The Machinery: Space Cowboy Online

Free MMOs are dangerous ground to tread. They are numerous, briefly exhilarating, and almost all entirely the same. You might've heard of Space Cowboy - for a free game, it's fairly polished. However, like most free MMOs, it's fun for a while, has an interesting take on combat, and ultimately its grind is too steep and too repetitive to enjoy.

A plane performs a barrel roll, one of the basic flying maneuvers.

The main draw of Space Cowboy is its flying; it’s well implemented and lag free, and it's really the first thing you'll notice about the game. However, flying is not only very easy to master, but also relatively inconsequential in combat past a certain level of familiarity. That is, without a basic mastery of flying, you’re going to die pretty fast. However, mastering the basics only takes an hour or so, and there's not much to learn afterwards. The divide between an expert player and a competent player is very small when compared to, say, that divide in Counter Strike, or Street Fighter. This is one of Space Cowboy’s more conspicuous flaws.

So what does being good at Space Cowboy mean, if being a skilled pilot is only a small part of it? If you’ve ever played an MMO before you probably know the answer: being good at Space Cowboy means being a higher level than your opponent, and having nicer items than your opponent. Essentially, being better than someone at Space Cowboy means playing Space Cowboy more than that person, and very little else.

This is especially true with respect to Space Cowboy’s grind. Almost all of the enemies have very generic habits and patterns, making your fighting tactics for each enemy almost exactly the same. There is only one quest per level, and sometimes not even that. Also, for a good four to five levels, you’re cordoned into a small area, and essentially forced to fight the same mobs over and over again for a good six hours before you level out of the area, and the levels only get longer the stronger you become.

Because the game is almost entirely level based instead of skill based, it takes a while to even get up to the point where you can viably engage other players. But even when you get up to there, the is also almost entirely about your items and your stats.

So many stats, so little actual skill

Even though the flying is fun and new, Space Cowboy cannot let go of the familiar grind, and that is its major flaw. Even amazing flying talent will only get you so far, as you’ll be shot down time and time again by people far higher level than you, because they’ve sunk more time into the dry grind. This is not incredibly surprising; after all, Space Cowboy is an MMO. However, after a few hours of learning to fly, it’s disappointing to realize that you’ve only just mastered the skills you need to start another long, boring, familiar grind.

The Machinery: EVE Online

EVE Online is one of the more innovative and interesting MMs out there right now, mostly for its death penalties (they actually exist), its player-run market and dynamic corporation wars.

But, like most MMOs, the true heart and soul of EVE is its combat. When you're talking about EVE, one can't avoid combat - the economy exists solely for combat, be it player against player or player against hordes of AI ships. But for being the focus of the game, EVE's combat is largely disappointing - most of combat is decided in the shipyard, when you're fitting your weapons. Ultimately, this is EVE's large failing.

The most important part of the EVE UI: the ship status panel.

Here is the ever present EVE UI panel that dominates the bottom of the screen. For now, the only thing you should be paying attention to are the large orange circles, called a "capacitor". It's pretty much just space mana, there's not much difference from WoW's familiar blue bar. It takes mana to use weapons and abilities, and it slowly replenishes over time. Basic MMO stuff.

The capacitor also has a second use besides space mana. Each item requires a certain slot but they also require you to have a certain amount of free capacitor load. As you use this up, you lose your ability to equip more energy-intensive items. This is EVE's balancing act.

Generally, weapons deal damage types in pairs. For example, a laser may deal primarily thermal damage with some kinetic, a missile may deal primarily kinetic damage with some energy, etc.

Resistances come in singles, though. To tank damage, look at your ship and think "what type of damage am I going to be facing?" Then fit some active resistors of that type. This is “tanking” that type of damage.

In EVE, your goal is to fit enough damage to break the tank of an enemy ship, or tank enough damage to stay alive while you're being shot. Even in AI combat, WoW barely explores the idea of resists, and focuses mainly on tanking through healing taken damage at a constant rate, while EVE focuses on resisting damage to make it minimal. That is, when that ten thousand damage thermal laser hits you in EVE, your 99% thermal resist is going to make it deal ten damage instead.

And then EVE throws something else into the mix: velocity. A large ship can't hit a small ship if it's going faster than its turrets turn. Stop moving for a second though, and you're dead. and that's the way EVE balances huge vs small ship combat.

Even with all of this, though, EVE PvP is ultimately sort of underwhelming. 99% of it is in the fitting of ships, just like 99% of WoW is in the gear and level. There's no practical fitting in battle, so you can't switch out guns or resistors. When you get out on the battlefield, you camp your gate, select your ship, set your orbit velocity and click your weapons. And then you wait while they die.

Even the velocity mentioned above becomes a decision you make before battle. The way you fit your ship decides your maximum velocity, and there’s no reason to ever go slower than that. Setting your velocity becomes simple clicking.

EVE holds a lot of promise: the corporation wars, the severity of player death, the economy - all of those are clearly well thought out and well implemented. However, in a game that ultimately boils down to combat, the combat is just sort of boring. There's a lot of positioning, a lot of waiting for the correct moment to strike - the fun part is the waiting. But ultimately, in the end, the entire game is about bucking for position. Combat could be run by an auto-resolve button and it'd be the same.

Eve's bigger battles are all played with as much UI information crammed in as the game will allow.

As you can see above, this becomes truer, unfortunately, the bigger the battles become. At fifty or a hundred players, the game is played zoomed out fully. Each player is a tiny square, and there's UI information everywhere. Maybe you're clicking frantically, maybe not, but the clicking is essentially just busywork. A ship leader calls out an enemy ship to attack, you click orbit, you click your weapons, sometimes you get selected yourself and you hit your tanks. There's barely any deciding or thinking.

Finally, because of the way money and relations work, attacking a player controlled mining operation in the game is the most satisfying thing you'll feel. However, that's not because of the core mechanics of combat, those mechanics which will become 90% of your playtime, it's because the guy takes real losses, and you make real gains. It's fun despite the combat.

The context of EVE is great. The game world, the corporations, the economy; all those are brilliantly done. Unfortunately, the core mechanics of EVE are dearly lacking. There's popular mantra for the game: "It's like playing an Excel spreadsheet". Sadly, it holds some truth.