In the Queue, Part I: My Return to EVE Online
Why EVE Online cannot be matched by any other video game experience
After four years, I decided to start playing EVE Online again. There’s a joke among players that the only way to win is to quit playing. I guess winning isn’t everything. But what is EVE Online? EVE Online is a massively-multiplayer online game set in far-flung future in a distant region known as New Eden. Players take on the role of a special kind of spaceship pilot known as the capsuleer whose consciousness can be transferred upon death to ensure a sort of unending continuation of life. And let me tell you, dying is a big part of this game.
Like many MMOs, the game offers players a chance to contribute to a variety of aspects of the game, but unlike other MMOs, EVE Online is so granular and player-driven that the majority of all ships and supplies are made by players using resources that were gathered by players in an ever-continual cycle of harvesting and building. The way I describe it you might think this is Stardew Valley in Space, but no… EVE Online certainly allows for people who want that Stardew Valley in Space experience, but there’s a lot of other things going on and building is just one of many.
EVE Online is primarily driven by emergent gameplay. Whereas games like World of Warcraft or Destiny 2, two of the largest MMOs in two wildly different genres and playstyles require expansions to drive new content; players in EVE Online create their own content through their interactions with other players. This could be anything from assembling a sightseeing group to travel several systems and visit lore-specific areas where there are cool things to look at and learn about. It could be a mining fleet clearing an artificial moon asteroid field created by player-owned and operated structures designed to pull chunks of rock from moons and split them into bits to harvest the valuable minerals inside those rocks. It could be hopping into bombers and dropping in on unsuspecting players to blow up their ships. It could be enlisting in the militia and fighting another empire faction’s militia in key disputed areas of space.
Despite the fact that I love the PVP combat of EVE Online, one of the things I missed most about EVE Online was space trucking. While games like the single-player Rebel Galaxy and X-series games have space trucking as a component and playstyle, nothing compares to the emergent play that comes from some players having stuff that needs to be moved with other players who can move meeting players who will try to blow up your ship en route just for fun leaving you down a ship and without the cargo.
And I tried other games like EverSpace for the combat flight simulation, I tried Elite Dangerous for the emergent gameplay, and I even went back to Star Trek Online for a quick second in hopes that I’d some satisfaction in games that I didn’t have such a troubled history with. None of them compare to the near-total player-driven content generation of EVE Online. None of them feel quite as expansive and granular. None of them feel as dangerous as EVE Online. And just to answer the question, “why isn’t Elite Dangerous as dangerous as EVE Online if dangerous is in its name?” Well, it probably has something to do with the fact that players can log off at any time with no repercussions or restrictions, thereby guaranteeing that any and all interaction between players is perfectly safe because no matter how bad things get, you can just log off and you’re safe. In EVE Online, there are entire mechanics around preventing people from escaping danger by logging off. This isn’t entirely unique to EVE Online, World of Warcraft imposes certain limitations on logging off if you’ve engaged in combat with NPCs or PCs. Elite Dangerous is more like… Elite Safe Flight. It’s also just not very fun. Even though it’s an MMO, the vast majority of play is a solo experience.
In EVE Online, players form corporations usually with some goal in mind. For some it’s industry (building, mining, and the like), for others it’s exploration (finding the ruins of lost technology and scavenging parts, for some it’s PVP combat, and for others, it’s a little bit of all of these things wrapped up in the vibes of the group. While playing solo is possible in EVE Online, most players join a corporation at some point. Corporations can offer a variety of benefits ranging from having a safe place to dock in otherwise hostile space to training programs that will help you do more of what you wanna do in the game and do it better than you did before. There can be periods of intense action where everyone is hyperfocused on accomplishing a single goal while other times it’s a casual social hour and everybody is chatting while they do their own thing or perhaps do some chill activity together (mining, for example, often times offers opportunities for people to chat).
The social aspect of EVE Online is not unique to that game either. World of Warcraft has guilds, Star Trek Online has fleets, and most other games have ways of organizing players into groups. EVE Online, like in most aspects of its gameplay, simply takes that to another level of complexity and necessity. I keep saying that EVE Online is almost exclusively emergent gameplay so let me explain what I mean by that and tie it back into things like belong to a corporation. Emergent gameplay is a term that refers to the improptu and improvised ways people play games. It is not exclusive to MMOs, but will be more often used to refer to the ways people play online games. This type of play can exist as a reaction to or independently of developer-made mechanics. Emergent play is people roleplaying slice-of-life activities in GTA Online and creating a whole world of functional social engagements in the game that were not there by design and in some ways, antithetical to the themes of the game.
In EVE Online emergent play can look like myself and some fellow corpmates going out in purpose-built and fitted ships to mine some valuable ore. We’re mining and chatting away. It’s a chill time to be us. The next thing we know someone says over comms (low-latency voice communication software like TeamSpeak, Mumble, or even Discord) that a hostile ship came up on the directional scanner (think something like sonar). Now we’re all packing it up and heading back to the structure, thinking about what ship we might bring to a fight with this hostile ship. Our relaxed conversational communication has been replaced with short bursts of information exchanged between one or two players while everyone else listens in silence. We’re waiting, hyped up by the promise of some potential PVP we hadn’t expected just 10 minutes prior. We’ve mentally made the switch from “we’re mining” to “we’re on standby to undock some ships that will hopefully blow up someone elses’ ships.”
Probably going to be writing a lot of about this game so consider this the first installment in a series about this game which celebrated its 20th Anniversary this month. Fun fact, EVE Online is older than World of Warcraft. It’s far from a perfect game and there are plenty of aspects which I’ll get around to criticizing or at the very least taking a critical look at, but for now I think I’ve given a good summary of what appeals about this game.