So I’ve been trying out the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Eve Online. After just 4 days I’m done.
I like the idea behind the kinds of games, an online world with lots of other players and things to interact with, if nothing else it should give the average game more depth as the world itself is continually changing as players function in the online world and interact with it. When you combine that with a developer staff that is continually working to keep the game fresh and interesting by adding new content and you should have a winner right?
If only it was that simple. I first dabbled with an MMORPG several years ago with Star Wars Galaxies. The promise sounded great, all the pieces of an MMORPG combined with creating a playable character in the Star Wars universe. Within a few weeks I started loosing interest as i discovered the weekness of the MMORPG genre.
Every new player starts off pretty weak, they have very little supplies, little in game experience, and little in game finances. Short of cheating there’s no way to get more skills, supplies or finances without participating in what is typically called “grinding.” See to do all of those things you must either complete missions or harvest some sort of in game material which you can either sell or remanufacture into some sort of in game asset which you can sell.
It’s called grinding because your grinding away at these tasks. Most missions in MMORPG typically boil down to “go here, kill this thing or things, come back and collect your reward,” or “take/bring this item to this location and collect your reward.” While the actual location, item, or creature may change you’re still basically doing the same task over and over again.
Harvesting resources is just as bad - prospect for worthwhile resources, setup a harvestor, collect resources. Repeat. Then the junior player discovers the next problem - what to do with the resources. You could sell them - except that more experienced players have advanced harvesters that are pulling in exponentially more resources than you and are probably selling significantly larger quantities of resources than you have or could even get in a month. You could process your resources into an asset that you can sell - except that as a new player you either don’t have the skill to do so at all or don’t have the skill to create something that other people even want. Getting that skill means grinding away for probably weeks or longer.
Some games have other issues on top of those. Many MMORPGs have the “realm” running on multiple servers in order to load balance the game. You only have contact with the folks who are on the same server as you. In terms of overall game performance it’s great no single server gets slammed as users congregate in areas. I was on Second Life for 15 minutes before I quit in frustration, the server just couldn’t handle that many people in the same part of the game. Galaxies suffers from an opposite problem, since folks on different servers can’t mingle there are vast swaths of the game that are deserted.
I tried Eve Online in the hope that it would be different. The storyline seemed compelling and from my reading it looked to be a different type of MMORPG. Unfortunately once I got in and started playing I was quickly disappointed. I was stunned by the amount of sameness throughout the entire game. At least in the other MMORPGs different parts of the game looked different, if nothing else you could spend a significant amount of time just exploring the different regions of the game to offset the tedium of the grind. Eve Online doesn’t even offer that, every single solar system is the same, there’s a handful of planets and asteroids plus a few space stations in every solor system - and that’s it.
$19.95 a month at least to me just isn’t worth the sameness that Eve Online offers.
