After months and months of reading blog posts and listening to thread after thread about Eve Online, I decided to break down and download the game to see what it is all about.  I figured that if Ages of Athiria is a direct competitor to Eve from a world simulation standpoint then I might as well play the game and see it for myself.  What follows is my impression of Eve after playing through the tutorial phase of the newbie experience.  I have very little former experience with Eve.  I know very little of what makes the game tick and therefore, I'm mostly a newbie save the information I've read about from fans and from other developers.

That said, my first thought was how easy Eve was to get and download.  The total game size is just a shade over 2GB which is tiny by today's standards and was downloaded in about thirty minutes or so on my computer.  The 14 day trial registration was quick and painless to get into which was a good sign.  As a contrasting point, EQ II requires you to download a much larger file, requires Sony Station's launcher, a file scan and then finally EQ II.  Getting into EQ II or into WoW simply feels more involved than Eve Online.  Now that I think about it, there wasn't a patching process to the game on first execute and that probably contributed to the perception.

So far so good.  As the game client comes up, I note that I like the greenish grayish color of the UI even if the default font size is tiny on my 1920x1200 24" monitor.  Logging in to the game takes me to an intro movie.  Honestly, I made it through about twenty seconds of this movie before I hit escape to move on.  As far as I remember, the only company that actually had me interested in their cut scenes was Blizzard.  For some reason, Blizzard does cut scenes and intro movies with Hollywood style flair and everyone else doesn't.  Not a knock on CCP because I didn't expect them to nail it like Blizzard does and in this case that is par for the course.  This leaves me with character creation.

Overall, character creation is pretty standard fare.  I got the idea of what was there for me to choose from but felt like there was not enough personalization to the system.  The ideologies presented by the four factions(races?) didn't quite suit my tastes exactly so I chose the closest one to the one I thought I would like to play.  I chose a background and a mostly forgot about the rest of the choices because they all seemed rather arbitrary.  If there's any long lasting game play implications of those choices, they were not made apparent to me in the process.  Perhaps this was because I knew there is a deep player versus player experience behind the whole game making the faction/race/profession choices seem shallow.  Its very possible that my prior knowledge of the game tainted my view of this part of character creation.  Next up, character customization and later, my first venture into the game.  Character customization is your standard fare customization.  It's a shoulders up customization of your character and for a game where your main avatar is a ship, I felt this was a bit out of place.  Throughout the tutorial I kept wanting to jump out of the ship and run around with the character I created but I know enough about the game to know that this is not possible.  That made me think that the whole idea of modifying your character's hair and eye color wasn't needed.  I would have much preferred to customize my ship with colors, guns, styles etc., etc.

From here, I am dropped into the game, floating in space with a tutorial begging for my attention.  It sorta felt like I was asleep at my desk and Trinity was talking to me through my monitor.  How deep does the rabbit hole go?  Eve Online certainly is beautiful.  There's no taking style points away from this game.  My starter ship is rendered nicely and the rendering of space leaves a lot to be admired.  If only X-Wing versus Tie Fighter looked this good back in the day.  I've got a few things to say about the user interface. 

There's a tun of windows.
The default font/button size is tiny.
There's a pile of windows and dialogs.
Space movement is disorienting if you're used to the land based movements of games like WoW and EQ II.
There's a pile of windows and dialogs.

Movement was completely new yet once I picked it up, it felt intuitive and understandable.  There really should be little need to fly these ships on your own.  Autopilot, range based orbiting and such are all the way to go and the options are all here and all hung off a right click context sensitive menu system, something I've been an advocate of for quite some time now.  Did I mention how disoriented I was?  The tutorial asked me to orbit a nearby space rock and I managed to make this happen.  Just as I started to orbit, I was attacked.  Immediately I thought that this was PvP and my adrenaline started pumping.  The feeling quickly subsided though when I realized it was just the tutorial sending an NPC after me.  The frustrating part of this is that I wanted to fight back but I had no idea how to lock on and return fire, so I sat there reading the tutorial while I was being shot at hoping there would be relief in the tutorial's text.  Thankfully, there was and I managed to return fire, destroy the ship, board it and get its contents.  The latter parts of that sequence were facilitated by the tutorial with step by step directions and given the disorientation I was still feeling about movement, I was glad the tutorial was there.  Next stop, warping to a space station to train and explore the mission system.

All I can say about the training system is that it is a bit like falling off a cliff face forward and seeing the vastness of the fall before you.  Needless to say, I was a bit overwhelmed.  There were no less than 20 skills I could train.  They all impacted various elements of my ship or my abilities and there was little guidance on what what used where without digging through dialogs.  Couple that with the understanding that real time is required to train and Eve demands from the newbie that he or she have an inordinate amount of game knowledge to make appropriate use of the first couple days of game play.  It's going to take me 14 days just to learn the training system and all of the ways I can develop my ship; the trial's not long enough....

After talking with a few friends that play Eve, apparently this newbie experience is an improved version.  Unfortunately, I think it misses focusing on what makes Eve the standout success that it is in favor of presenting the user with another level/rep/treadmill grind of running missions and leveling skills.  Throughout the newbie experience, I felt like there should be a couple of members of player run corporations asking to help me out or show me around.  For a game that is decidedly about PvP, the lack of any other players in the newbie game is a bit surprising.