Honey, we need to talk…
Posted in games on April 19th, 2010 by Roblob – Be the first to commentI have a confession to make. I haven’t been very happy with EVE for the past month or so. Things have sunk to the level where I’ve logged on more from duty than from any real sense of enjoyment. Like the dutiful husband I’ve put in some hours to make things feel normal, but my heart has not really been in it.
What I’m feeling is a general lack of goals and purpose. I’ve just finished training my two gals to stealth bombers and now I’ve found that there is not a lot to do with them. My casual play style doesn’t really work for SB hunting. If I only have an hour or two to play in the evening I can’t really use three hours to hunt for targets in wormholes, now can I?
And otherwise I’m sure we can agree that the solo PVP in EVE is pretty dead. Hunting for targets in low sec is like constipation; you have to work really hard for a even the smallest of results.
On the PVE side I feel I’ve pretty much seen everything the low sec exploration I’ve been doing has to offer. I don’t think there is much to do about that other than to move out to null (or wormholes) if I want to experience something new.
I’m sure things would be a lot different if I joined a good corp, but I feel that that requires a level of dedication I’m not ready for. Red vs Blue would most likely offer some nice PVP opportunities, but I’ve never been a fan of pointless PVP. If I’m hunting for targets in wormholes I’m doing it partly for fun, but I’m also hoping for some profits. Staged fights may be fun, but it still feels too artificial to me.
The previous time I felt like this was in the fall last year. Back then we were just about to head out for a month long vacation in the States, which brought a month long break from all things EVE. When we came back from the trip things felt new and it was easy to pick the game up again.
Which is why I’ve decided to take another break from EVE. I’m going to set up some long time skills for training and just forget EVE for a while. Of course, things wouldn’t have the required drama if I hadn’t also met someone new…
It’s not you, I just can’t seem to settle down…
For the past six months I’ve had several games on my radar that I’ve been following with interest. I have not been exactly looking for a new game but just keeping an eye on the industry.
One of the older ones I wanted really badly to be a winner was Champions Online. It unfortunately suffered from a premature launch and seems to have run permanently aground. It is really a shame since I liked City of Heroes thematically, but the game mechanics didn’t really win me over and I succumbed to WoW in the end. I was hoping Champions would be the successor for CoH which would fixed everything that was wrong with the older game.
Another hot title on my watch list is of course Star Wars: The Old Republic. Who Star Wars fan wouldn’t be excited about that one? But the game is still in early development and scant details have been released so far. For me SWTOR is starting to feel a lot like WoW in the Star Wars universe. From what I’ve read it actually seems like a solo rpg dressed up as a MMO, but of course initial impressions may be misleading. We’ll just have to wait and see with this one.
A bit of a surprise contestant has turned up lately with All Points Bulleting. APB is more like a massively multiplayer fps than a rpg, but I’ve found myself strangely intrigued by its mechanics. APB release shouldn’t be too far off so I’m sure there will be more information available soon.
The problem with the above games is that they are either (seemingly) dying or haven’t been released yet. This makes them rather poor substitutes for EVE.
I don’t really know her yet, but she seems really nice…
I’ve been reading about Fallen Earth for a while and while the initial reviews weren’t entirely positive the user base has shown the same enthusiasm that I’ve come to find in EVE. FE may be a bit rough around the edges, but it is getting constant love from the developers and its core seems to be pretty solid. It is said to have a punitive learning curve, requiring (and rewarding) dedication to master and offering the player a pretty free approach to their character development. Sound like any game you might know?
On the other hand FE is most definitely not a sand box game the way EVE is. This is not necessarily such a limitations as one might easily gather from discussion with a Eve fan. It is true that EVEs most prominent advantage is the sand box model, but it is also its greatest pitfall.
The emergent gameplay that arises from the EVEs world being such an open playground produces the amazing stories that almost everyone interested in gaming has read. It does require that the players make these things happen. For a solitary player it is easy to feel left out and that is when EVE starts to look less promising.
Sure, you can do what ever you want and set your own goals. But what if you don’t really know what to aim for? It is pretty easy to start to lose the focus and then your goals become just arbitrary landmarks. So I can now fly stealth bombers, so what? What am I supposed to do now? Aim for recons? But then what?
Without the framework created by other players, EVE really does lack the story to keep you playing. For a solo player EVE is just not always much fun. The obvious answer is to get together with some other people and get that social network to support your in-game actions. This again has its own downsides, but I digress…
I guess what eventually lead me to try Fallen Earth out is the loving memories I’ve with the Fallouts. FE is pretty much the Fallout MMO that never was.
So we’re not going out tonight?
I must say that Fallen Earth has done its best to keep at a distance so far. I bought the game on Friday from their online store and figured I would have the game downloaded, installed and ready to play by Saturday. Unfortunately the game requires a product key to install and didn’t seem to be getting the receipt email containing. After three hours had passed and no email was to be seen I send the support an email asking about the problem. And promptly got no response. It was getting late and so I headed to bed slightly miffed.
In the morning there still was no product key or reply and so I surfed to the game forums. I found some threads asking about similar issues and since posting in them seemed to get dev attention I also posted a question. Within an hour I had gotten a moderator response and when I checked my email I had a product key waiting. Nice.
I soon fired up the game launcher and got to downloading the client. It is a pretty big download, about 4-5 GB in all, and the launcher happily announced that my installation would be finished around 9 pm. Well, no worries. The day time is family time in any case.
When I stopped by to see how things were progressing some six hours later I was greeted by “5 days remaining” estimate even though the download had progressed to about 2 GB. Something was definitely wrong here. After some investigation it seemed that the download server was capping my connection under load. I guess they don’t have a very robust server cluster down where they are distributing the files from. Patch days may prove interesting…
Luckily there turned out to be a official torrent for the complete client and so I stopped the launcher and started to download the client from there. Six hours passed and I had the client ready to install at around midnight on Saturday. I decided to call it a day and left the installation for morning.
Yesterday I finally got the game installed, but it was such a busy day that I didn’t even get a chance to boot up the game. This is where I’m at now, eagerly waiting to get a go the game when the wife and kids are snugly in bed. Hopefully it doesn’t have any more (nasty) surprises in store for me.
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