{"id":49819,"date":"2020-04-25T17:22:50","date_gmt":"2020-04-25T21:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=49819"},"modified":"2020-04-25T17:34:30","modified_gmt":"2020-04-25T21:34:30","slug":"the-other-kind-of-mmo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=49819","title":{"rendered":"The Other Kind of MMO"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Achilles and The Grognard is on temporary hold while my various playthroughs catch up.)<\/p>\n

(Also, I know there’s an irritating white line in the header image. I made a mistake copy-pasting.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

People are still somehow playing EVE Online<\/em><\/a>, the internet spaceship MMO that came out in 2003.<\/p>\n

Not bad for a seventeen year-old game.<\/div>
Not bad for a seventeen year-old game.<\/div><\/p>\n

I played EVE<\/em> 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).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And then, after many years of effort, I reached the highest skill level an EVE<\/em> player can reach: I stopped playing EVE<\/em>. 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/span> lunch by now. But that hasn’t happened. A dozen fortunes have been lost iterating on the World of Warcraft<\/em> concept, but nothing comparable has happened here. I once made a video about this.<\/a><\/p>\n

So what is the EVE<\/em> “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<\/em> 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Large fleet fights are not always aesthetically pleasing.<\/div>
Large fleet fights are not always aesthetically pleasing.<\/div><\/p>\n

What makes EVE<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n