Where's the Massive in MMOGs? 105
Grimwell writes "Like MMOG's? Concerned about their future? You should read Darniaq's article questioning the general approach to these games. From the article: 'I expect invention from Blizzard as I much as I would from the local Top 40 radio station. I'd hate to think that the entire breadth of MMOs is measured by the playing of a few of the hot selling titles. It's great what WoW has done for the genre, but man I hope people don't give up on the genre just because they hit 60 and realized they didn't want to spend 3 hours a night in Molten Core.'"
The "Massive" is in EVE Online (Score:5, Informative)
There's also the in-game universe, which consists of a network of more than 4,000 solar systems. How many zones are there in other MMOGs like WoW, Everquest, Everquest2, and so on? 200? 300? Again, massive.
Oh, and you wanna talk massive? Check out the ships [grismar.net] you can fly. You do of course start the game in a tiny (by comparison) ship, but through the training of skills you will be able to fly bigger and badder ships over time.
Skills are another area where EVE takes the term massive to the limit. Any player can learn any skill, of which there are literally hundreds. You aren't limited by your "class" because there are no classes. The skills you have determine the activities you can perform, period. There are certain types of spacecraft which are designed to be used by members of a particular race (there are four: Caldari, Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar) but there is nothing preventing say, a Gallente pilot from learning the Amarr skills so that they can fly Amarr Battleships. One thing about skills that differs from other games is that you select a skill (one at a time) to train, and then it will train over a period of time, regardless of whether or not you're online. So if it will take you a few days to get the Caldari Cruiser skill from level 3 to 4, you can put the game down for a long weekend and come back to your new skill and the benefits it entails.
Everything (item-wise and ship-wise) in the game is produced in one of two ways: you take it as loot after killing an NPC pirate ("rat" in game terminology) or players make them. Most of the equipment and ships are player-produced. It is possible (although difficult) for a single player to mine her own ore, start her own production queue, and start producing her own ships, guns, ammunition, microwarp drives, armor plating, and so on. It's much easier to be part of a group.
That brings us to Corporations. Corporations of many types exist. Some corporations exist solely to mine the ores of the asteroid belts in the outer regions. Some corporations are pirates, who exist solely to kill other players and take their equipment. Some corporations are explorers, or escorts, or manufacturers. Corporations can be as small as 20 people or as large as 1,000 (or more). Multiple corporations can form Alliances, perhaps granting a Mining corporation the privelege of mining precious ore in an outer system controlled by a Pirate corporation in the alliance.
At the beginning I mentioned the 4,000 solar systems. These systems each have a sovereignity and a security level. The security level determines a player's safety in the system, ranging from 1.0 (secure) to 0.0 (insecure). At a security level less than 0.5, any player can attack any other player. At a security level less than 0.3, players can set up their own space stations (you read that right, you can deploy and operate your own space station) and claim sovereignity over that system, effectively making it "theirs." Alliances will claim sovereignity over vast networks of systems, as well. So of that massive 4,000 systems, perhaps half are at a security level of 0.5 or greater and are "protected" by The Federation. Outside of these systems though, anyone and anything is fair game, and the stakes can be quite high.
Outside of Federation Space, there is one thing that is more massive than any other game out there. If you have two alliances, each with 4,000 players or so, who both want to control a region of space because of, say, the extremely valuable minerals in the asteroid belts required to build a certain type of ship, th
Re:The "Massive" is in EVE Online (Score:5, Informative)
Take WoW for example. Say you have a group of 30 lvl10s. You will never, ever kill a level60. They will just resist, dodge, absorb or tank all your damage and one-shot each of you without breaking a sweat. A level 30 in the 30-39 bracket? Welcome to hurting.
But in eve... big ships have penalties to hit smaller ships. Now, smaller ships can't really put out the damage to kill a big one, so a battleship vs a frigate would basically be a stalemate, as long as the frigate keeps its speed up. But a tiny fleet of frigates can easily pin down and kill a battleship. Some corporations base their operations on that: large groups of cheap ships that always lose a few members when taking on big game, but end up doing much more damage monetarily speaking. (You lost 8 250k frigates, they lost 2 100mil battleships. You win.)
It's such a refreshing change that you can be actually useful in a short period of time, I figured it'd be a shame not to mention it.
Why I gave up on WoW (Score:3, Informative)
I have since figured out that I would rather play a multiplayer (4-10 people) game than a MMORPG. The server tends to be more stable, the players more consistent, and the cost a LOT less. Even when I played Wow, I seldom got the feeling of the supposed millions of people who were playing, except when I walked into one of the major towns. Other than in town, I doubt I ever saw more than a dozen people at any one time, anyway, so what's the difference?
Re:Sandbox mmos... (Score:1, Informative)
EVE will not hold your hand at all. If you can't figure out what *you* want to do to have fun, the game will be very boring, very fast.
There is no level 60. There is no Boring End Game Dungeon With The Same Old Monsters Only With Different Models. There's even no grinding unless you want there to be - a player with some decent skills (both coded and basic lessons you can learn from your friendly neighborhood pirate), a player in a frigate can be as or more valuable than a player in a battleship. You'd be hard pressed to need to grind to afford a frigate!
Do you want to shout "Arr!", raise the jolly roger, and make people who should know better than to carry around billions of ISK worth of equipment in an unescorted hauler cry?
Do you want to give yourself braindamage and mine asteroids for weeks on end?
Do you want to topple empires?
Where's the massive indeed.
Re:Sandbox mmos... (Score:4, Informative)
Another thing to mention is that Eve doesn't use "shards". There's none of this "Oh, you play WoW? What server? Oh, too bad, I'm on Mediveh". It's ONE SERVER, but at times, we've hit 25,000 simultaneous connections. They accomplish this with big hardware (IBM dual core dual xeon blades, at the moment, i think) and a RAMSAN [superssd.com] from a company in Texas.
The game is... it's really hard to explain it to someone who hasn't seen it. It's almost entirely player controlled. All of the low-security space is permanantly up for grabs, and Might makes Right, period. The economy is by far the most complex I've ever seen in a game. Anything you can think of to make money is fair game. There is no "end game" - i.e. there is no lvl 60. If you get bored, join an alliance. Start a war. Train your character in a different direction. I mean... just go check it out. That's all there is to it.
(and I've only been playing since Feb.)
~Xiaodown
Piloting a Ferox with more tech 2 gear than you can shake a stick at.