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PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

EVE Online Beta Reviews 65

Posted by simoniker from the penultimate-frontier dept.
LevJohnson writes "KCGeek gives a gushing review of EVE Online, the new MMORPG space opera for PC by CCP Games, with screenshots from the beta. From the review: 'It's like Trade Wars 2002, had it been designed in 2002.'" Now the NDA is lifted ahead of its release next month (press release), there are some great guides and handy previews to this intriguing title.
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EVE Online Beta Reviews More

EVE Online Beta Reviews

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  • ugh.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by phrawzty ( 94423 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @09:11AM (#5833588) Journal
    I've been on the "beta test" for a month and a half, and i've yet to actually play the game. Why? Because the patching system is buggy. And it's not just me - there are hundreds of long, tired threads on the beta boards with people having the same types of patching problems.

    And absolutely no developer commentary or feedback.

    Good luck.
    • The downloads page on their beta boards works a treat. The in-game auto-patcher I have yet to get to work. But that's not a big deal for beta, the patches are easily named with from-to build numbers.
    • I'be been beta testing as well. I have been experiencing the same problems. The few times i have actually played the game haven't exactly been promissing.

    • Re:ugh.. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Vacindak ( 669486 )
      There IS an IRC channel in #eve-test at irc.stratics.com; the people there are generally friendly and will gladly tell you what the latest patch is and give you a direct link so you can download it manually. Of course, you *could* just go to the download page for the eve beta website and find out yourself... you know, like everyone else. If the problem is with the patch itself, just clean reinstall the original installation file and use one of the direct patches from the original to the latest version. A

    • I've had some issues with the patch system as well. But Gemini's download page contains all I need. Hopefully, the patch device will work correctly at release.

      The only real beef I have with this game is the steep learning curve on the user interface.

  • Beta observations... (Score:5, Informative)

    by JHMirage ( 570086 ) * on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @09:12AM (#5833600)
    Admittedly, I've only been beta testing for about 6 weeks, but my play experience definitely fell into the "What the heck do I do now?" category. Maybe playing too many other MMOGs has left me unimaginative and in need of heavy-handed guidance, or maybe the gameplay is a little too undirected. I spent a lot of hours when I started just searching for ideas on what to do next. The responses I got on the beta board (ignoring the ever-present and highly helpful "YOu r DuMB! EVE r0x!" posts) generally boiled down to "Whatever you want!" Okay... but give me some idea of a goal or a point to my existence.

    Anyway... the graphics are really as impressive as everyone says. And the character generation feature is a lot of fun to play with. (I just wish your carefully constructed face is used in more detail or in 3D elsewhere in the game... if it is, I've never seen anything beyond the approx. 200x200 snapshot used in chat.)

    I keep hearing about how innovating EVE is... could someone list some specific points of originality for me? I seem to have missed them. The preview/review(?) above doesn't seem to introduce any except the sheer expanse of the universe. Yes, it is large, but how is that enhancing my gaming experience?

    • Explore
      Expand
      Exploit

      In whatever order you want.

    • "Whatever you want!" may not seem like a very good answer, but it is accurate. Get in the game and find some people who aren't pricks, and they should be willing to point you in a direction. The experience is entirely what you make it, unlike pretty much every other game, where the experience is entirely what the developers make it.

      You want to fight other people? Mine asteroids? Ship goods around the galaxy and trade them? Run a corporation? Work for a corporation run by someone else? Build your own spac

      • Re:Beta observations... (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I have been playing for a few months, and i can tell that theres a legit complaint about lack of content.

        When i say content i mean content that is not entirely player generated. I for one likes to be challenged and involved in a storyline that is exciting. Without the proper and extensive storytelling techniques and content, i think this will probably drop down into some kind of multiplayer starcraft with real players ... in the end one metaorganization will sit on everything and what do you do then... no
      • "Whatever you want!" may not seem like a very good answer, but it is accurate.


