I decided to download and try this on the 14 day trial this weekend. I've just got a Macbook (the most basic version) so was intrigued to see if it would work. I've never even played an MMO before.
On the positive side the game worked very well on basic hardware on medium setting, I'm not sure how it'd perform in a large battle but I did have room to move the graphics lower. Sadly my connection dropped every hour or so, I guess playing wirelessly isn't a great idea, though 50mb line with Virgin you'd think it would cope.
The fact is, the first few hours of EVE are quite simply terrible for a new user with little to no idea of how it works. I am at least a heavy gamer so understand some basic ideas but for a casual gamer they'd have no chance. I really shouldn't have to resort to youtube several times to have to complete a tutorial.
The first tutorials were generally ok. But when you get to the career specific ones the hand holding isn't close to being good enough. When I took one mission, I had no idea how to get to the area, it was only later when it clicked I had to right-click on the destination in the mission log and click warp to location. That solved a few problems.
But why are the missions so unbelievably dull and drawn out? Having tried to do the exploration missions and failed I tried military. Cue 2 hours of, try the afterburner, fix it, launch, go to area, press one button on the HUD, dock, complete. Rinse and repeat for missiles, warp jammers etc. All of these could easily have been rolled into one mission. Why make me spend 10 minutes per mission just to press one button?
I got given a frigate to run into a pirate and it was going to explode. So I got 100% insurance on it. I got 26k for it from insurance, fine. Then I took the mission for missiles, took me a while and lots of clicking to work out that my two ships had high power slots but not missile hard points. THe frigate that had just been blewn up does have one, so I went to buy it and the cheapest I could get it was 200k? SO why did my 100% insurance only pay me 26k?
To be honest, I did actually enjoy the potential of it and if I had time and it was stable I would certainly stick with it. By the end I was getting a hang of it and things were slowly becomng clearer. But how many thousands of people have been put off EVE by the terrible opening few hours. If I was the developer I'd be ploughing a lot of resources into this area, I'm sure it would have paid for itself several times over by now.
Edited by IJ at 16:25:22 28-05-2012
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