Reviewed: July 8, 2003
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Simon & Schuster Interactive

Developer
Crowd Control Productions

Released: May 6, 2003
Genre: Simulation
Players: Online
ESRB: Teen

8
10
6
9
8.9

System Requirements

Therefore, the following review really isn’t about EVE but rather my life in EVE. I’ve been playing daily for the past 25 days, sometimes up to 10-15 hours a day. I’ve easily logged 200+ hours, built up two characters to above-average status and am still dubious as to if I can do this game justice in words. There is simply so much to do, so many places to go, so many skills to master, so many career paths to explore that it would take a hundred monkeys…err…game reviewers at a hundred keyboards a hundred days to cover half of the possibilities.

EVE is probably the most ambitious MMORPG ever conceived, both in scope and complexity. The universe is comprised of more than 5,000 solar systems, each with their own collection of planets, moons, asteroid belts, stargates, and space stations. Having just come from a 50 hour tour of duty in Freelancer I thought I had an idea of what a large universe was, but I was totally unprepared for a universe of this scale. To put this scale into words, early in the game I made a trip that consisted of 37 jumps (37 systems). After setting the destination waypoint and clicking the autopilot it took just short of an hour (of real time) to reach my target.

The other innovative hook EVE brings to the online gaming table is a dynamic player economy that is totally controlled (and sometimes manipulated) by the players. There are dozens of different types of minerals to be mined and processed into ore, which can then be sold on EVE’s open market. NPC’s will often buy and sell items but a majority of the economy is driven by real players with real needs.

While mining and minerals make up a major portion of the economy – at least for the noobs (new players) - once you find your space legs and get yourself a respectable ship you can explore other avenues of income. Pirate hunting is a logical next step up from mining as you get a bounty per ship based on their difficulty and you usually get some nice booty from the wreckage that can be sold or melted down into their primary ores and sold.

There is a unique bounty system in place where players can put a price on other players’ heads. But before you all start having delusions of becoming the next Boba Fett anyone with a bounty of any significance is generally flying around in a cruiser or a battleship and usually with an escort. By the time you are powerful enough to take him the bounty offered will be chump change. Becoming a professional bounty may sound exciting and even a bit romantic but you won’t be getting rich anytime soon.

You can also engage in Agent Missions. These are the equivalent of “quests” that you might find in those other MMORPG’s. These missions vary in their difficulty and reward based on the quality of the agent you are working with and the system you are in. There are also player-generated missions you can choose from. These often involve a steep upfront collateral payment and generally involve hauling a player purchase from point A to B within a certain time limit, sort of like an intergalactic UPS driver.

The other obvious career path is to join one of the many player-run corporations, or if you have that management drive inside you (and your character) you can even start your own. Joining a corporation usually requires you to travel to a station where that corporation has an office then filling out a job application. There are several positions to choose from, some offer salaries and others start you out as just an unpaid grunt, but you still get the membership perks such as accessing the corporate hangar for any items other members may have discarded.

Corporations are basically a group of players that have joined together as a collective – yes; there is strength in numbers – to work towards a common goal whether it be to mine, or buy blueprints and build ships to sell on the open market.

Players can buy shares (stock) in a corporation and make money as their corporation’s value increases. A good example of this is one corporation who was trying to purchase a battleship blueprint for several hundred million ISK (game dollars). Corporation members contribute cash thus buying shares (or a percentage) of the value of that blueprint and later when copies of the blueprint are sold or ships built from that blueprint are sold everyone who contributed gets their invested percentage back from the profits.

There are dozens – perhaps hundreds – of other possible career paths to choose from. Some are obvious and others are still hidden waiting to be discovered by that one inventive player. Once I discovered you could actually sell a waypoint bookmark on the open market I immediately envisioned a career as a stellar cartographer where I roamed the galaxy looking for unique and undiscovered territory and sold those coordinates to other players.