        Great! I'm going to destroy the entire universe! I'm glad someone has finally made a game with this feature.
    • generally boiled down to "Whatever you want!" Okay... but give me some idea of a goal or a point to my existence.

      I have this problem in RL too... ;-)

      • Re:Beta observations... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by KDan ( 90353 )
        I guess it's time to bring religion to EVE...

        Daniel

        • Re:Beta observations... (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I'm using AC, since I'm at school and all but I think that's actually a really great idea. Just think, vast galactic religions... it _would_ give newbies a sense of direction for a bit, and they may choose to continue in the religion or leave or even become instrumental players in it. All I want to see are vast, intergalatic conspiracies, like a giant Illuminati. I've been betaing EVE and have been enjoying it, and hope it becomes even more vast and in depth.
    • I've been following this game for quite some time and I think that what's causing you to complain is the very element of EVE that I find most attractive. Instead of having in-game quests, provided by the administration (and there still might be those, if the administration is running the big entities on the grid, when the game is first released), the stories that occur are player-driven. To me, EverQuest and its ilk is like the high-end graphical evolution of the MUD - lots of things to kill, lots of quests

    • Re:Beta observations... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Scooter ( 8281 )
      I guess you need to ask "what is the point to my real life existence?" and apply the answer to your game play. I'm sure everyone who ever played Elite knows the answer to this - Elite had no plot basically, but was one of the most successful and popular pre-PC/decent console games that ever existed.

      Your goals are your own to invent. The innovation is in not succumbing to some lame contrived and artificial looking "reason" for your actions such as "missions". The holy grail of mmorpg (in my opinion) shou

      • I guess you need to ask "what is the point to my real life existence?" and apply the answer to your game play

        There are several problems with that...

        This is supposed to be an alternate universe... if I wanted an accurate recreation of the goals of RL, I'd play The Sims.

        I've had 30 years to learn the rules of my RL universe... in EVE I'm supposed to "just know them?"

        The universe in EVE has it's rules set by the developers... however much you think you control everything, they still own you. (maybe n

        • I agree with your point about the rules being different etc and yes - of course you can't translate your real life motivation verbatim. It's a starting point though - you gave the impression in your original post that you'd not come across this style of game before (which is highly likely - they're aren't many that claim to be goal-less, let alone deliver).

          You are of course absolutely right when you say that you are never free to do exactly what you want, and I didn't really make any claims that EVE deliv
    • The responses I got... generally boiled down to "Whatever you want!" Okay... but give me some idea of a goal or a point to my existence.

      A lot of us want to provide our own goal or point to our existence.

      It's thrilling to hear this "what-do-i-do" versus "whatever-you-want" debate. The "gamers" want a game, where the goal is specified by the devs. The "worlders" want a world to live in, where goals are specified by each player. (Applications of this concept to politics are left to the reader as an exercise
    • As a beta tester don't you think you should read all about the game on the gemini site before you even log in?

      I've been playing for a while and I see the same questions over and over and over again and the answers are in the faq on the page you clicked through to download the game. Stop whining about being a beta tester. Why did you apply?
  • that game looks sweet. those screenshots are just simply amazing.
  • I've only tried playing Eve about 3 times, the first time I destroyed a drone in the tutorial instead of just disabling it so it threw an error and crashed. The next time I think it crashed in the market someplace and the time after that I was just exiting a space station when it notified me of a hostile target so naturally I tried targetting them and before I knew it another set of errors, which somehow led to my ship being impounded and me being arrested.

    Prior to this the actual gameplay post tutorial di
    • From your comments, you haven't played the beta in some time - so saying "Still too buggy" is hardly fair.

      The 964 patch was pretty horrendous, but 965 seems quite stable and playable. Despite all the naysayers, I'm starting to believe it might be ready for the May 6 release date.

      I'm waiting a while to purchase, just in case... but if they keep ironing out bugs, I'll be buying.

