Zero Punctuation: Eve Online

[lord667]

what if your eyes boiled out of your head right now?
Told you it could get ridiculous

Well, I can't imagine playing MMO's in Braille so it could do wonders for my social life.

 

[Neurowaste]

Doesn't look like much fun, trying to find a decent space/planet exploration game, but, not many choices around. Anyways, great review, and, the skill trees would fry my brain.

 

[badoli]

I tried the game thanx to the beautyful ships. It was a mistake. Most of the time i was watching the game play itself. Seriously, i was sitting watching TV and once in a while checking wether my ship was still mining ore or already was filled up ready to go. And my goal at that point (being in one of these corporations) was to get a bigger ship to mine even more ore to get a bigger ship to mine more... you get the point. This was just broken up by enormously booooring traveling between stations: Klick jumpgate. Wait until you reached jumpgate and jumped. Fly to next jumpgate. Wait until you reached jumpgate and jumped. Fly to station. Wait until you reached station. Sell ore. Fly back to jumpgate.... WUAAAAH!

 

[McGuckin]

14 day free trial? didnt even last an hour, ive never uninstalled anything that fast in my entire life lol

 

[KiiWii]

what if your eyes boiled out of your head right now?
Told you it could get ridiculous

Well, I can't imagine playing MMO's in Braille so it could do wonders for my social life.

Hahah xD
Tell you what thought, you probably could play EVE in Braille, its pretty text based. It'd take freaking ages though. =]

 

[insanelich]

Eve is the game that made me look upon WoW more favorably.

I don't feel accomplished once I've attained something big in a game. If I didn't have fun getting there I just feel I've wasted time. Frankly, WoW isn't anywhere close to perfect either but it is significantly better than Eve.

 

[PxDn Ninja]

and in terms of training, I can get my equipment long before you would have the skills to use the Battleships stuff. Just about every aspect of the game is deep and has many different things to consider, similar to a tactics RPG.

As for being unfair, the hardcore players are rewarded where casuals are not in the terms of money. While most games are level based, Eve is money based. You can train for years, be able to sit in the largest, most armored ship, with the best weapons for that ship, and still be stuck in a frigate because you play casually and never will amass the billions of isk needed to afford what you trained for, while the hardcore player will have a hangar filled with different cruisers, battleships, a capital ship, and other variants, thus being prepared for any situation. All because they play a lot and can afford the nice items.

How exactly would you get your equipment ready before I'd have my battleship stuff? Unless you are somehow able to defy time itself. Oh, and money isn't really an issue if you're in one of those fancy corporations or if you have a friend who's willing to donate some money.

So your the small ship with the advantage, until that battleship either A: Kicks on a webber and causes your ship to slow to well within it's targeting speeds, B: Deploys drones for close range defense that can easily keep up with you,

Nice one. You just said that the bigger guns don't always win, and now you say that they pretty much do.

Huzzah, I can be a lazy bum and still achieve the same as others. It's fairness all over the place!

For your first point, it is quite simple. You start in a small frigate with gun skills, Battleships take upwards of a month to sit in, another month for the skills to use the guns, and yet another month to use the modules to fight against a frigate who spent just half that time powering up their guns and modules.

Also, frigates are cheaper than battleships, thus they will have an easier time outfitting their ship.

And I didn't say the bigger guns always win. I said in those options was to either force the other ship to slow to your guns tracking speed (so the big gun can win), deploy drones, who use small guns (thus, small guns win), or pull an ally in, who can be using any sort of gun, because the frigate will be on you so they can just distance themselves as needed and open fire (gun doesn't matter). These are just a few of the options available to a battleship in this situation anyhow.

 

[KiiWii]

It all depends what you're going for i guess.
Seriously, did no-one play space4k? Real simple EVE? no? It was the kind of thing you just went on every now and again to build a ship or something, but the timescale was smaller, like hours.

 

[Amnestic]

EvE online is not so much a space game as it is an economic simulation

From the fourteen day trial (I actually played two, about 6-9 months apart) I can safely say that *this* is entirely true. It's all well and good to have a deep PvP aspect with corporations and the territory control aspect but a lot of people on a trial won't see this. I know I didn't. I played the fourteen days and realised that as far as the game went for me, it was fly->shoot->loot->fly->sell and repeat. The only thing that kept me going was that next ship and that is something that you see in every MMO, just replacing "ship" with your equipment of choice be it sword, gun, lightsaber or Titan class starship. My friend played EVE a lot longer than I did and he thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm not nearly rich enough as a student to pay for two MMO subscriptions (WoW and EVE) at the same time, so I chose that which I had known and loved, that being WoW.