Again, I can’t stress enough that EVE is what you make of it. If you are content to hang out in noob space, do agent missions and mine Veldspar then you will probably have a pretty boring experience. If you take chances, venture out into deep space, join other players, and really get involved with the game then EVE can easily consume all of your free time, get you fired, divorced, and generally destroy your life. But you’ll have a blast doing it.

CHARACTER CREATION

The first order of business is to create your character. Each purchased copy of EVE allows you to create and run three characters, but not at the same time. Once you pick an available character slot you are given a choice of four races, Amarr, Caldari, Gallente, and Minmatar. Each race has a generic portrait, a background story, and a preloaded set of stats covering attributes like Intelligence, Charisma, Perceptions, Memory, and Willpower. Once you pick your race you then pick sex and bloodline. This further defines your character and modifies your stats appropriately.

Once these initial choices have been made you are taken to one of the most advanced character portrait generators I have ever seen in a game ever. You are given a rough composite of your chosen race and ancestry and then you can start cycling through dozens of options with a potential for infinite results. Yes, I said “infinite”, as it would be virtually impossible for any two characters in EVE to look exactly alike. Even if you went back and tried to recreate one of your own characters it would be impossible unless you wrote down every setting you chose the first time.

You can change the eyes, skin, tattoos, implants, clothes, background, hairstyle, and even their lighting. You’ll be surprised how much lighting can totally change your characters appearance. You also have independent rotation of the body (only seen from the shoulders up), and head so you can get a portrait view or have the body sideways and the head tilted toward the camera. You can also move the pupils of the eyes so they can be looking right at you or off to the side.

Oh no – we’re not done yet. There are a series of crosshair controls that let you adjust things like eyebrows, lips, and jowls. These actually articulate the facial muscles and morph the face much like the advanced software ILM uses to create virtual movie characters. Again, the possibilities are infinite and you will probably spend a great deal of time creating your first character. It took me 46 minutes to create and train Jasmine. Xanth took about 20 minutes.

As fun as all this sounds it really is wasted in this particular game. Once your character has been created you will only see them in a 2”x2” window in your character sheet or in a half-inch square thumbnail in the chat window. I really hope CCP can license this character creation engine so it can be used in other games where you can appreciate the results of your effort.

The next step is to assign five bonus points to your various attributes. This is your final chance before going to school to round out your character or load-up on one or more particular attributes in preparation for your chosen career. The problem here lies in the fact that noobs really don’t know what is available in the world of EVE so it’s not always easy to know what you want or will be doing. Often you build up your character and then fall victim to your own strengths and weakness within the game as you are forced into whatever career your skills and stats allow.

Now it’s time to go to school and this is where things start to mirror real life just a bit too much. At this point in the game you pretty much need to have a good idea of what basic career path you want to pursue and train accordingly. This is where you are going to start building your list of skills and school is the only place you can get them for free. Once you start having to buy skills you will be stunned by some of the prices. Skills only need to be purchased once and then they can be trained up to level 5 at no cost to the player other than time. Picking your skills at this stage of character development can save you time and money later in the game.

Your first step in the EVE educational system is to pick a school. Every decision you make from here on out has a nice text description, but the bottom line lies in the skills you learn and the addition of any attribute points. Once you are enrolled in school you pick your department, then a field of study, and finally any specialties. Basically it’s a four-part system to customize your character before starting the game.

WELCOME TO NOOB SPACE

Clicking on my portrait I am whisked away to a safe part of the EVE universe. EVE is comprised of more than 5,000 solar systems, each with their own level of security ranging from 1.0 (high security) to 0.0 (free-for-all). As the security rating get lower the threats increase and anything .5 or lower is relatively unprotected by NPC security.

Anyway, you find yourself in a section of 1.0 space determined by your chosen race in a nice new noob ship. Your friendly neighborhood insurance agent is circling you and the tutorial begins. The tutorial is in three parts and part one consists of space flight, navigation, mining, and a bit of combat. It’s just enough to get you started, but you will be learning about EVE for as long as you play it. Even after a month I still learn many new things each time I play. Your absolute best source of information is the built-in Help Channel and the online community.

