Scott Tortorice
31 Oct 07, 16:48
Good article over at MMORPG:
14 days in EVE - from powerless newbie to savvy contender
Laura Genender played EVE for two weeks and went from newbie to warrior with the help of some friendly EVE players. EVE is a unforgiving place, but with the help of some friends you can rise fast. From being a powerless newbie in a big world she quickly became a savvy contender in space.
Starting off on my first day in EVE I felt like a 7th grader who, by some error of the education system, had been transferred into senior year of high school. I was alone, very small, and quite unprepared for my future – all I had to my name was a lonely little pod, a handful of skills, and a very stubborn nature.
14 days ago, I downloaded EVE Online and registered for the trial. All the feedback and activity on our forums about this somewhat eccentric Sci-Fi game eventually ate away at my curiosity, and brought me to the game’s official website. I jumped into the game with a fairly casual attitude, choosing my race more by flavor text and appearance than anything practical – the EVE website has a (perhaps overly) thorough starter’s guide, but with only 14 days to explore, I wanted to shoot, not read! I decided that the in-game tutorial by my helpful electronic assistant Aura would be more than enough. Of course, at this point, I didn’t understand how important my somewhat hastily made character decisions were – I didn’t even know that different races piloted different ships!
That’s how I found myself sitting in my Ibis (the Caldari starter frigate) somewhere near Kisogo. I had some general knowledge of how to progress my character and how to pilot my ship, plus a courier mission sending me on to my first NPC agent, but not much else. I was a strawberry blond, and looked sort of like the girl from Spiderman. My cargo bay was full of Veldspar, one of the most common unrefined ores.
The sheer size of the game world was overwhelming; when your waypoints start measuring themselves in Astronomical Units (149,598,000 kilometers each), you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. Even in my little starter system, Kisogo, I found myself warping up to 18.7 AU to reach a destination.
And that’s just one system. EVE’s world is made up of hundreds of systems....
Read the rest here: At A Glance: EVE 14 Day Trial (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?LOADFEATURE=1535&SETVIEW=features&BHCP=1&GAMEID=14&bhcp=1)
In her conclusion, she writes:
And this is where my first look at EVE ends. It’s a massively immersive world, with so many choices and options that there’s always something to do. It’s very, very hard to break in, and sometimes feels like a hopeless task; in a game where skill training is based on time, how do you keep up with the Joneses who’ve been playing for multiple years?
That is right on the money and is the one thing about EVE that eventually wears away my patience with the game. With other games, you know that with a modest amount of time, you too can have that uber-weapon and compete with the big boys. EVE is not like that; there is no gurantee that you will ever advance past a certain level no matter how much time you put in. For a game, that is a heady dose of realism. Nonetheless, the game is fun just to cruise around in. For me, it's like a sci-fi vacation: I might not want to live there, but it is fun to visit! :)
14 days in EVE - from powerless newbie to savvy contender
Laura Genender played EVE for two weeks and went from newbie to warrior with the help of some friendly EVE players. EVE is a unforgiving place, but with the help of some friends you can rise fast. From being a powerless newbie in a big world she quickly became a savvy contender in space.
Starting off on my first day in EVE I felt like a 7th grader who, by some error of the education system, had been transferred into senior year of high school. I was alone, very small, and quite unprepared for my future – all I had to my name was a lonely little pod, a handful of skills, and a very stubborn nature.
14 days ago, I downloaded EVE Online and registered for the trial. All the feedback and activity on our forums about this somewhat eccentric Sci-Fi game eventually ate away at my curiosity, and brought me to the game’s official website. I jumped into the game with a fairly casual attitude, choosing my race more by flavor text and appearance than anything practical – the EVE website has a (perhaps overly) thorough starter’s guide, but with only 14 days to explore, I wanted to shoot, not read! I decided that the in-game tutorial by my helpful electronic assistant Aura would be more than enough. Of course, at this point, I didn’t understand how important my somewhat hastily made character decisions were – I didn’t even know that different races piloted different ships!
That’s how I found myself sitting in my Ibis (the Caldari starter frigate) somewhere near Kisogo. I had some general knowledge of how to progress my character and how to pilot my ship, plus a courier mission sending me on to my first NPC agent, but not much else. I was a strawberry blond, and looked sort of like the girl from Spiderman. My cargo bay was full of Veldspar, one of the most common unrefined ores.
The sheer size of the game world was overwhelming; when your waypoints start measuring themselves in Astronomical Units (149,598,000 kilometers each), you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. Even in my little starter system, Kisogo, I found myself warping up to 18.7 AU to reach a destination.
And that’s just one system. EVE’s world is made up of hundreds of systems....
Read the rest here: At A Glance: EVE 14 Day Trial (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?LOADFEATURE=1535&SETVIEW=features&BHCP=1&GAMEID=14&bhcp=1)
In her conclusion, she writes:
And this is where my first look at EVE ends. It’s a massively immersive world, with so many choices and options that there’s always something to do. It’s very, very hard to break in, and sometimes feels like a hopeless task; in a game where skill training is based on time, how do you keep up with the Joneses who’ve been playing for multiple years?
That is right on the money and is the one thing about EVE that eventually wears away my patience with the game. With other games, you know that with a modest amount of time, you too can have that uber-weapon and compete with the big boys. EVE is not like that; there is no gurantee that you will ever advance past a certain level no matter how much time you put in. For a game, that is a heady dose of realism. Nonetheless, the game is fun just to cruise around in. For me, it's like a sci-fi vacation: I might not want to live there, but it is fun to visit! :)