An amazingly complex game with endless possibilities and some of the most brutal PvP encounters you will ever have.

User Rating: 8.5 | EVE Online PC
To appreciate Eve Online as an MMO, you must first throw out much of what you believe an MMO to be. The introduction of World of Warcraft brought with it a slew of new gamers getting their first taste of the MMORPG. Now as some of those gamers become tired of WoW, they look to other games with increased interest.

Eve is not a typically high fantasy RPG. It's at this time, probably the only true space MMO available. Spaceships, lasers and cold, dark and brutal rules of space await the players of Eve.

The quickest and simplest way to differentiate Eve Online from many other MMO games, including WoW is the simple analogy of the sandbox versus the theme park. WoW for example is a theme park design. It consists of content that the developers of the game provide to the player. The players enjoy this content over and over, and then begin to get bored and wait for a new content to be released.

With the sandbox design, the developers focus more on giving the players tools. What they do with those tools is what creates the content for the game. It's like putting kids in a sandbox and giving them shovels and other items in which to play with. A good example of this is the pirates in Eve. There is no pirate class that people must roll to be a pirate. The pirating and ransoming of players for money is something that emerged out of game play. The fear of the penalties of death makes people inclined to pay others to spare their lives. The pirate in Eve is born.

But how does one combat these pirates? If only there were other players that could help protect the weaker players from such evil. The mercenary is born, the players that offer their combat expertise for a price. These are but just a couple examples of what type of content can emerge in the Eve universe.

Many players trying out Eve Online are use to the theme park design. They enter the game and expect to see yellow exclamation marks over people's heads telling them what they need to do next. Not many games simply allow you to do anything you want. However the new player experience in Eve Online is something of increased focus by the developer of Eve, CCP, based out of Iceland. Although under constant improvement, the experience of the new player is lacking. It's especially lacking if you were to consider a WoW player downloading the 14 day trial of Eve Online.

There are no classes in Eve, there are no levels. What you are is the combination of the skills you train. Any player can train any skill; it's only a matter of training time. In Eve, you pick a skill to train, usually after having purchased the skill book and it will train on or offline. Yes, you did read that right. Even a husband and father of 4 could be spending the weekend with his family and his Eve character would be gaining strength by training a skill. This is a unique idea to the typical grind for XP in order to level.

After spending hours and hours playing other MMO games, where you are trying to get enough XP to level up, you'll find your life getting sucked away. Playing Eve, immediately allowed me to reclaim my life as I could take a break anytime I wanted and still be making progress.

Another huge difference between Eve Online and other MMO games is the fact that the entire Eve universe resides in a single world. No realms, no shards. Every player in Eve is part of the same universe. Why is this a wonderful thing? Many reasons including player population. Anybody who has played games such as WoW understands how frustrating it can be when your character is on an under populated server. You log on and have a hard time finding anything going on. You can bring in old friend and meet new ones and all be in the same world. You can try to make a name for yourself in the universe, and it would be just that, the entire game universe.

One could write pages and pages about the numerous innovations Eve Online has brought into the MMO industry. Those of us following the development of Eve Online know that there are great new things in store for the game in the near future as well.

It's not a game for everybody. It is a complex game with harsh death penalties, blood pumping PvP and a player run economy that will amaze those more inclined to manufacturing then to combat.