I'm not saying that the 'grind' is all EVE is. I recognise it's other aspects (those mentioned before, the giant scale PvP, corporations and economy control) but in the fourteen days you simply don't see that. It's a flaw not with the game but with the trial system itself. If they extended it to a month perhaps then people may be more inclined to get into a player run corp, see EVE for what it can be rather than the initial impression. At the trial's current length of fourteen days you get almost exactly what Yahtzee described which is pretty close to my impressions. Fly around for a while, shoot some stuff and return. I hope the EVE developers take what Yahtzee said as constructive criticism to help improve the game, I really do.

 

[Odjin]

Yathzee made my day... with including a bunch of dragons... and cute one at this too. Now a game with this bugger I would play ( pets cutie dragon ).

What goes for EVE... I never liked it before... I didn't like it anymore now... and I'm not going to like it better in the future. It's an MMO... this already qualifies it as a failure ( unless miracles still happen in this world )

 

[Digikid]

Finally a good review of a boring game.

Well Done Yatz.

 

[Dectilon]

The "you must be at least this awesome"-sign was brilliant ^^

 

[teknoarcanist]

Now that I think of it, the first comment about how having maps makes everything boring is really quite accurate. One of the main reasons I think fiction about uncharted islands does so well is that we like the idea of having something on Earth that's still a mystery, some place we have to explore, where we don't know what's coming.

Just a thought.

Plus logically, the less of X you have, the greater value X must be. Take the old RPG's, like Chrono Trigger, where all the graphics were painted and then entered into a pixel-engine by hand. Certainly not going to waste time with a random fucking mountain just for the extra bulletpoint on the back of the box.
You can say the same for a lot of parts of gaming actually. Enemies? MMO hordes vs the much less numerous and much more interesting enemies in Shadow of the Colossus.
Quality > quantity. People will replay the same good thing (a boss-fight, a minigame in Zelda, anything by popcap) over and over; nobody cares about sixty hours of shit if it's SIXTY HOURS OF *SHIT*.

 

[katerina_delicious]

Thank-you, Thank-you, THANK-YOU Yahtzee for letting me know that I'm not stupid in not liking EVE in the slightest...

My boyfriend has been addicted to EVE for months and I've watched him spending god knows how much money getting more and more immersed in what I see as a game with little or no mental stimulation; now I feel more confident telling him it is indeed a waste of his precious youth/money now that I know an actual GAMER thinks so too...

...The funny thing is, he actually defended it!! how do I get him off it for God's sake??

 

[geldonyetich]

...The funny thing is, he actually defended it!! how do I get him off it for God's sake??

I wouldn't be too quick to get him off EVE Online. It may not be a great game in terms of actual gameplay quality, but it amuses from an external virtual community standpoint.

More importantly, you level-up in EVE Online at the same rate whether you're online or off. You might pry your significant other off EVE Online, but if he starts playing another MMORPG where all the leveling happens online, there'll be significantly less time for romance.

 

[HSIAMetalKing]

Hah, that's exactly what I thought about EVE.

 

[DanRSL]

I feel this was a much better video than others you have produced recently. Definately because it focuses on the game, the whole reason for the game review anyway, and keeps it as the main subject rather than a stab at marketing/online social interactions/gaming theory. Which I am glad about and also disappointed with at the same time.

Because I have seen you tackle gaming theory, but unfortunately I don't think there is much room for comedy in that field. A comedic open mind, yes, but not comedy itself. Take for example the recent Soul Calibur review. I could certainly explain why people enjoy and continue to buy and play fighting games, its actually very easy to grasp and completely free of cynicism, but that's the boring stuff of University nerds, not the fun Python-bred nerds.

So what I am saying is - good job. Keep on about the games, not theory. Because theory just isn't funny since there IS an explanation to every punchline, and when you disarm the punchline, comedy falls apart.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Great review, rubbish intro.

 

[Aries_Split]

Why does he insist on reviewing old stuff instead of stuff like Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty?

That game was everything I wanted out of a short and sweet PSN game.

and more.

 

[keyton777]

Why does he insist on reviewing old stuff instead of stuff like Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty?

simple my friend, most of the new stuff is crap, and there is an ocean of old crap to sift thru