The Eve Online demo is a massively MMORPD (the D is for demo) where you play the part of a spaceship. Technically, you’re really a person inside a spaceship, but you never get out and walk around, so you’re basically a spaceship.
What sets this apart from the demos of some other MMOs, aside from playing as a spaceship, is that there’s just one universe, and everyone playing is in it together. Whereas demos like World of Warcraft have a bunch of different servers to choose from, there’s just one gamespace in Eve. That’s pretty cool.
You start the demo by watching a movie that explains what’s going on — it’s pretty much the standard sci-fi stuff about how earth was crowded or something so everyone left and colonized other solar systems, and there are stargates and wormholes but one closed and everyone got stuck on the other side and they don’t get along, blah blah blah.
When the movie is over, or, more specifically, when you get tired of the movie not being over and end it yourself, you start by customizing your character (not the spaceship, but the person inside spaceship who never gets out of the spaceship).
There are all sorts of races, religions, factions, and specialties to choose from, so I went with the one that had the biggest tits. I did my best to make her look like the date from hell. You know, the girl with great tits that you really want to sleep with but you just know you’ll regret it because, seriously, yo… she crazy.
Then, you get to visit the beautiful and majestic Tutorial Nebula, where a predictably dispassionate British female voice instructs you on how to use your ship. Just once, can’t a computer voice in sci-fi not be British? Can’t it sound Japanese or like some greaseball from Yonkers? I know England conquered the world, but that was a long time ago, and I don’t even think they even have a spaceship these days. Let’s face it, when space is conquered and intelligent starship computers are given voices, they’re either going to sound Asian or like some American celebrity. Probably Tom Hanks, knowing us.
Anyway. Being in the Eve universe is extremely enjoyable. There’s pleasant mood music and the game is really gorgeous. It’s all very serene and captivating.
To fly to a nearby asteroid, all you have to do is click the asteroid and select “approach” from the drop-down menu. It’s a piece of cake. The voice also instructs you on how to have space battles, which involve selecting a target, choosing an option from the drop-down menu to move near the target, and clicking on a button that looks like a gun. Again, it’s a snap. Nothing to it. Which is why this demo fails.
I remember as a kid, imagining myself piloting a vessel through space, and never once did I picture drop-down menus being involved. Han Solo never used drop-down menus. I honestly don’t know what Han Solo did to fly the Falcon, I don’t think they ever showed him doing anything but squeezing those hyperspace joysticks together, but I’m pretty sure he had some sort of steering wheel or control handles or foot pedals or something that didn’t involve a drop-down menu. I’m not bashing drop-down menus, I find them useful in all manner of activities, like using Microsoft Word or doing online banking. But for space travel?
I also don’t remember him ever ordering Chewie to press the button that had a picture of a gun on it, and then they sat there staring blankly out the window until the fight was over. No, he and Luke would run out of the cockpit and climb up or down that ladder into those gun pods and they’d swivel around in their seats and aim the guns and fire big red lasers into space, and it was exciting. Eve is not exciting.
I realize that MMOs do things differently. They’re not meant to be combat simulations, they’re meant to be… I don’t really know what they’re meant to be. I’ve played a few, now, and they just seem like a never-ending series of chores that you pay monthy fees for. I just don’t get them.
All that said, I still give Eve Online six things out of ten things. I really need to come up with a solid rating system one of these days.
Should you download the demo? Absolutely! It’s totally free for two three weeks, and it is extremely enjoyable flying around in space. The music is soothing, the scenery is beautiful, and if the combat required skill or reflexes or even that you be in the room while it’s happening, I’d be totally into it.
25 responses so far ↓
1 Derek // Apr 6, 2008 at 10:15 am
XD
2 Theory // Apr 6, 2008 at 10:33 am
The menu-based movement is for technical reasons, AFAIK. CCP’s servers would melt if everyone was flying around with direct input.
3 Tales // Apr 6, 2008 at 11:02 am
“MMOs just seem like a never-ending series of chores that you pay monthy fees for.”
QFT :D
4 Mrmong // Apr 6, 2008 at 11:06 am
its impossible to get decent stuff without people giving you it unless you were there from like the beginning
5 Dan // Apr 6, 2008 at 11:43 am
I like the space combat in Star Wars Galaxies. At times it is annoying and difficult, but shots don’t go through walls and you actually have to turn and aim and actually fire to hit something. The ground based combat is just annoying in comparison (and shots go through walls and over vast distances there, and enemies never miss regardless of distance).
6 fishface60 // Apr 6, 2008 at 12:50 pm
At least in SWG you did have direct input, but the non-space bit let the whole thing down.
If you want a similar experience to EVE I would recommend X3, also available on Steam, it’s single-player but you get to do all the fancy manoeuvres to dodge getting hit.
7 maw3193 // Apr 6, 2008 at 12:51 pm
British voices will still be used. They still hire British actors in Hollywood for the sole reason of being British (after all, the biggest thing Stephen Fry has going for him is that he practically formed the British stereotype)
8 PsyW // Apr 6, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Check out Infinity: Quest for Earth - it’s an indie in-development MMO (don’t laugh, the team is actually making serious progress- just look at the screenshots) with twitch skill-based direct-input flight and combat. No damned drop-down menus.
