EVE: My First time playing. Is it really like PotBS?

I downloaded the EVE 14 day free trial the other day because Graev wanted to give it a try.  Reading message boards and other blogs it seems like a lot of people are either returning to the game or deciding that it’s worth playing all of a sudden so I figured I might as well give it a try too.  It’s also been circulating around that Pirates of the Burning Sea if very similar to EVE; so much so that PotBS has been called EVE on water.  Since I’ve played PotBS Beta for a few months and plan to play it at release it can’t hurt to see how a more seasoned game being compared to it has faired.

I’ll skip right to the part where we make our characters.  Neither of us had a clue which race to pick and the confusion quadrupled from there.  So many different options and information ranging from heritage and career to skill points and all the various things that bug me.  I very much dislike thinking that I have “ruined” my character by picking a heritage or skill that isn’t as good as another.  Does that make me a min/maxer?  I think it might…

After both of us finally decided on our characters and created their little picture – very cool btw  – we moved on to actually playing the game.  Actually, you can’t call what I did playing because I spent (I kid you not) over an hour trying to understand the various controls and interface options.  We each went through the tutorial and after completing a few missions discovered that although we were the same nation we were across the universe from each other – Graev tried crossing 8 solar systems to get to me but we gave up.  We promptly remade our characters to the same everything so that we could play our first time together.

Skipping ahead again we are now able to run missions together.  From the help of a very friendly tutorial computer lady thing we figured out how to find our mission objectives and we jumped to warp speed (I guess that’s EVE’s way of zoning?).  When we defeated our mission objective we found that it was only completing for one of us.  It took us another hour to figure out that we had to run the mission twice – once for each of us as the Fleet Boss.  We might have been doing something wrong but trying to get answers in a chat channel with 300 people in it was difficult.  It wasn’t a pretty picture watching Graev get impatient and start flying around trying to ram into other ships.  Okay I lied, it was me trying to ram into other ships.

We spent a little bit more time figuring the game out before deciding to take a break.  EVE is … interesting.  To me it’s a very complicated game when compared to a simple hack and slash MMORPG.  It feels like there is really a lot going on at once and it requires a lot of thought and planning before making a decision.  Skills, for example, were taking 3+ hours to learn and I had no idea where to even begin placing the points.  It felt like I was being presented with far too much information at once.

So having played a couple hours I can already see that it does have some similarities but many obvious differences from PotBS.  Both games are very centered around the player economy and have all the bells and whistles there.  Both games have you controlling ships (one sea, one space) with PotBS having the edge covering land combat to some extent as well.  Combat in both games is similar but it feels like PotBS requires more skill.  In both games you can buy and lose ships.

Overall I feel that PotBS takes the similarities and makes them much more streamlined for ease of use.  There was almost zero learning curve for me in PotBS and I felt like it moved me along very quickly into the action.  If you’re a regular around here you know that I don’t necessarily consider that a good thing either.  Where EVE was too difficult I feel PotBS is too easy.  The middle-ground might be more easily obtained by PotBS but honestly I can’t make that judgment call yet.

I’m going to give EVE some more play time during my trial period and hopefully I can figure it out more so that the subtleties can shine through.

  • it is interesting to read a 1st time players perspective on this game again. I bought eve when it went gold in 2003 and trust me it was exactly as you said. Although picture all your frustrations WITHOUT a tutorial LOL

    A suggestion, get into a big, newbie friendly corporation right away. The general chat, like you said is pretty useless.

    EVE is one of the hardest MMO I have ever played. The loyalty base on it though is extemely high. For some reason I always go back to EVE.

  • If you’re in a group together (or what EVE calls a ‘fleet’) then when one of you goes back to the agent to complete the quest, you will see an option that says something along the lines of “Yeah, my buddies and I have completed the mission (maximum of 5 players)!” That will make it so that you both get the quest done. However, you share the money reward. 😛

    My husband and I have been playing it for a bit. He enjoys it much more than I do, though. I just kind of go in and train skills, and that’s pretty much it for now.

  • We tried the splitting thing and nothing happened when we clicked the link. I’m thinking it might be because we were doing lower level missions. We’ll give it another shot next time we play.

  • EVE’s learning cliff is a little ridiculous. The tutorials really don’t give you very much useful information and don’t give you any real objectives. It doesn’t even tell you much about what kinds of objectives there are.

