EVE Online

One Big Union... Ah, that is... One Big World

From both a technical and a design standpoint, EVE Online is a staggering accomplishment. Yes, it's a massively multiplayer game--but you can forget most of what you know about MMOs when thinking about it.

For one thing, there are no shards or servers: EVE is one vast universe, and all of its more than 100,000 players live in it. No worries about whether or not your friends are on the same server, because they are. No zones, either. Unless you've developed an MMO yourself, you may not realize how hard this is to pull off; EVE is supported by a back-end system that dynamically reallocates areas of the universe from one physical machine to another as load demands. Prior to EVE, this kind of technology was used almost exclusively in high-load financial processing systems.

The problem of managing load isn't the only reason most MMOs use "shards"; there's also the sheer cost of content. When it launched, EverQuest's world was roughly the size of Rhode Island; it takes a lot of time and money to build "virtual Rhode Island," if you will. Every tree and rock needs to be created and placed. If you want everyone to be in the same world, suddenly you're looking at crteating not virtual Rhode Island, but virtual North America; it's cost prohibitive.

How does EVE manage the problem? Very simply; the universe consists of algorithmically generated star systems, and the content, too, is generated either by procedural systems--or by the players themselves. Thus you will not find, in EVE, the kind of hand-crafted quests and cities you see in conventional MMOs; instead, you'll find huge player-run corporations, armadas of ships operated by players, NPCs who trade or fight, and vast commercial empires.

In most MMOs, you never feel like you can really affect the world; it may change over time, but mostly because of refreshed content from the developers. But the world itself is curiously static. In EVE, by contrast, virtually everything is owned and operated by the players themselves, and events that can have a real impact on you--like the outbreak of war in a sector--are events that the players themselves create.

In short, this game is so different from conventional MMOs that if you have any interest in the genre, you must check EVE Online out. You may or may not decide it's the kind of game for you, but the contrast with other MMOs will be enlightening, and suggest ways for the form to evolve in directions other than the now-stereotyped fantasy level-grind of games like World of Warcraft.

What's it like to play? In EVE, your character is the owner of a ship, and gameplay is always in space--although you may dock at space stations and other facilities, you never appear as a person in the game. The universe consists of more than 5000 star systems, which vary widely in terms of "security level." Essentially, a level of zero means there is no law (at least none enforced by NPC police), and you may be attacked at any time. Initially, your character appears in an area with high security; while it's still possible for someone to gank you, if someone does, they're likely to be attacked and destroyed by NPC cops, and will lose "security status," meaning they may be effectively barred from some areas (or have a bounty placed on their head).

In other words, player-vs.-player is permitted, but is somewhat limited by the security system. If your ship is destroyed, you escape in a pod, which you can pilot back to a base--but if someone is particularly nasty (or mad at you), he can destroy your pod as well. However, you can purchase clone backups, which are activated when your pod is killed; there's usually some loss of skills when this happens, however. You can also purchase insurance for your ship, as they are quite expensive.

As you might expect, your character initially has few skills, your ship is small and not terribly powerful, and you have little starting cash. As a new player, you need to go out and start doing things to earn money; asteroid mining, courier services, and trading are typical early tasks. There is no "levelling" system, but you can always improve your skills by purchasing "skill kits"--essentially plug-ins to your neural network interface that teaches you new skills instantaneously (yes, we're all cyborgs in the future).

The heart of the game is commerce and industry. As the game goes on, you can design new ships, build and own space stations, and join one of the player-run corporations (Eve's equivalent of guilds), which often run substantial manufacturing and commercial enterprises. Behind the scenes is a complicated economic simulation in which prices rise and fall with supply and demand--both sides of the equation provided mainly by players themselves.

This is a vast, open-ended game which supports an amazing variety of different activities, and a wide variety of gameplay styles, from peaceful trading to all-out warfare. It's also surprisingly beautiful, given that it's all in space; check out the screenshots.

Reviews:

Game Revolution: "Eve Online is the biggest game you could possibly hope to play."

PC Format: "...What's exciting about Eve is the spectrum of possibilities that it offers.