First, a little history. When I was in middle school I played an amazing piece of Mac shareware called Escape Velocity. This space piloting sim/RPG had you flying a little shuttle craft across a seemingly endless universe, jumping through hyperspace between systems and carrying out different missions. You could never leave your ship and walk around, but you could dock at different planets, moons, and space stations. There you could trade commodities, get the latest news and gossip from the space bar, buy and upgrade weapons and other ship upgrades, or buy a new ship all together.
It was such an ingeniously simple game. Run currier missions, ferry passengers, and horde as many credits as you could until that wonderful day when you could finally purchase a bigger ship. I melted away my adolescence in the many following incarnations of Escape Velocity, and at one point was even building my own campaign utilizing the insane number of user-created scenario editing tools.
That's where this new MMO comes in. Chuck, new friend and road wizard/dungeon master of The Sailing, has been talking to me and Kirkland a lot recently about the game EVE Online. Now I've known about this game for a long time - and knew only that it's basically an MMO in outer space. But that's all I knew. For whatever reason I was always turned off by this game. Maybe it was the banner ads floating around that showed really ugly, ordinary people transform into even uglier 3D avatars. I probably thought something like "ewww, that character design is so American, so nasty looking," or, "haha, looks like an ad for a low budget Sci-Fi Channel miniseries."
But what I never thought was, "Wow, a space ship MMO. That could be a lot like the Escape Velocity of my dreams." During one of his first 'mmo-pitches' to me, Chuck had mentioned rather quickly that it was like "EV Nova," and kept talking like no one in the room caught what he was talking about. Then it clicked.
"Wait, this sounds a lot like this old shareware game I used to play called escape velocity..."
"Yeah, like I said - it's a lot like EV Nova."
"Holy shit."
Meet Chase Pritchard. After 4 or so hours of play I can say yes - IT IS THE ESCAPE VELOCITY OF MY DREAMS. Plotting courses through hyper space, eliminating pirate vessels, mining astroids, upgrading weapons, buying ships, docking and getting missions, everything; it's all there, in tact. Whether or not I have enough time or motivation to really put in the time to be extremely awesome in this particular MMO world is yet to be seen. For now I'm just "playing playing" it - as in playing it because it's fun to sit down and play, not because I feel like I have to put in the time in order to achieve some lofty far-off goal.
I do have a (leniently enforced) 2-MMOs-at-a-time limit, so after the first month of EVE it's either cancel the subscription or suspend WoW or FFXI. I guess we'll see how it goes. Just to tantalize your imagination I've included a few screenshots of a couple of my first n00bular kills. It has one of those great UIs full of data and clutter - makes you feel like you're doing something important (one of the reason tactics RPGs kick ass).
It's looks really nice as well.