  • You MUST be joking (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Look at the number of people accepted for the beta, look at the number of people playing it. Yes they did a wonderful job on the graphics but that is it. The game is a nicer looking version of Jumpgate, asteroid mining and all.
    • Hah... I was a tester and a regular player until I got in the Eve beta during Phase 3, and I can whole-heartedly say that Eve is better than Jumpgate. First of all, its more realistic (Even though calling a space sim realistic is pushing it) in that you haul around realistic goods, in a realistic world, and don't fight small blobby flying jello-molds :D

  • Where's my crew? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by billtom ( 126004 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @09:49AM (#5833954)
    One thing that has been sorely missing from space multi-player games has been the option for several players to be the crew of a ship. In all the one's I've seen, once you leave the planet/station/whatever, it's everyone in their one-person space ship.

    Now, I'm not in the beta for Eve, but from the previews it looks like Eve follows this trend and only has one-person ships. Can a beta tester confirm/correct this?

    Now, don't get me wrong, it can be fun to fly around in formation and all. But the usual SF template for this sort of thing is a small group that's the crew of a ship (the Falcon, the Enterprise, Moya, etc).

    Now, I guess that the reason for this is technical. Having one-man ships makes the coding similar to wandering around the landscape in a fantasy game, but with one more dimension. While multi-person ships would add a whole new level of interaction to be coded.

    But I wish some company would break out and make multi-player ships. I've got four friends would would love to be sitting around the mess table while the ship cruises to Alpha Something III, when the proximity alert goes off and we all run to our battle stations and man the helm, the guns, the engines, the sensors.

    • Re:Where's my crew? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In X-Wing Alliance, you could have two-man crews on the Corellian ships with gun turrets (think Millenium Falcon). One guy would fly, the other would gun. It would lag the game out in internet games (modem days), but on the LAN it was great. Also, it wasn't enabled by default (probably coded and left out because of lag issues), but all you had to do was add 2 lines to a config file.

      Then of course there was Allegiance... the best space sim/mmo game EVER. You had bombers with 3 man crews, and capital ships t
    • I'm in the beta, and eve is one person per ship. (but each character can own mulitple ships - but only use one at once)

      But the intereasting thing about eve is the corporations. Anyone can form a corporation and attract members. Most of the benefit and enjoyment of eve is through working alongside others in a corporation - for mutual gain.

      Corporations exist kinda in and kinda outside of eve, and there is lots of political negotiations between the different corps.

      Eve is definately a game for teams of pla

    • Re:Where's my crew? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Daddio ( 171891 )
      I like it I want to try it. The crew problem is twofold, what od you do when your crew is not online and well everyone wants to be the captain. I have read that the largest problem with mmog is that westerners want to all be cowboys and heros and really dont undertand the concept of teamplay or sacrafice for the greater good.
      • Oh sure, there's bound to be issues, but there is with any multi-player game feature. I think that multi-person ships will probably only work well with established groups of friends. I can't see jumping in with four strangers. (Particularly because the ship itself will probably represent a shared in-game expense.)

        It's just that the "Crew of the " is such a large part of the usual SF setting that I don't see why all these games are ignoring it.

        I mean, imagine if, when the Star Wars Galaxies space ship expa
    • As a long time Traveller player - I totally agree. Most Traveller player parties crewed (and usually owned) some beat up old freighter at some point in the campaign. Some were pilots, some gunners, some mechanics and so on.

      Also see the "Trader Team" books of Poul Anderson (on which Traveller, and hence "Elite" is partly based) such as "Mirkheim" (spel?) and "The Long Night"

  • Let's Get Ready To Mine! And Mine! And Mine! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Teh Suq ( 655848 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @09:49AM (#5833955)
    I wanted to write about my experiences in EVE beta, but I found a review that pretty much sums up my feelings. Here that review is: FourBelowZero [fourbelowzero.com]
    • I'd have to agree with that. Stunning, knock you off your feet graphics, but when it comes to actual gameplay and fun factor, picking my nose is more fun and satisfyng. Being an EnB veteran I know what a game needs to keep you hooked and what will get you to play it for a month and stop. There is no real story, or ANYTHING! Its one HUGE univers were you can mine and mine and mine, and if you die you have to mine it all again... Graphics 10/10 Fun Factor 1/10 Will you be playing it in a month: unlikly Ma
  • Having seen all the ranting about how bad the game is, I thought I should tell how I've found it :P

    It's amazing... sure during the beta there have been some bugs... *that's what a beta is for*! But despite the fact it throws up errors at me all the time, and parts of the game randomly die, it's still one of my favourite games, because it's what everyone has been waiting for since Elite.

