T w e n t y S i d e d

(Achilles and The Grognard is on temporary hold while my various playthroughs catch up.)

(Also, I know there’s an irritating white line in the header image. I made a mistake copy-pasting.)

People are still somehow playing EVE Online, the internet spaceship MMO that came out in 2003.

I played EVE on and off from around 2007 to 2013 or so, and very occasionally since then. It’s by far the best and worst online game I’ve ever played. It’s ancient, and full of the remnants of the 2003 vintage game design choices. Both despite and because of this, I enjoyed my time in New Eden. I got to experience the much-discussed metagame: at various points, I was a spy, a scammer, a capital ship pilot, and a member of several different sovholding alliances (that is, player groups that controlled areas of conquerable space).

And then, after many years of effort, I reached the highest skill level an EVE player can reach: I stopped playing EVE. Of course I had the usual litany of complaints about the game, the same litany anyone who’s played an MMO for six years has. But I also felt like the game was winding down. I mean, it was ten years old at that point. Surely it was time to start thinking sequel?

Shows what I know. Seven years later people are still at it. The game is dying, of course, but the game’s been dying since 2008 and somehow it’s not dead yet. The playerbase still has enough vitality to periodically revolt, for instance. You would think that at some point in the last seventeen years, another company would have come along and eaten CCP’sThe game’s developer, no relation to the Chinese Communist Party. lunch by now. But that hasn’t happened. A dozen fortunes have been lost iterating on the World of Warcraft concept, but nothing comparable has happened here. I once made a video about this.

So what is the EVE “concept,” and how would one iterate on it? At this point I should rewind to catch people up who are unfamiliar with the game. EVE is a game about spaceships, set in another galaxy in the far future. You start the game with a rinky-dink little spaceship, but as you earn money you buy bigger, fancier ones, all the way to supercapitals, which cost billions in in-game currency and take months to build. You earn money by performing similar activities that you might see in a typical theme park MMO. They have different names – quests are called missions for instance – but otherwise they would be recognizable to someone who’s played World of Warcraft.

What makes EVE unique is the presence of zero-security or “nullsec” systems. In nullsec, the usual rules governing PVP interaction are suspended, and players can cheerfully blow each other up without the usual consequences. You still have to pay for the ammo, but aside from that, nullsec is the wild west of space. What’s more, many of the game’s most valuable resources – such as rarer asteroids, higher NPC pirate bounties, and minerals mined from moons of the R32 and R64 variety – are found in abundance only in nullsec.

To top it all off, in-game groups of players called “alliances” are able to plant virtual flags in these systems and claim them for themselves. This is called taking “sovereignty” (usually abbreviated to “sov”) and carries a variety of both costs and benefits. The result of all this is alliances of players – frequently numbering in the thousands – setting out to live in lawless nullsec, control its various income sources, and nurture endless feuds against each other. It looks like this. The “empty” region in the center of the map is “high security” space, which can’t be conquered and where there are penalties for attacking other players. Everything around it is controlled by one of several player groups, helpfully color-coded in the linked maps. There are also intermediate systems called “low-sec,” but never mind those for now.

This is, in my opinion, an elegant way of setting up a game world. There’s a clear contrast, at least in theory, between the low-risk, low-reward play in the center of the map and the high-risk, high-reward play at the edges. There’s also economic interchange between the two areas – valuable raw materials come from outside in, and finished goods go from inside out. You can get rich overnight mining space gold in a free-for-all – or slowly and safely inside high-security space, building the ships the nullsec pilots will launch at each other over the course of their endless fighting. It’s supposed to look and sound something like this:

Or at least that’s the idea. In practice, something like 80% of EVE players live in high sec full time and don’t directly participate the nullsec metagame at all. What’s more, if you’re thinking that nullsec is nonstop excitement, you’d be wrong. The big power blocs (usually called “coalitions” in the game’s lingo) that dominate conquerable space eventually tired of grinding wars of attrition and now spend most of their time in an endless ceasefire occasionally nicknamed “the big blue donut.” (Allied groups are said to be “blue” to each other, so if all of nullsec is mutually blue it’s like a blue donut.)

Then of course there’s the people involved. Player alliances are most often led by men in their twenties and thirties, some of whom respond well to toxicity and confrontation and some of whom don’t. During my occasional time spent as a spy I got an up-close and sometimes depressing look at why EVE is frequently called “high school in space.” Here’s what that looks and sounds like. Warning: profanity – lots of it.

I’m not just trying to dump on the game. Developers CCP made a type of MMO that had never been made before, so part of the design was guesswork by necessity. They’ve also made continual adjustments, tinkering with the mechanics, sov system, and economy over the course of regular expansions. But many of the issues handicapping the game’s potential were baked in back in 2003 and there’s no baking them back out again.

So why discuss this second-tier, seventeen-year-old MMO at all? Because EVE Online, to me, is the genre’s most notable example of the road not taken. It is, like the title of this post, The Other Kind of MMO. Nearly every other developer focuses on PVE content, with PVP existing inside a walled-off warren, if it exists at all. My personal hunch is that there’s significant unmet demand here. Whoever successfully iterates on the EVE template is going to win all the marbles, or at the very least turn a profit.

I’m not sure CCP has it in them. Over the past decade or so a handful of ambitious plans have come out of their headquarters in Iceland, like giving players the ability to walk around inside stations, integrating an FPS with the game, and launching a World of Darkness MMO. None of them panned out. They appear to have one of these mysterious systemic dysfunctions that burrow inside the intestines of certain companies, preventing them from being able to complete projects.

So, once again it falls to me to move the genre forward. Apparently this is what I do now: dream up hypothetical sequels to franchises that have disappointed me. Real-world games don’t stand a chance against the glittering, gem-like creations that float in my head, unblemished by this fallen world. This will be one of them. But before I splatter the paint of wild speculation all over the canvas of wishful thinking, Jackson Pollock-style, we have to examine the challenges involved – and there are many. To do that, next time I’ll take you on a quick guided tour of my personal experiences with the game, and what I think can be learned from them.

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.