I’ve been playing some EVE Online, though recently, I’ve not been on there too much due to work and other stuff taking up my time. However, I thought I should document some of my experiences in there here.
One of the latest things I’ve picked up on is exploration. The idea is that you drop some probes from your spaceship, use a scanner on them, and try to figure out the location of hidden sites in the various solar systems. It sounds amazing, if you’re among the types who’d try to go across the edge of the map in games like World of Warcraft, and it is quite fun – though, in the areas I’ve been working, not as cool as I would’ve wanted. I’ve found identical sites countless times, and while that’s of course the nature of the beast in games like this, it is a bit of a letdown.
I did however get an escalation from one of the sites I found. Escalations send you on to other solar systems, to continue the battle you’ve been doing. The one I did was called Mindflood, and I’ve documented what I found there. Even though I didn’t make much money – I ended up losing the most valuable item I found two days later from a really stupid decision in battle – it was lots of fun, quite exciting, and showed that someone had really cared about the experience for the players.
In the near future, I’ll try to write some more on the things I like and dislike about EVE Online on this blog, so stay tuned.
I am intrigued by this game, although I have heard the penalties for losing battles can be quite harsh. I don’t know if this game would suit me, as I usually find MMOGS to be both amazingly fun and amazingly annoying at the same time, as well as time-consuming in the extreme.
I think the ultimate offline exploration game is Morrowind, if you’re into fantasy at least. Including expansions and the official plugins, the game is absolutely huge, and if you explore a lot you will also uncover more and more of the rather extensive background story, as well as badass magic swords of course. But the real quality of Morrowind is that the different sites you can find are not all just copies of the same thing, so when you’ve seen one, you haven’t seen them all.
It’s right that the penalties in EVE can be harsh – at least in the way that you’re likely to lose quite a lot of virtual money from dumb mistakes. I lost about 100 million of the ingame currency last week from one of those dumb mistakes; To put that into perspective, my current cash on hand is about 400 million, so it was quite a penalty for what’s basicly failing to focus for 2 minutes in a battle.
Sounds like I should try out Morrowind at some point, then. Exploration is really my thing, though I do like the idea of having other people around as well, for whenever they’re needed. Optimally, having them there when I need them, and not having to bother when I don’t 😉
Edit: Actually, thinking about it, I played a bit of Oblivion at some point – I liked most of it, but the whole portal-to-a-different (mostly same looking) dimension to close some gate was annoying, in my opinion. Anyway, I see that there’s lots of expansions, so it might be worth getting my hands on one of those.
I have to comment on this. I was very careful to say Morrowind and not Oblivion for a good reason. In my opinion at least, Oblivion is Morrowind for the masses. Oblivion does have shinier graphics, sure, but like you already noticed, a lot of other things just went wrong with that one. They didn’t in Morrowind, but then again that is a game for certain people. It’s not as easy to figure out, and you have to actually like wandering about and exploring. Oblivion is more about action and shiny graphics.
Ah, I guess that makes a difference. I hope they’ll make something really nice of number 5 in the series, whenever that comes out.