Your second part of training begins when you dock at the space station and you begin to learn how to access the market, refine mined asteroids, repair and fit your ship with new parts, and access the agent list. There are other things to do while docked that you will learn about later in the game.

Agent training is the final part of your in-game education and consists of several missions that will have you making courier runs, or even shooting down training drones. These missions are fairly easy and pay rather well giving you some good starting money. When this tutorial is over you are given some new agent contacts and sent out into the big, bad, scary world of EVE.

WHAT TO DO FIRST

Money makes the universe go round and when you first start EVE you have little choice but to start mining. The trick is to find a relatively safe system with a nice balance of valuable asteroids and low-level NPC pirates. I found such a system early in the game and camped out there for nearly a week amassing a good deal of wealth.

During this time I started my second character, Xanth. My reasoning behind this was I heard a lot of people talking in the chat channels about how cool the Rifter ship was. The Rifter is a Minmatar fighter and Jasmine was of Amarr origin. While it’s possible to cross-train and fly ships from other races it would have taken a lot of money and time to do so. It was easier to start a second character.

Xanth proved to be a virtual goldmine. In no time I had purchased my first Probe, a speedy little frigate with a lot of cargo space. I outfitted my ship with two mining lasers and setup operations in the safe and profitable system Jasmine had discovered and started earning about 120,000 ISK per hour.

Xanth was making enough money for both Jasmine and himself, and I found you could transfer money to your other characters – or any character for that matter. So while Xanth did the work I was busy training up Jasmine’s skills preparing her for bigger and better things.

ON THE JOB TRAINING

As previously mentioned, skills need to be initially purchased and the more important the skill the more it costs. My skill to operate a cruiser cost me around 300,000 ISK. Once you buy a skill and train it you can then keep training it up to level five. The higher you go the more time (real time) it takes. Going from level 1 to level 2 may take an hour but going from level 3 to level 4 on my frigate skill took me 3 day, 13 hours, and 10 minutes. Other skills can take weeks and even months to learn.

It’s hard to be proactive about your training and skill selection. Often you will purchase or find an item that you want to install on your ship and find you don’t have the skill(s) necessary to do so. The first time this happened to me was when I wanted to install a shield extender. This required some mechanical skills that I had to quickly purchase and learn before I could use the item. The next time this happened was when I bought a missile launcher and needed to buy and learn that skill. So very often, the skills you choose to learn are driven by your purchases. Fortunately, you can find out which skills you need for each item before you buy it.

Characters can only train one skill at a time and if one character is training none of your other two (if you are playing multiple characters) can train. Yes, it’s annoying, but it’s the only way to keep things fair. On the bright side, your characters continue to train even when you aren’t playing. With this knowledge you can plan your character’s education around your real life. Going away for the weekend? Now’s the perfect time to train that skill that’s going to take 48 hours. Ideally, your characters should be training 24/7 whether you are online or not.

MOVIN’ ON UP

There are no real character levels per se in EVE. Instead, your status is reflected in the number and level of skills you have trained and the type of ships you are flying. The more you earn, the more you buy and the more you train to use those new toys. It’s an interesting dynamic that is really unparalleled by any other MMORPG out there today.

About a week into EVE I was approached by a corporate recruiter and asked to join their corporation. He explained all the advantages such as protected mining operations in low-security sectors and access to Mallers (cruiser ships) at nearly half the going market rate. They already had Maller blueprints and were manufacturing them in numbers. Their current goal was to get battleship blueprints and do the same.

I joined the corporation and relocated Xanth’s mining activities to their sector, an area of space I could never have survived on my own, but with the presence of two corporate Mallers in the asteroid field the pirates kept their distance while I mined massive amounts of Omber (a medium value rock). Another perk of being in the corporation was I no longer needed to haul each of my tiny loads back to the station. I simply jettisoned them into space and once an hour (about the lifespan of a cargo container) a Bestower (cargo ship) would fly through and pick up everyone’s containers and take them back to our base station. At the end of the day you return to the station and collect your share of the ore from the hangar and process it for sale. Needless to say, my earnings per game session grew exponentially.

