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.
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.
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.
11 comments:
I've been playing EVE fro 5 months and in that time I have seen a lot of different parts of the game and I can agree that there is some slow times, boring times and times of extreme excitement and intensity. I generally pick my playing experience well in advance by keeping Jump Clones in different regions where I can have a certain type of experience, in empire I run missions and mine semi afk, in 0.0 I rat in belts, gate camp and participate in PvP gangas and Operations. If I want to relax I Jump Clone to Empire, if I want action I JC to 0.0.. Also as EVE is truly a multiplayer game it does require you to interact with others and it si in this that the game begins to unfold and become less boring.. It's like war, it's times of extreme excitement in between times of perceived boredom, where you still need to be alert.
I've been playing EVE a while, see that battle above? i could pwn em all! lulz, nah, no way in hell could i do that. i've only got an Omen at present, training up for a carrier though. EVE is definatrely fun and sometimes even fast paced at times, but usually boring. The best way to avoid boredom though is to not mine.
EVE combat could be considered to be combat more on the Strategic level rather than the tactical level like most MMOs. Yes it is planning, not just fittings though. When and where you attack is far more important than individual fittings. Also, things that are rarely considered in mmos like logistical support, supply lines etc, are very important in eve. So yes, the combat in usually decided before the battle itself but it's far more than ship selection and fittings.
I can tell by your post that you played EVE for a total of 5 minutes if you've even played it at all (it sounds to me like you may have just watched someone else play, as most of the statements you made, about combat specifically, were just blatantly false.) The basics of combat are, yes, knowing the optimal ranges of your weapons based on the preparations you made in advance. However, there are many more variables, such as electronic warfare, fleet coordination, logistics, resource management, etc. I myself am not a skilled PVP'er, but the fact that you are content to make blanket statements while simultaneously demonstrating your ignorance of how the combat actually works makes me determined to never fight with you by my side.
I must say i agree whith anonymous; eve is really much more than positioning and firing - I don't know whether you play in less experienced corps or haven't played at all, but i do most operations in fleets in size of about 8-10 players, and it's all about teamwork.
Currently i fly a blackbird and act as EWAR operator; as long as my ecm is active, the target ship is having real trouble hitting, or even locking, this means his squadmates either have to use remote sensor backup systems on him, or target me. In case of the latter, my ship could use some shield transfering from allies, or i could use my nosferatu to power my own shield booster. When targeting smaller ships you might want to have someone target painting them, or use a webfier. As a countermeasure, smaller ships can activate microwarpdrives, and as a counter to that, you can use a warp scrambler. Just like that you could find so many funny tactical situations that requires intelligence and teamplay to win.
you might think it were boring if you had only played for a little while but when you get in to a fleet of 5 battleships 7 battlecruisers and several cruisers and frigates and everyone is hitting 500+ dps with tech II guns and tech 2 power relays and shield hardeners for defense. and everyone is strapped with smartbombs and nos and the little frigates have afterburners and micro warp drives and you are raping another fleet half the size of yours and making the other fleet lose everything that they have worked for ever in the game.... in feels pretty damn good
soo... 99% of 10,000.00 is 10?
Basically, 70% of your descriptions are assumptions and totally mistaken. This is not a bashing attempt but you terribly fail to describe the game and it's mechanics. Maybe you should play a bit more than a few days and pleeease :D get a new calculator :D
So compared to other games how much player activity does this combat demand? Do you toggle these various jamming and shield systems on and off? Do you cycle through a variety of attack skills on other units? Do you try to disable opponents for a minute so that you can manage to do something they really would have wanted to interrupt?
@most of the posts above:
I definitely respect these points of view - I really wish I had enjoyed EVE, becuase I really want to enjoy it. It's such a cool game in terms of diplomacy, capturable territory, permadeath etc etc.
Maybe the combat is good in small gangs (some people said they played in smaller corps) but in the big battles over territory, diplomacy, and all the aforementioned cool stuff, small gangs are the exception to the norm of giant fleet battles, which are more or less sitting in a vent and doing what I described. Occasionally, they're exciting - most of the time, they're excruciatingly boring.
And yes, I played the game for several months in the largest high-end PvP alliance in the game.
I found a better way to ask my question: Several levels of rock paper scissors type stuff have been described in the combat but how many rounds of rock paper scissors take place during a fight/how often are you choosing the next thing? The article makes it sound like it's just one round that takes place before the fight and then you could practically make a little bot macro sort of thing and basically just press one key to set it in motion whenever you changed targets (without trickier programming than what I described.)
I haven't heard anything that suggests it's more like multiple rounds which would mean that you just had "how well can I execute target changes?" being the only factor up in the air during a battle.
Hey Shoku, sorry - I forgot to answer your question!
Yeah, I think you have it about right from my experience. Again, I've really only participated in fleet battles because I wanted to be part of the other things about EVE I liked and had read awesome stories about - the diplomacy and fighting over large chunks of 0.0 space between massive alliances.
It seemed to me that in those fights most people just equipped the kind of tank that their ship was best at equipping (or, for a certain time, a kind of tank that could survive a titan doomsday) and then could've just done a macro bot for the rest of the battle.
That said, I think that that part of the game is likely a lot more interesting for the few players at the top calling the primaries, assessing the battle, and figuring out whether to keep fighting or to bail out. To me, EVE fleet battles are a lot like WoW 40-man raids in that sense.
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