Ships in Space

Sometime tomorrow the first month of my subscription for EVE Online will run out. Which means I have played one month and fourteen days. Since trial counts fully as game time. Do you only get a month if you buy a subscription outright? That would seem unfair. And why does on Steam EVE costs five euros more than a first month subscription? No matter.

In any case, I decided to keep playing. I also decided to start this blog. At the very least it will be an exercise in writing English, since I somehow doubt that anyone would care about newbie ramblings. It will be mostly composed of describing what I am doing in EVE and what I am trying to achieve, and aforementioned ramblings on game mechanics and balance. Perhaps the former will result in some form of loosely defined narrative. The latter I suppose I could have written on the forum, but since no one would care and the game ater ten years has way too much inertia to change anyway, I am putting those in words more to get them out of my head rather than for anyone to read.

So, why did I start playing EVE now, rather than anytime in the last decade? I have always liked science-fiction, and space-opera, or at least some subsets thereof, and indeed, spaceships. And computer games. I spent way too many hours playing X3. And before that… I actually don't remember anything spaceship related between that and Privateer and Frontier: First Encounters. That seems strange. I was aware of previous X games and Freelancer, but never bothered to play them. Maybe my liking of spaceship games comes in waves? Now that I think of it, it is a good few years since I gave up on X3. Mostly due to collision damage. Why would you put collision damage, high-inertia spacecraft and dogfighting weapon composition in a single game? Anyway.

What I didn't really play until fairly recently were MMO of various description. Or any multiplayer games at all, really. Some combination of being relatively bad at video games and self-conscious about it. And not being very social at all. Or whatever. And I don't really like pure skill-based games, with no persistent systems. Which eliminated FPSes and RTSes. And back then MMOs were almost all subscription based and I didn't make my own money, and didn't want to make time extended commitments. I did play Discworld MUD for a bit. I think my character still exists there, even. Somehow I failed to talk to anyone. Part being asocial, part being overloaded with English text I guess… In principle I read English fluently, but that does not necessarily mean fluidly.

Then the era of free-to-play MMOs started, and eventually I picked up some of those. And then gave up eventually. I played Star Trek Online for some time, and even joined a random fleet. But after hitting the level cap I realized that the primary game loop in that is not really satisfying, because even if you could get marginally better stuff, there is nothing to use it on. And I really like Star Trek space aesthetics (I don't care how silly beam weapons which feel heavy are, but I just like them), but there are limits.

And then I finally finished my not-so-slightly overdue master's thesis and got an actual job. So, when next wave of liking spaceship games hit me, I realized that I now have enough money to actually pay a subscription without it relatively mattering and remembered that EVE still exists. And is apparently doing fine subscription-wise. And, I don't actually like spreadsheets, since I think for most applications they are applied to a proper programming language would be better, but spreadsheets-in-space, as I often heard it called, actually did have some appeal. And since there was a free trial, I trialed it, and here I am, still not bored. Despite the fact than I didn't really talk to anyone once again. But who knows.

In the next few days I will write some posts about thoughts accumulated after forty-something days of playing EVE. After that I guess the pace will slow down. Especially if I spend time writing about EVE rather than playing it. I wonder now how long will I actually keep at both EVE and this blog. Well, only the future can tell.