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Friday 8 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY
A major selling point for EVE is the player driven economy. Outside of the starting safety areas, that is space owned and controlled by one of the four empires, the economy – that is EVERYTHING in the economy, including ships, ship equipment, trade goods, minerals, and other manufactured goods – is entirely driven by player input. I put money into the EVE economy by occasionally mining for minerals. However, those minerals can play a large part in the production of ships.
Taking those minerals I mined, I can then create ammunition for the weapons on my ship – or even another ship itself. And while I am not directly interacting with another person, by mining minerals for others to use I am contributing to a group of individuals in its goals.
DESIGN
As I mentioned in my comments on the gameplay, one of the most innovative elements of EVE Online is the completely player driven economy. The players mine the ore, process them into minerals, manufacture ships and weapons with the minerals, buy ships to shoot each other with, and lose those ships. The economy in EVE is mind boggling in its scale. If one was so inclined, he could plot which NPC regions needed what trade good and make millions of isk (the ingame currency) just by moving around a trade good from where it is readily available to where it is needed. The same holds true for minerals and ships in player owned space.
However, the economy is not the only great feature of EVE Online. In fact a feature that I hold dear to my own heart is the ability for groups of players, corporations, to take and hold space under their name. This ability to hold space has led to some of the greatest territory wars imaginable. Having two sides fighting with over 300 people on each side is an amazing sight to behold, and the incentive provided by holding space has wrought the formation and destruction of many powerful alliances in the political arena of EVE.
By giving the player so much freedom to choose and do what he wants, EVE is one of the most open ended games I've seen. All of the goals in the game are created by the player. There is no set level structure – a very good design implementation as it allows relatively new people to still be useful in fighting – and players rely on each other to hold and control space.
However, even with this, the game is still bland from the actual gameplay perspective. The control of ones ship is extremely limited. And combat is literally a few clicks to target a person and one button press to tell your weapons to fire at them. There is very little strategy involved in the actual combat, all strategy falls into a larger perspective emergent goal based view. All in all though, the gameplay is bland, but fun enough to keep the player involved.
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