It has taken me over three years to write this review. I set out to take a deep dive into the Player Versus Player combat scheme presented in CCP's on-line internet spaceship "game" called Eve Online. You probably haven't heard of it. Mostly weirdoes play it.
Wait a second... that isn't working. Time to try another angle.
Hello! My name is Rixx Javix and I'm an Eve Online enthusiast that spends an inordinate amount of time wasting my life shooting internet spaceships...
That makes me sound pervie. I need a good angle here.
By jovian! I've got it. I started playing Eve for one simple reason, I could fly spaceships and shoot other people who were also flying spaceships. And while that might sound all groovy and cool, it isn't. What I mean is that Eve is much more than that. It comes down to people man, the people are so friggin' awesome. They taught me so much about myself that...
Uh, this is harder than it sounds. Seismic Stan asked us to write a community centric review of Eve Online. It could be from any angle, section, piece, corner or whatever we wanted. Open ended huh? Eve isn't like a movie I just saw, or a new album I just listened to. Eve is very strange in so many ways, especially for me, since it incorporates into so many aspects of myself and what I do on an almost daily basis. It isn't that I'm one of those weirdoes, or that I attend Eve conventions dressed like a Jovian, but Eve permeates so fully that it is always there. Even though it might be lurking behind a corner, it is hard to remove yourself from it in order to see it clearly.
Rationally it makes little to no sense at all. I mean, most of the time it isn't even that much fun to play. And even the word "play" is wrong, cause you really don't play Eve as much as you experience Eve. Even thinking about it in terms of "play" is wrong-headed and will only result in your frustration. Believe me, I've been there several times.
Emotionally it can be crushing. I spent an entire year helping an Alliance grow only to watch it crumble and squish and be betrayed and ultimately destroyed. I've actually done that more than a few times now. It can be emotionally disturbing to invest so much time, literally hundreds of hours, effort and dedication into something, only to watch it melt away as if it never existed in the first place. Poof. Gone. That hurts and hurts hard. That kinda thing can kill you dead.
Eve is horribly harsh and unforgiving. I have worked my butt off to buy ships and 99% of those have been blown up by other players. I've sunk billions of in-game money, they called it ISK, to buy ships only to have them destroyed by other players. I've lost 255 ships and I have less than 50 in my hanger, what kind of odds are those?! Oh sure I've blown up more than my fair share of other people's ships, almost 1,500 of them, but that just means I am part of the problem - not the solution.
I'm trying to make a point by painting a negative picture about something I love. Eve is all of those things above. It doesn't make much sense, it is often emotionally crushing, harsh and unforgiving... and that is exactly what I love about it.
From day one I have only been interested in one thing about Eve - combat. I sucked at it early on in my career and got my ass handed to me on numerous attempts at shooting other players. Slowly, but surely I got better at it. Some days I feel like the king of the universe and other days I feel like the court jester of the universe. You can't be in love with something that makes rational sense, that doesn't have the potential to crush you emotionally, that isn't often harsh, cruel and unforgiving... because it loves you back.
What other virtual internet based digital universe can deliver that kind of passion? I don't know of any. That might make me weird of course, I have to concede that possibility. But if so, then I welcome it.
Combat is my thing. My only thing. I've fought countless times across the width and breadth of New Eden. My Eve map is full of colored dots from one side to the other. I've fought in every type of space the game has to offer, from Empire to Null, Wormholes to Low and every where in-between. On the side of thousand man fleets to small five man gangs, to creeping around by myself looking to pounce on some unsuspecting pilot. In all that time I've learned a lot about fighting in Eve over the last three years, but still I manage to learn something new every single time I fly.
Ask yourself this? How is that even possible?
I mean really think about that for a second. I've been playing for over three years, I write a blog about it, spend hundreds of hours doing it, talking about it, thinking about it, planning about it, reading about it... and still there are things to be learned?
I can't say that about very many things. But I honestly believe, that when it comes to Eve, I may never be able to learn it all. To encompass the breadth and width and height and depth of it. How remarkable is that?
So then. For this rambling, disjointed reviewer, I give Eve unlimited stars for potential and 4 out of 5 stars for reality. Eve is, as always, an on-going work in progress. It ebbs and flows between utter collapse and the heights of accomplishment. The most recent expansion Eve:Crucible has raised the bar once again.
I can highly recommend Eve Online.
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