TIME TO GO SHOPPING

The dynamic market in EVE creates a volatile marketplace in which items that are worth nothing one day become valuable the next and vice versa. Not only is the market driven by need but also location. A mineral might only be worth 24 ISK in one system but jump two systems away and you can get 64 ISK for that same mineral and if you’re selling in bulk that extra 40 ISK makes a huge difference.

If you are buying or selling and don’t like the current price of a particular item you can place a buy or sell order listing the quantity and the desired price along with an expiration date for the offer. If somebody turns up and agrees to your price during that time the transaction is completed. These orders are the backbone of the EVE economy.

Since there are a limited amount of items in the EVE universe chances are you won’t always be able to buy the items you want (at the best price) at the station you are shopping. This quickly became the case when outfitting a new ship. I would arrive at the station and pick-up my new craft then go to market and buy lasers, shields, cargo containers, and any skills required to run these new items, then I would bring up my assets list and find that my purchases were scattered about the galaxy. I then began the lengthy process of traveling to multiple stations picking up my purchases. Some of this process can be eliminated if you don’t mind paying higher prices for local purchases.

THE JOYS OF MULTI-TASKING

EVE offers gamers some interesting features that you won’t find in other games. The first of which is multi-session, multi-monitor support. If you have two copies of EVE installed on your computer with two unique ID’s and paid accounts you can actually play two characters at once on one computer using dual monitors.

For those of us less ambitious and not wanting to lose their entire life to this game, EVE can be played in a window. This opens up a wealth of possibilities, many of which I explored. For starters, on those lengthy multi-jump trips across the cosmos you can surf the net, read email or even enjoy a game of solitaire. Hey – even Han Solo and Chewie played holo-chess. When you settle down for the repetitive task of a 4-6 hours mining shift you can actually do “real work” in another window. I’m mining right now while I write this review and I probably wrote 4-6 other reviews during the month of June while mining in EVE. You get verbal cues when your cargo hold is full requiring a quick switch to the EVE window where you jettison your ore (or combine it with an existing container floating in space) then it’s back to work.

I’m not encouraging anyone to take their copy of EVE to the office and play it during the day unless you have a really cool boss, or you are the boss, but the more time you spend in EVE the faster you can advance. Many of you might think this doesn’t sound fun and you’re right. But remember, EVE is a life simulation and a big part of life is working and for most of us, work isn’t fun (unless you happen to be a game reviewer). At least EVE gives you the option to minimize the drudgery of mining by allowing you to do something else.

THAR BE PIRATES

Once you have acquired enough cash to outfit your character with a nice little fighting frigate you can start to have some fun that actually requires some thought and interaction. This is where things start to pick up and EVE becomes more of a game than a simulation. Once Jasmine was in a Punisher and Xanth got his Rifter I was able to leave my mining operations and go hunting - time for some payback on all those Sansha and Blood minions that harassed me when I was first starting out.

At first glance combat may seem a bit simplistic and in the beginning it is, but as you get more ships with more fitting slots you can start to experiment with all sorts of exciting modules. You’ll naturally want some primary guns and these can range from energy weapons to projectile guns. I prefer energy weapons only because I hate hassling with buying ammo. You have beam lasers and pulse lasers that can be fitted with a variety of crystals to enhance their damage. You have rocket and missile launchers, smart bombs, warp diffusers, sensor arrays, jamming devices, shield enhancers, and even a vampire-style weapon, the Nesferatu, that drains energy from your target and adds it to yours.

And that is only scratching the surface of a list of hundreds of items you can buy and find in EVE. Most of the good stuff can’t even be purchased on the open market, but rather found in the wreckage of destroyed pirates. Installing and using these devices is a clever orchestration of managing your ship’s CPU and energy reserves plus your own learned skills. By the time you work your way up to a battleship the sheer number of weapons and other devices you have at your disposal as well as the potential for their combined use is overwhelming.