    With that said, it can be pretty cool once you figure out what there is to do. I highly recommend looking up and joining the Eve University corporation (I’m still in it a couple months after starting the game). There are a lot of helpful people in the corp that usually answer questions in corp chat as well as running classes on a variety of topics (from mining to mission running to fleet PvP).

    I think at the very beginning of the game, it’s useful to pick whether you want to do PVE combat (it’s pretty fun working your way through the various missions and difficulty levels), mining/production (mining is tedious but can be zen-inducing), or PVP (a duo of pirates in frigates or cruisers might be able to eke out a living, but it would hard – finding a corp might be doable, but it would be hard as brand new players).

    Working your way up the ship levels is an easy start to figuring out if you like what you’re doing (for PVE missioning, fly your frigate, work towards a cruiser, then battlecruiser, etc). Try to read up on what your character is capable of (as a Gallente, for example, you’d want to focus on drone or gunnery/hybrid weapons skills to do more damage as well as mechanic/armor skills to shore up your defenses) and focus on those skills to begin with. As a miner, skills would be in industry and science for getting more ore as well as better refining rates.

    What started out as a quick response is quickly getting bloated. It’s sort of unavoidable as a new pilot in Eve.

    http://hammer-eve.blogspot.com/ is the last thing I’ll point you if you haven’t yet seen it, aside from Eve University. Or send a message to Bellatroix and I’d be happy to give you some starting advice. 🙂

  • I’ll be the first to admit that EVE isn’t simple and that the learning curve is quite steep. Having said that, if you give yourselves some time, and ask for help when needed, you’ll soon realize the tremendous potential of the game and how much you can accomplish.

    If you’re looking for information, I’ve put together a list of sites that should help you ease yourself into this complex MMO.

    Fly safe!

  • Dammit Keen…I’ve been toying with the idea of reupping Eve, and you’re making me want to. I’m actually not in a game at the moment (which, what with blogging and everything else, probably isn’t that bad of a thing), but I’ll be getting into something again soon or I’ll go nuts.

    I second the recommendation on Eve University. I actually joined them last time I played Eve (including with original character that was rolled back in 2005), and you won’t find a more helpful group of people in any MMO.

    It really is a great game, but I find myself drifting to and from it every few months for some reason.

  • I played Eve during the beta, and it didn’t stick with me, partially because I was heavy into DAoC at the time.

    I tried it again a year ago, and I was lucky enough to fall in with the Eve University corporation. I can’t second Sollaires strongly enough; without Eve University, I would have missed 75% of what makes Eve a good game. If you become active with the corp, the classes, mining operations or hunting ore thieves, or maybe an excursion into lowsec or 0.0 space, you’ll see a side of the game that a lot of people miss entirely when they try to figure things out for 14 days on their own.

    Inhibitor is correct, E-Uni is definitely the most helpful organization I’ve encountered in any mmorpg.

    Fly safe!

  • Great that you’re trying Eve :). The complexity is part of the fun. What fun is it to discover everything about a game in just a few days /played ?

    This is nice to read as it was more than 2 years ago I started and am already so familiar with the game ! The tutorials should be better now, I think they also improved them with the last expansion.

  • I’ve been playing Eve for nearly a year now, and I’m still learning things.

    Eve is like an onion. There are many layers of the game that you just can’t experience till you’re older, and that’s a good thing. It keeps the game fresh for veteran players who want new experiences. The downside of this is that all those extra bits will overwhelm the average trial player. When you first start Eve, it’s important to have someone tell you what you should be spending your time on as a new player. It’s not like some MMO’s where the gameplay is rigidly linear. In Eve, there’s nothing stopping you from doing something you’re not ready for (It’s actually kinda exciting the first few times you get yourself blown up and lose days worth of equipment).

    I’m usually online in the evenings US time. If you have some questions, feel free to send me a convo ingame. Once you have a text convo, it’s super easy to start an Eve Voice session too. (if you haven’t tried it yet, Eve voice works great and is free since the Trinity patch)

  • Keen:

    It’s really nice to see the recommendations that others have posted about Eve University. I started playing Eve (my first MMOG) a little over a year ago and have graduated from student to director at the Uni.

    Convo me in game, drop by our Headquarters in Korsiki or join channel “EVE UNIVERSITY”. Always glad to help out, answer questions or whatever else we can do to help new pilots get a strong start.

    Regards,
    Dee Carson
    Mining Director
    Eve University
    http://deecarson.blogspot.com/