Blog Banter – Enduring Allure
Brinelan, of The Shard, asked a great question for this month’s Blog Banter. “What drew us into EVE, what keeps us playing the game, and what brought us back in if we’ve ever left?” I began to think and found the perfect answer to his question that is one word. Sandbox.
Sitting in a cold and dark room for months on end, reading the same magazine article concerning a game I had never heard of drove me stir crazy. It was called EVE Online, and I was captivated by a world in which limits are only as high as you want to set them. No rails, just pure sand for players to dive into and get started on their own destiny. This feature, freedom, is what convinces me that EVE will be my game of choice for ages to come.
Writing about EVE, briefly for Massively as a blogger and now freelance, the concept of EVE as a sandbox is what I feel is EVE’s most important and alluring feature. For players wanting to jump into a capsule for the first time, images of piracy, market cornering, fleet wars, and drug cartels hit the brain simultaneously. Anything is available to you and it all starts in that fresh new Ibis. As it launches for the first time and the vastness of space becomes reality, the experience, at least to me, was captivating and also down right frightening.
There were thousands of other players waiting to make their mark on the world. There was no level cap race, no one trying to be the 100th person to loot the new sword, and no one following me on a “unique” quest. Instead, everyone was floating around space or docking in stations with their own unique set of agendas, unrestricted by code or content. Every one of them, it seemed, was gunning for me. Anything was possible and after blasting away at Pithi drones and earning some isk, I knew what direction I wanted to take.
Past the high security centers, pirates roamed, corporations struggled for control, and alliances sent waves of ships crashing into their not so distant enemies. The further you advanced past the first station, the darker, and grittier side of New Eden encompassed your very being. In the lawless 0.0 regions of space, more opportunities presented themselves. Vast amounts of wealth, juicy targets, fame, and glory were all for the taking. Players have to strategize though, think tactically, since charging ahead against equally minded opponents would only result in failure and a quick trip to the clone vats. Foreign policy was real, as were the wars and refugees displaced by them. There is pure chaos around every corner, and still, pure unadulterated sand to play in at every turn.
In a world full of scripts, rails, quest databases, and loot tables, your mind is not challenged. Knowing what macros to use and what sequence to strike keys in is important, but nothing compared to learning how to motivate hundreds of players to fly into certain death. Yet, due to the freedom that EVE allows, the mind is forced to work, quickly and effectively. The wrong turn could end up causing your corporation to fall in a manner that would make Machiavelli smile. You could end up broke, iskless, and enslaved to a massive alliance, or, on top of it all, leading thousands of people to victory. Everything depends on what you want to do, how you do it, and how others reacted to it. Pure freedom. That is what keeps me coming back for more.
For more stories concerning this CrazyKinux Blogbanter, see:
Xiphos what great way to summarize! Your third and fourth paragraphs capture everything there is to EvE and then some. What a great recap bro Way to go!
Excellent post! I’m enjoying hearing how folks came to EVE and what keeps them there.
Good read! Pure freedom, indeed. Can’t wait to see what that means in future expansions!
Excellent post, I linked to it from my blog too.
Heh, great write up! I’d love to go back and play with the wide-eyed innocence I had back when I started. It all seemed to complicated, yet it clicked once it was explained. Awesome!
Great post. Almost poetic.
Very enjoyable for both style and content. Thanks for sharing!
Well said my fiend. I think you’ve really summed up the essence and beauty of EVE and why it is that we’re so captivated by it.