    Multiplay Elite.

    In a huge universe (try turning on the full universe option in your map. Everyone of those dots is anoth
    • Yep, I've been waiting for multiplayer Elite. How well does this game handle PvP combat? Is it real-time flying and shooting like Elite, or is it a case of pressing buttons to select the next attack move, like MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot?

      I've briefly looked into developing an Elite-style MMOG, and one crucial area that had me stumped was how to handle dogfights in a scalable way. It's all fine until a hundred people gather at the same location and start trying to shoot each other. I've a feeling there's a s
      • Combat is pseudo-realtime, in that you can change your options whenever you like, but it's still essentially turn based.

        It is made up for by some *really* huge ships though ;)
      • I don't get the pseudo-realtime comment. It's totally realtime. I took my friggate up against a couple of well-armed industrial ships the other night and it took me 3 tries to get a good configuration of missles/lasers/guns to take them out. I locked on from a distance, set my ship to orbit one of them at 1k, and when I got in range I opened up with everything I had. My medium pulse laser was draining my capacitor too much and I need that energy to replenish my shields when they drop too low for comfort

  • Not to everyone's tastes (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    After "playing" the beta for almost 5 months I'm hooked, however in that time I've seen so many other testers come and go. It's a really pity you can't "try before you buy" with MMORPGs, more so with EVE - you'll either fall in love with it or despise it with a passion.

    Still, it's very pretty though.

  • Ups and Downs (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @10:44AM (#5834544)
    I've been with Eve a fairly long time. I signed up for the beta in the middle of 2000, and received access in early 2001. I've seen it go from a very dull and drab interface with few working game features to a very nicely rounded game.

    Admittedly, it does have plenty of bugs still. There should be many more fixed now than there are. However, it is a good system.

    As some others have said, though, there is little to do in the game, as it stands. Currently, about the ONLY way to make money is to mine ore for like three weeks to be able to afford new equipment and ships. However, when the game goes live, an entire basic NPC economy will exist which will allow you to fufill more or less every role in the game by working with the NPCs. Of course, if you stick to working with just the NPCs, you'll have limited income since they're designed to help you get started. The real money comes from the players and their custom jobs they create for other players.

    It's hard to see and grasp what that will be like now, since there's nothing there like it already. Personally, I hope it works out great. I left the community because of several bad interactions with CCP on a personal level. I attempted to get involved on a higher level, and was absolutely tossed out in the cold for it.

    One thing to consider, however, is that this game benefits the hardcore gamer MUCH more than other MMO games ever will. That's not to say that new or slower players will be left out, because it's impossible. However, advanced players will wield considerably much more power than others, on the order of something like a fleet vs a single freighter.

    Again, that doesn't mean that lower players will be left out. More advanced players will be able to do so many more things, but if you break down the economy, it's still the little guy at the bottom who can do all of the actual work for the big guy. That's what makes this game so unbelievably advanced for it's economy. It mirrors a real life economic system fantastically. The diversity will hopefully keep Eve going a long time.

    Slashdot doesn't seem to like my login. This is Keiran Halcyon posting.

    • Re:Ups and Downs (Score:3, Insightful)

      by JHMirage ( 570086 ) *

      Currently, about the ONLY way to make money is to mine ore for like three weeks to be able to afford new equipment and ships. However, when the game goes live, an entire basic NPC economy will exist which will allow you to fufill more or less every role in the game by working with the NPCs.

