http://www.eveonline.com
Well, some of you remember me ranting about my soon to be WoW addiction, and how I couldn't resist the temptation of installing and playing it. One day, about 2 months before WotLK was released, looking at a Warcraft website, I clicked on an ad for a game called EVE Online. The future of my gaming life was changed from that point on.
I know my posts tend to be long, so I will try and keep this brief:
EVE is an online game set in space. There are four races, all descendant of human colonists who were isolated from Earth when a natural wormhole leading back to Earth collapsed. Millenia after the event, memories of Earth transformed into legend and myth, the human race has rediscovered space flight. They may be in the same galaxy as Earth, in a different galaxy or in another universe. All hope of finding Earth again is lost. So life goes on for humans.
This game has no limit. The market and economy is player run: Ore is mined from asteroids, refined at stations, manufactured into items through blueprints researched by scientists, sold on the market, resold by traders, flown by pilots, and destroyed again. There is not a single item that is not manufactured in EVE save for NPC space stations, and yes, all the steps I just mentioned have players behind them. There are no classes, you can do whatever you want, as long as you make money and advance in skills. Skills are abilities trained in real time, so you can turn off your computer and the skill trains while you sleep, work or eat, as well as play. These let you fly certain types of spacecraft, let you mine more efficiently or perhaps control drones a bit farther from your ship.
This game is single server. You heard me right, the entire population of the game runs on one shard, Tranquility. This effectively means you can shape the future of the universe. Corporations (essentally guilds) dedicate themselves to mining, manufacturing, piracy, you name it. The largest corporations control vast areas of space, fight in fleet battles of hundereds of capital ships and build monolithic spacecraft only possible through the cooperation of hundereds and even thousands of players. And furthermore, the developers write the lore based on the actions of players ingame. So corps find themselves in novels sometimes.
This game is also harsh. CCP (the developer of this game) stays out of boundary issues unless it interferes with gameplay. Pirates are simply PvPers who ambush, ransom and destroy other ships. There was no selection screen to be a pirate, no official designation ingame. Pirates are simply opportunists who take their PvP skills to the criminal side to make money. The gameplay is so in depth you need about a month to familiarize yourself with the game, but it is absolutely worth it. Once over the learning curve, horizons really open up, and you can do anything from scam a corporation out of it's money and make billions, join a powerful player Alliance and fight in massive fleets agains rival Alliances, mine quietly in a pocket of space, or make billions trading on the market. The death penalty is harsh: When your ship gets blown up, you don't get it back. Ships are expensive, in the money needed to buy the ship and the turrets, modules, targeting systems and the like, and time to buy all these items and reassemble your ship. In addition, if the player manages to catch your escape pod, you are killed, and lose some of those skills you trained (in real time, remember) And these skills can take up to months to train.
You can't walk around as an avatar (yet, this feature, after 5 years of this game being out, is finally coming) The focus of this game is space. Fly a mining ship out to an asteroid belt with your mining corp, or fly a gigantic Mothership into the heart of a corporation war. And I've barely scratched the surface of the nuance this game holds.
The graphics are absolutely spectacular. Download the Premium content and be rewarded. The following is a player-made video describing an ongoing war between two gigantic alliances with hundereds of thousands of players.
WATCH IN HIGH QUALITY
This is all ingame footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYEaPLCCIrY
And one more to show off the graphics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B78GERrwnj8
(This would be considered a big ship, but about 1/3rd of the size of some monsters.)
You really have to play the game to believe it. Download the trial at the official site. 2 weeks of free gameplay. Don't give up on the learning curve (or cliff) and be sensible in character creation, and you'll do fine. (To people creating a character, try to keep a balance of your attributes) And download premium by all accounts if your computer can handle it. The full game is installed with your trial, but you need to subscibe ($15.00 a month) to continue playing and have full accessibility to the game. Try it! (and tell me what you think of it)