Choose My Adventure: EVE Online wasn’t really all that bad I guess

As I alluded to last week, I’ve been putting in a lot of thought into my time with EVE Online over the course of this adventure, and I’m slowly beginning to realize that perhaps it wasn’t all terrible. I mean, it still was terrible, but not because the game is.

The longer I think back to everything I’ve done during this round of CMA, the more I come to realize that it’s the miserable UI and its extremely hands-off approach that I disliked the most. It felt less like I was piloting my ship or even ordering it around tactically so much as I was on some distant station pushing buttons on a computer. It all felt like some form of mobile game, which is kind of amusing considering EVE Echoes is nearly a thing.

The thing I love the most about sci-fi games and internet spaceships is being in direct control of said internet spaceship. I don’t necessarily need space legs or even need to care about what the avatar in the cockpit looks like. I just like the sensation of flight. It’s why I have fun in games like Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous. There’s a sense of real, honest, flight going on here.

That’s not to say that I was expecting EVE to transform in to Wing Commander, but I was sort of hoping that I would feel at least some sort of connection to my weird little Caldari polyhedrons.

This problem was only highlighted by EVE’s awful UI arrangement. The number of windows required to perform certain things is beyond ridiculous at this point, and I wish that someone somewhere would wake up and realize that playing a space game via windows isn’t really fun.

Of course, these are problems that are too far gone, and asking CCP to fix them would require them to wholesale reboot the game, so I appreciate that things won’t change here. I guess those walls will remain in the way of me and my enjoyment of EVE. That’s a shame, because I have found myself liking things about it.

Most of these things revolved around combat, which really was opened up to me thanks to the two military career NPC mission tracks, especially the advanced military missions. I know I’m repeating myself here, but since these missions were never in the game the last time I played, I can’t stress enough how revelatory they were for me as a fresh face. There really is a lot more to combat in EVE than I thought. Even if the experts have likely pared combat down to a precise and efficient exercise.

Someone had asked in the comments before why I didn’t join up with a corp and fly with others. That’s mostly because I wanted to do the leg work to get acclimated fully to things in EVE, and I also felt it unfair to join a guild for a game that I knew I wasn’t going to be playing too regularly. I would be a wasted guild spot. That just strikes me as rude, honestly.

That said, perhaps some time later I’ll return to the game, find a group of people to fly with, and revisit EVE. Maybe I’ll fully explore just what being a combat pilot for an org is like. Maybe I won’t be awful and will completely find my place in New Eden. Or maybe I’ll just hate it even more, what with hell often being other people. I can’t really say for sure, and I damn sure will not be entertaining that notion any time soon, but it’s something to consider.

Unless, of course, anyone reading this just doesn’t want to hear it from me anymore.

To that point, it’s about time we moved on to our next adventure, which sees us arriving to Dungeons and Dragons Online. I am stupendously curious about this one since I’ve never played it before, but we’ll need to get a couple of polls out of the way before we begin.

First off is an obvious one at this point, I suspect: the starting class. I understand there are a lot of choices here, so I’ve narrowed things down.

The second one is another poll choice that I’ve used before, but I also feel like it’s pretty relevant to the interests of those curious about starting out a new MMO: whether to arrive as a free player or to start things off with a subscription.

As usual, polling will wrap up at 1:00 p.m. EDT this coming Friday, July 3rd. For now, I’ll be wiping EVE from my drive, but I will admit that it’ll likely just be temporary. I’m hoping to work up the nerve to dive in one more time. But it won’t be today. Or tomorrow, for that matter.