REACHING THE PLATEAU

So when does the game start to wear thin? That really depends on each individual player and their own personal goals they have set for themselves. Personally, I swore off online games after playing Ultima Online and Anarchy Online - not because I didn’t enjoy them but because it became all too easy to lose myself (and my life) in these type of games.

As my review period comes to an end I find myself growing weary of EVE. Having to play and review 10-30 games a month has probably hurt my attention span, but the fact that I have easily logged 200+ hours with this game in less than a month says something for its addictive quality – especially for someone who has sworn off on online games.

I’m sure there is a wealth of unexplored opportunities out there. I’ve never explored the business side of the game, never started a corporation, never built a factory or became a space station manager, but I really have no desire to do so either. As of this review I have just purchased my first Maller and have equipped it quite nicely so I am now ready to explore (in relative safety) some of the more dangerous systems in EVE.

SEND IN THE CLONES AND THE INSURANCE ADJUSTER

The last thing to cover is something I haven’t had to use but is still worth mentioning. As you invest more time and money into your character and ship you need to protect yourself and your assets. If you are unfortunate enough to lose your ship in battle you are ejected into space in an escape pod and can travel to the nearest station where you can purchase or take over an existing ship. If your pod is destroyed then your character is lost as well and you will have to start completely over. For a high level character, this could be devastating.

To protect your character you need to visit a medical center on a space station and purchase a clone. There are several levels of clones that range in price and effectiveness. Basic clones restore lost characters but not their skills. Since you may have accumulated months of training time you can buy advanced clones that will restore your character and their skills to various levels based on the cost and level of cloning.

To protect your ship you can buy insurance. Insurance works much the same way as clones. You can purchase a simple policy that replaces your ship or get more expensive insurance that protects the modules you have installed. Insurance only lasts for a short period of time so it’s best to purchase just before you embark on a dangerous mission – sort of like buying flight insurance before hopping that plane to Cuba.

That pretty much sums up my experience with EVE. Even after a month of continuous gaming I’m confident I have only scratched the surface of this massive title. There is literally a lifetime of gaming to be had here assuming you have the time to live dual lives.

As I was warping around the cosmos I was spellbound by the fact that no two solar systems were alike. Every backdrop for every system I visited was worthy of becoming a Windows’ wallpaper. Perhaps I didn’t explore far enough but if there are in fact 5,000 unique space vistas then I am even more impressed – if that is possible. Each system has unique planets and with high planetary detail turned on in the graphics options you will marvel at the complexity of the surface textures and detail. Some planets have orbiting moon while others have nebulous rings and orbiting space stations.

Space stations are also a marvel to behold and while they eventually start to double-up you will have to travel far and visit dozens of them before you see a duplicate. And even when the stations do use the same model it is always associated with the same race and type of station. Stations are animated with moving searching lights or in the case of the refinery stations; jets of flame shooting from exhaust stacks. Inside the stations you can pan around your ship and enjoy the scale and complexity of these massive interiors. You can see shuttles driving around and other ships entering and exiting the station. It’s a bustle of activity that’s quite exciting.

Both stations and ships all have very detailed models that look very metallic and reflect the ambient light. Circling around my Punisher in flight you can see the sunlight reflecting from the metallic copper finish and enjoy the warm blue glow from the engines. Zoom in during a mining operation and you will marvel at the detail of the mining lasers recoiling as they suck the ore from the rocks.

The interface is flawless and I really have to commend the designers for using a font that is perfectly legible when playing at resolutions of 1600x1200 or higher. The icon menu (NEOCOM) along the left side of the screen can expand for text descriptions of the various icons as well as a portrait of your character. Almost every icon opens up a window and it can easily get overwhelming. You can minimize these windows and they will turn into file tabs along the bottom of your screen for easy access to your favorites. There is even a built-in web browser. It’s limited in what it can display but it’s good for bringing up corporate web pages and other HTML information provided by the game designers such as help and tutorial information.

