building, buying, selling, trading... this whole article could become a list of the things you could do in EVE if I let it! There is virtually an infinite amount of things you can do in EVE Online, and the best part is that you get to choose what you want to do, when you want to do it.


EVE Online lets you play on your terms, letting you do whatever you want, whenever you want. You want to mine? You don't have to sit in front of the computer for hours a day grinding up your mining skill to x level, you merely start the skill training, log on when it's finished and start shooting those rocks. You can level up on your own time, doing things that you want to do. In EVE you don't have simple linear choices between a couple options, you have thousands, if not millions of possibilities, and every possible choice has a possible effect on the game itself.


I think in one of CCP's excellent advertisement videos they talked about something which they dubbed “The Butterfly Effect,” which highlights the amazing fact that the EVE Online universe is an open sandbox, anyone can get in and kick your sandcastle down. There's no simple picking of one out of two factions, you have to decide if you want to fight and who and what you want to fight for. In EVE your decisions matter. Not only does what you do have an impact on the internal organization of the game, but it also has direct impacts on other players. You take over a station for your alliance, and your enemies suddenly become locked out. You decide to blow up somebody and that player loses their ship and everything in it. They don't just respawn with some more ammo and a yearning for vengeance, they have lost something that they put in time to work for. Similarly, if you get killed, you too, lose your ship, and even those precious skillpoints that you have invested to make your character able to do those things you so love. In EVE, everything you do makes some difference, whether adding a couple more units of tritanium to the market, exploring unknown space, or routing thousands of enemy players from their virtual homes, pillaging and demolishing anything, or anyone, who stands in your alliance's way.






I love science fiction, and EVE is the closest you can get to the real thing. The EVE backstory and excellent trailers, story videos, and chronicles as, well as the in-game news service, provide one of the most immersive virtual worlds I've ever encountered. It's one of the things that keeps drawing me back. You feel like you are part of a real world, where there is real politics, wars, tragedies, and miracles which you can be a part of. Unlike many games, it's almost as if you are invited to add your chapter to the story of EVE, and many people have.


In fact, the people of EVE are one of the things that make the game so good. There are tens of thousands of people logged in to one world at any moment from all around the globe, each doing what they want to, and each one of them are just as immersed in the game as the next one, each one of them having some kind of effect on their fellow players. It's not a static game with static players and cheap AI, they are real. They act real, sometimes making foolish mistakes costing them a month's worth of in-game money, sometimes creating devious strategies and planting spies in your alliance, costing you a year's worth of work. They are all real, they are all an important part of the EVE universe. To top it off, the EVE community is one of the tightest knit groups of players ever. I have never seen a forum used as often as EVE's, with players constantly posting their thoughts and ideas, many of which are used by the developers.


The sky is really the limit for all the amazing things that make EVE Online the best game out there. In fact, I could go on and on about how good EVE is all day, about how there is so many things to do, so many people to do those things with, and the impact of those actions to other players, but I'm afraid I would need quite a bit more then one article. CrazyKinux's question was: “Why do you love EVE Online so much?”


My answer?


Because there is so much to love.



Fly Safe,


Prideful

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