-PsyW
9 SeanAY // Apr 6, 2008 at 2:02 pm
C’mon, sci-fi computer voices is all we got left, leave us English alone :P
10 AR // Apr 6, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Your crazy lady is missing some of her arms…
11 Oliver // Apr 6, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Loving your tags mate!
And hey! We colonized your country, allowing you to boot us out and go on to rule the world!
Don’t begrudge us our dispassionate computer voices ^_^
12 Belcher // Apr 6, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Oh my god, Ugleigh Buhtz… I laughed heartily.
13 EelPie // Apr 7, 2008 at 1:13 am
You might wanna try Freelancer.
It’s not an MMO, but it’s has an incredibly fun-arcadish gameplay.
14 Pentadact // Apr 7, 2008 at 4:36 am
Ha. I like the combat in EVE Online for precisely the reason you don’t. I’m convinced that by the time we’re all jetting around in space-ships of our own, we will be using drop-down menus to direct a mostly automated craft.
Or our brains.
Almost all MMOGs use a combat interface like EVE’s, clicking pictures of attacks from a menu, but EVE’s the only one where it’s conceivable that a person involved in that kind of combat actually would be doing precisely that. Rather than, say, swinging a sword around.
As you might know, the next big change to EVE is going to be letting you get out and walk around as a person in Stations and other public areas. Hundreds of thousands of people who’ve just been heads for years are suddenly going to find themselves transplanted into shiny new bodies all at once. It’s going to be kind weird.
15 mr T....ompson // Apr 7, 2008 at 7:12 am
i play (and pay) for EVE, but i dont do it on a computer that can handle the fancy graphics, i play it on the bendable laptop that i type this on. yet for some reason i was hooked right from the fourth day of the 2 week trail (i went to their site instead of steam) for no apparent reason. while i may be wasting my money, at least it is on the thing that sets the genre, for example, WoW set the standard for MMOs, and since then every one has been just trying to copy WoW. EVE is the standard for space MMOs.
16 atomicthumbs // Apr 7, 2008 at 10:40 am
I love EVE! I have a Thorax and I wuv it and cuddle it and call it Argo.
And shoot pirates with my railguns. And my siege cannon.
17 Damn brits // Apr 7, 2008 at 4:31 pm
I hate that voice, makes me want to squeeze its throat. Damn brits are so full of themselves
18 Mike // Apr 8, 2008 at 11:53 am
I think it’s unfair to rate the game thus. A lot of the skill and expertise aren’t clear until you’ve devoted a lot of time into the game. Combat can be very fast and intense, just not the combat in the first 3 weeks, which is essentially training you. The game kicks off after about 3 months (although I found it enjoyable for the first 3 as well) when you have many options, goals, and friends.
It’s also entirely possible to obtain anything in the game by yourself, it’s just hard.
19 Joe // Apr 10, 2008 at 9:26 am
See, Mike, that’s a problem in the game. It should not take three months to get to a point where the game *stops* being a mission-running, money-making grind. I really liked the game, but a lot of the mechanics and the way the company polices the universe and even its own developers just turned me off just as I was getting into it.
20 Crelda // Apr 25, 2008 at 6:19 pm
The computer voice isn’t so dispassionate when you get pod killed by another player for the first time. She gets really fired up.
I’m also not sure that the phrase “You can not warp because you are being warp scrambled” would be so effective if she had any more feeling. Its like she’s saying “your gonna die now but nobody cares”.
21 ChronoLynx // May 7, 2008 at 6:38 pm
EvE is an excellent MMO (not quite and RPG if you know what I mean). I am ChronoLynx in-game. Lemme start off by saying that the TRIAL is not a demo of the game but actually the full game itself. You can do everything in the trial that you could in the full game minus train some skills(that you would never reach anyways) and give moneys away. Other then that this seems to be about right.
The universe is a harsh cold place where when you fail… you fail hard.
(Would like to also say that this should have a higher rating imho but that is what an opinion is for. [9.2/10])
22 Aenir // May 21, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I only played the demo, but I was surprised you didn’t mention how travel times were realistic and you had to have the game running (ie, 4 hour long warps).
23 ClearlynotaRobot // Jun 6, 2008 at 7:02 pm
I’m hoping for Jimmy Stewart or Morgan Freeman for the soothing voice of a computer.
24 Jace Falco // Jun 22, 2008 at 3:19 am
I might have to give some of these a go. I like space-based games, IMO there aren’t enough of them.
What I’d really like though, is a game like this with capital ship combat like Age of Pirates, and small ship combat like the old X-Wing games.
And stop slagging off the British. Or, as you really mean, the English. The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish wouldn’t really like you grouping them under the same umbrella, as it were.
25 Free Chat // Jul 20, 2008 at 11:13 pm
I found this blog on a google search and boy am I glad I did. I thought I heard someone mention it in a free chat room.
Awesome read!
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