Perhaps the best features of the EVE interface is that there are multiple ways to do the same function, and this has been further enhanced after the most recent patch. Most of this functionality is related to navigation and helping you get to where you need to go. You can navigate within a system by clicking the Scanner button, bringing up a list of all possible destinations sorted by numerous criteria or you can click on the small square button next to the system name to bring up a menu of destinations categorized by type. You can also click in the actual 3D view on any visible icons. These icons come in various shapes to specify destinations like planets, moons, stations, stargates, asteroid belts, PC and NPC ships and cargo containers.

Navigating outside of the system is handled by using the massive 3D map then using the search engine to find and input the name of your destination. You can also set the destination by clicking on actual stars or right clicking on system names found in active agent missions or in your asset list and you can bookmark any location (even individual asteroids) for future reference.

Special visual effects are excellent as well. The real-time lighting is wonderful and you will see surrounding asteroids reflecting the golden glow of your mining lasers. The stargates are perhaps my favorite effect as you see a white glow build up then shoot your ship out of the cylinder like a rifle bullet. One type of stargate even has these green fluorescent type lights that flicker to life just before you are shot into the next system.

Of course the most impressive effect in the game is the warp effect that surrounds your ship in this indescribable misty vortex. You can pan around during the warp and enjoy this stunning view from all angles. Going in and out of warp is equally as impressive as large objects like planets and stations will shrink away or zoom up close in a stretching effect.

The various lasers and rockets all have appropriate sound effects but none really stand out. Some of the sounds like bumping into a container sound like backing into a trash can with your car. The most impressive sounds are found inside the space station where you get this murmur of activity like people are actually working and when you open up the market window you get a sound sample that could have been taken from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. And I can’t overlook the amazing sound of traveling at warp speed. The crackle and roar sounds identical to the sound of a jet flying high overhead. It’s truly amazing.

EVE comes with a jukebox preloaded with plenty of “mood music”. It’s all very ambient and spacey stuff that you’ll hardly notice. It’s quite enjoyable and never grew repetitive even after 200 hours of gameplay, but if you do get tired of it there is nothing stopping you from creating your own playlist using any MP3’s you might have on your hard drive.

It’s my personal opinion that $49 is a bit steep for EVE even though you can find it for around $35 most everywhere now. I’m a firm believer that ALL online games should be sold for the price of the first complimentary month and the cost of materials (CD, manual, etc) – generally no more than $20.

The $13 it costs to keep playing is fair only because of the level of quality you are getting from the designers and online support team. They have a team of GM’s online helping players with real-time support and they bring the EVE servers down for one hour each day to insure stability and do whatever else they do for those 60 minutes. All of this costs money and even with thousands of online players paying $13 each month I doubt anyone is getting rich.

I really have to commend the programmers for some serious network code that allows EVE to run flawlessly on dial-up modems. The only time I noticed any lag (and it was so short I hate to even use the word – it was more of a hiccup) was when opening the market or changing the scope of the market so that it had to refresh and when warping to an asteroid belt. But considering the amount of shared information being pulled off the EVE server a slight delay is to be expected and even those with broadband connections confirmed similar delays.

Sure, it starts off slow, but so does every other game of this type. If your wallet exceeds your patience then you can probably purchase a high level character complete with ships and money on eBay. As of this review there are more than 200 auctions currently going on and some characters are going for hundreds of dollars. There are even people selling ISK for real US dollars. Talk about lazy!

Personally, I enjoyed my month of EVE and if I didn’t have a stack of games sitting here waiting to be reviewed I would be inclined to keep playing. But even with EVE’s unique ability to play in the background while I do “other things”, my characters have advanced to a point where they require hand-on attention. You can’t really fight pirates or storm through blockades while answering email or working on another review.

If you have plenty of ambition and free time then I can’t think of a better online game you could play. It’s stable, it’s fun, there is a great player community, and the possibilities are endless, limited only by your drive and imagination. Space might be the final frontier but EVE is the genesis of a new type of online experience.