      That's the type of thing that I just don't get... do they really believe that NPCs, the economy, or working race/faction systems don't need any beta testing? Are they high? Seems like they're just setting themselves

      • Well actually, they DON'T need any beta testing, heh. The NPC economy system itself is nothing more than market orders and job offers automatically generated by the computer. If you've played Freelancer or any game like it, random jobs are always available that follow the same old scheme of "transport this here" or "kill this guy here". In Eve, if you want to hire on under an NPC organization to do transporting, you simply take a job listed on the market coming from that NPC organization, and do it. It wil

  • Beta (Score:2, Informative)

    by Wheaty18 ( 465429 )
    I got into Beta 7, and despite the eye candy, there was nothing much to do in the game besides mine rocks. The skill system was strange as well, basically you "activate" a skill you want to learn in your character sheet, and it counts down the time until you sucessfully "learn" it. The thing is, you don't have to be actively playing the character to learn a skill, you can "activate" a skill that will take 4 days (real time) to learn, go on a vacation, come back and you are a master miner (or whatever).

    Wh

  • More views (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Limbo13 ( 669459 )
    I've been beta testing for about a month now, and I just wanted to add my two cents. When I first started, I had the same reaction as many of the others: "What the heck do I do now?". They teach you extremelly basic mining, refining, and combat, and that's it. At that point you are expected to figure out how everything works and what the next step is. That said, once my head stopped spinning I actually just decided to dive into mining and started to piece things together from there. Once you learn a fe
  • I was accepted for the beta a few weeks ago. I spent a night tinkering around with it. I would have to say that I echo many of the sentiments of the people posting here. There was a lot of "What now?" in my experience. I think my big problems with that had to do with the interface.

    1.) Anyone else think that a RTS-style "double-click to go there" is really HARD in 3D?

    2.) It also seemed to me that I was always juggling windows. I know Shadowbane uses floaty windows as well, but it feels like they did m
    • Well, if you're having trouble with the navigation, there are several solutions.

      For starters, the best way of navigating around is to select your destination from the tree list up in the upper left corner. Most people don't seem to even realize it's there.

      But beyond that, if you hover your mouse over the icons, they will spread out and then you will be able to easily read them and select the one you want.

      Also, there's a keyboard shortcut for freezing the labels in the current location. I think it's Ctr

  • About EVE (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ThomMust ( 174974 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @11:21AM (#5835002) Homepage
    I've been in the beta for about two weeks now. I was hoping for an experience along the lines of the early days of EverQuest, when it was more about exploring and experience than the acquisition of phat plat. What I got was a very pretty game with very little to actually do.

    The UI for character creation is fun enough, though I suppose one could dismiss it as a virtual version of that old Barbie head my cousin used to abuse. After picking your race and bloodline, you alter the look of your character by tilting the head to and fro, changing the eyes, applying a beard, placing a scar and so on. It's a neat use of the 3d engine, but really all you're doing is making a static avatar for in-game chat and to appear stamp-like in the upper-right corner of your HUD.

    The game itself is admittedly gorgeous. At times, it is like playing in one of those Astronomy Pictures-of-the-Day. But you know, that can get quite tedious, feeling more like a Photoshop image with too much lens flare. The ships are unique, not drawing too much from existing and standard sources like Star Wars or Star Trek and so on. The stations and jumpgates all are built to the standards set by the creating race, from rusty i-beam industrial for one to shining gold and glass for another. Out from the stations are the asteroid belts, huge hanging semi-circles of boulderous rock, around which lurk the occasional pirate.

    And that's about it. You have two choices of action. You fight pirates or you mine asteroids. Fighting pirates is far too risky at first, so you spend a lot of time mining asteroids. So much time that many on the boards of the beta suggest having a book handy to occupy your mining time.

    The comradery in the beta has been good and I've had a couple of good nights out in the higher yield mines with fine folks from Toronto and Europe, still awake at 4am their time when I'm just getting started at 10pm EST. But really, it all comes down to the acquisition of more cash to get a better ship to use to then get more cash.

    And I won't go into the massive bugs that still exist this late into the beta, many that result in a sudden crash to the desktop and others that have managed to lay waste to a few users' harddrives (but not mine.)

