EVE Online The Second Genesis
EVE: The Second Genesis is a massively multiplayer, persistent online role-playing adventure that takes you into humanity’s greatest adventure!
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Star Mediocre in every way, very poor support
A friend purchased this game for me recently to try, since he has been playing it for approximately two months. I played the game for about two weeks, from about May 10th to 26th (2008).
Client Stability and Server Availability
In general, the game engine is about as sophisticated as many three to four year old games - regarding graphics, audio, and general complexity. So, it runs very well even on older hardware.
The servers are brought down fairly regularly. I didn’t play every day, but it seems as though the servers were down every day, sometimes for several hours, sometimes just for one.
Audio/Visual
This game looks and feels three or fours years old. It’s prosaic and unremarkable in this department. Really nothing worth mentioning.
Game Play
Eve Online can be summarized as “the greatest experience for hardcore, long time MMO players”. At the same time, one can easily refer to it as “the most boring, time sink filled, banal and repetitious computer gaming experience ever fabricated in mind or reality”. Unless you’re a masochist this game is not for you. In my humble opinion.
Support and Service
Your petitions for support/assistance are only handled during scheduled outages. Even so, it routinely takes ten or more hours for issues to be addressed, and roughly half the time the issues are not resolved. Once my character became “locked”, that is, the client would crash whenever I attempted to log into it. I was told two days after submitting my petition that this was due to a bug that required game master intervention, and that they had corrected it. However, all of my resources that I had spent a week collecting were missing. I politely requested assistance acquiring the lost items (a typical and benign problem in all MMOs). I was denied, told that it was not in the EULA (odd that they would refer to the end user license agreement for software for this issue) and - get this - actually told by support that I can feel free to cancel my subscription. Heh. Amazing customer service there. So I did.
Conclusion
Old technology and graphics, constant outages, poor audio, repetitious game play filled with outdated time sinks, and extremely poor customer support. I recommend avoiding this game.
4 Stars Great Change of Pace
I love this game, but then again I don’t like games that depend on how fast of a mouse I have, or how fast I can click my macros.
Some of what you read in these reviews is only partly true.
Can you lose skills that you’ve worked for weeks to learn? Sure, but only if you don’t clone yourself.
Is fighting like being on Auto-Pilot? Not that I’ve seen. My missles don’t fire automatically. Yes, I can set my ship to stay a certain distance from an enemy and it flies itself, but I still have to choose my targets, lock on, and fire.
PvP. Well, you don’t die first of all. Your ship blows up (but you did buy that insurance right?), and you go to your homepoint in your life pod. Can the other players blow up your life pod? Yes, but I’ve never experienced it. Besides, I have my clone and lose nothing if they do.
With the huge expansion coming out, now is the time to get your 14 day trial, plus the 30 more you get when you buy the game code.
44 days of play for $20. What do you really have to lose? (Besides your job from losing track of time and staying up until 4 AM!)
2 Stars I have seen the future. And it is boring.
In some aspects, EVE Online is superb. The graphics are jaw-droppingly beautiful, the sounds are great, the design of ships and stations is awesome, and you really get a sense that you are exploring a genuine vast universe. It is also perhaps the most realistic space simulation I’ve ever seen, but that very aspect of it might be it’s greatest weakness.
Quite simply, EVE is boring. After the initial wow-factor of the graphic design wears off, you are stuck in a very dark (literally) and uneventful world, which can make the gameplay an emotionally depressing affair - seriously. Even the combat is boring because of its automatic nature. You pretty much just sit back and watch your ship trade shots with another one until one of them wins.
If you don’t make friends within EVE to chat with, then you can add “crushingly lonely,” to “dark” and “uneventful.”
For me, if game isn’t fun, then there is no reason to play. That’s why I quit WoW. After awhile, I wasn’t having fun anymore. With EVE, I never had fun. If a chat room with beautiful scenery is what you’re looking for, then EVE is for you. But if you’re looking for an engaging and exciting experience in space, then run away.
1 Star This game is not for kids! Inappropriate player made content!
Eve Online to be release in March. ESRB Teen! Not for kids!
Game creator is CCP, Iceland.
March 2009 the game will be published by Atari
Game Content is ESRB Teen
This game exploits a major loophole in the ESRB called Player Content. ESRB does not rate player content. Write the ESRB today to complain their policies.
Player Content is ESRB Mature+
CCP communicates and promotes a sexual, perverted, profane and drunken adult social community in this game.
You have read what the game is about. Here is what kind of Player content your child will be exposed to.
The average age in game is high, about 28.
A group called SomethingAweful ([...] largely controls the game at the moment.
They run the largest in game entity called GoonSwarm, ([...]).
This sick organizations members are extremely perverted and have inundated the game with inappropriate player content.
Their members have a majority of the Game Manager positions working for CCP in Iceland and ignore all parental complaints.
Your child will be exposed to:
Inappropriate chat discussions
Inappropriate voice discussions (both the games integrated voice chat, teamspeak, and ventrilo)
Links to porn sites in chat
Sexual stories from other players
Inappropriate Jokes to include: Racism, Sex, Politics, Drugs.
Your child will “hear” people doing drugs.
Your child will “hear” people drunk.
CCP the maker of eve will broadcast fanfest events through the ingame voice system. Your child will hear inappropriate things during their presentations.
While flying through space systems your child will see and be overwhelmed with content named with inappropriate names. I once saw someone had their ships out and they were all named a modified version of penis.
You will not be able to protect your child:
There is “No” in-game method or mechanism to shield your child from this player content.
There are “No” chat filters
The same person that posts links to porn will be talking to your child
3 Stars Keep coming back to it, and leaving for the same reasons
Eve is a really revolutionary product in the mass of me too MMO clones. All players on a single server cluster (and there are a lot of them), very scalable to older hardware (it helps if you draw a lot of empty space I suppose), casual-gamer friendly skilling system, the most robust and complex in-game completely player-driven economy ever seen, player-driven politics and territory control, scams, intrigues, assassinations, you name it, someone has done it somewhere.
All that said, Eve is well and truly a multiplayer corporation- (guild/clan) based game, and without a good group of players it becomes pretty boring. If you’re a casual game who logs on once in a while to shoot some AI bad guys, there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but once you get to the point of breezing through level 4 kill missions, it’s pretty boring. At this point you need to get into the PvP scene, and to do this effectively and enjoyably you really should have a good corporation. If you want to do this in 0.0 space (no-mans land where the players control territory, pretty cool concept) you need a good and big corporation, since you will be defending your territory from invaders. And here is where the problem is. Whether you’re protecting what’s yours in 0.0 or gate ganking with a small squad in low security space, it translates into a lot of downtime. Just a handful of guys sitting around, waiting for a target to come by, chatting. If you want to be that target, things are a little more exciting as you’re actually going places, at least until you run into a bubble camp that traps you and you get shot to pieces. If you want to be a solo killer, you can do that too, but it’s still a lot of sitting around, scanning for targets, picking your spots to charge in, etc. You could play the industrial game too, but it’s not for me; I tried it for months.
So every few months, I re-activate my account and play, and ooh and ahh at the great design and gameplay concepts, then I get bored, maybe kill some people, run into problems because nobody I know is around or doing anything that is interesting, and I cancel again. Since other MMos tend to bore me to the point where I NEVER want to come back, I suppose this is a step up. Eve, love it or hate it, or, like me, be occasionally ambivalent.
Filed under: MMORPG Software