    All in all, I think I prefer old Norrath to the new coldness of space.
  • I am in the beta, but admittedly have not spent much time on it. The thing about the game that struck me instantly was this: What is different in this game from Earth&Beyond (which I also beta tested)? To me it seems like a pretty (a very very pretty one granted) remake. Stunning visually, but it is all the same, watch your ship zip through space to mine some rocks. Maybe it is better than that, but htey need something in the game to show you what makes it special or it will not go off any better than E
  • Waterthread [waterthread.org] also had a review and some comments on Eve on their forums. Overall, they were not great. Eve looks great graphically but suffers from both gameplay issues (it's boring and the death penalty is huge) and stability issues. Basically it's another MMOG that was pushed out the door early. So sad. Why can't someone plan and execute a decent MMOG?

  • Nothing to do? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Daddio ( 171891 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @11:59AM (#5835393)
    This is more a testament to the way we have been TRAINED to play games than to the game itself. What do you do if I sit you in a sandbox? what do you do if I hand you a blank sheet of paper and some crayons? Do you wonder where the picture and lines are?

    I have found EVE to be the most liberating game I have ever played. I can do WHATEVER I WANT. I can change my stats, there are no CLASSES. I can go shoot bad guys, I can shoot good guys, I can rob people, I can hunt don those who rob others. This is the tip of the iceberg. OK another thing to remember is we are all in beta. supposedly alot of content is not in there.

    My Disclaimer: I may sound like a fanboy, if anything I am a (45 year old) fanboy of gaming in general. I went into the beta dead set on disliking eve from reading posts that dissed it everywhere.
    • I see your point, as the class-less system does seem to allow greater freedom of activity, but it also removes any kind of purpose. I have this blank sheet of paper, but only two crayons. Those two crayons are marked: "Mine Asteroids" and "Shoot Things."

      Let me put it this way. I created what was supposed to be a renegade engineer, a Minmatar character. I built him as a proficient miner because I figured that money might be handy. And that's how I played him. He mined, alone and in groups, then bought
  • The graphics are beautiful, I like the market system, but it's just not fun.
    Unless the producers hold many game events, this title will fail. Quickly.
  • I'm not a beta tester but still i've been following Eve's development for years now and must say that I'm very excited about this game. Fourteen years ago I played "Elite" on my brothers sturdy 8086 and ever since I've craved for a modern multiplayer version of that game. I'm hoping that Eve will satisfy my hunger!....

    After the NDA dropped, the internet is absolutely flooded with information regarding Eve.
    Without going into too much detail on my findings, I will say that people seem to be compeletly divi
    • Strategy? I've been playing beta, and this is how combat goes. We'll use the example of getting ambushed at an asteroid field.

      1) warp to asteroid field
      2) threat indicators light up saying some pirates are in the area
      3) You either run or stay and fight. We'll stay and fight.
      4) Lock target on a pirate ship. Targetting takes a few seconds.
      5) Turn on weapons. They autofire, see.
      .
      .
      .
      6) Shield wearing down a bit? Smack the shield boost icon. Full again!
      .
      .
      .
      7) Boom! Got him!

      No exaggeration, t

      • Well, there is a *bit* more to it. You have ot understand the range benefits of your weapons and those of your target, and position your range accordingly. Since you're flying around and about during combat, this *could* have been a challenge.

        Unfortunately even *this* is oversimplified with the option of "Keep target at range x". Understandably the future technology of these space ships would take care of this for you, but it doesn't make for interesting gameplay.

        I'm almost certain that every weapo

  • I've been in the beta for a while, but I'm still can't quite get past this -

    So you set up shop trading. What exactly do the people do with the stuff they buy from you? They either shoot something out in space, or mine something out in space?

    It seems that the game still only has 2 ways to interact with the environment. On top of this is the promised free-roaming universe where players can do anything they want. This has boiled down to a universe where you're either (a) Mining (b) Killing something nea

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