Massive damage (to gaming fun)

What are you people getting out of Massive games? I’m not kidding around, I really don’t understand. I tried my first one recently, and I’m certain it’ll also be my last.

Let me backtrack slightly. 14 days ago I signed up for a trial of EVE Online, partially because I’d always wanted to see what all this MMORPG fuss was about, but mainly because a few of my friends had recently signed up for it. These things are all about social interaction, right? Living another life inside the game with all your buddies helping each other out, PvP battles, joining guilds, ascending through the ranks, all whilst having a jolly good laugh with your mates. All this, and spaceships! Frankly I’m amazed I only just signed up. I’m a real sucker for spaceships…

So you start the game and you have to name your character. This is the name that everyone will see you as in the game, so it’s important to choose a good one. This was lost on me, so my brief stay in The Citadel was through the eyes of “Slaptit Mohammed”, a weasely man with a penchant for economics.

Finally you enter the universe of EVE. You’re given a spaceship, a bit of money, and a tutorial. A tutorial that lasts 3 hours. I know what you’re thinking: “Pfft, I’ve played games before, I don’t need the tutorial.”. Yes, you do. Yes, even you Doug. Not only is the EVE interface an absolute masterpiece of jumbled up random bullshit, but it’s also far far too big for regular folks’ resolutions. If you’re running 1280, it’s just about bearable, for you 1024ers, forget it. It wouldn’t be so bad if the game either recycled windows, or did jumpups on hover (ala OSX, say), but it doesn’t do any of this so you’re constantly fighting a battle with the game interface to let you have a glimpse of your ship before it blows up.

After some time, you may learn how to keep the interface at bay (think Indy Jones fending off snakes with a burning torch), and you’ll move on to actually doing something in the game. You have three options: Mine, trade, or run missions. Mining consists of strapping a mining laser to your ship, wandering off and finding an asteroid, pressing ‘mine’, and then waiting for ten minutes. Occasionally you may have to point your laser at another asteroid. When your cargo hold is full, you plod back to a station and sell your haul. Hmm. Trading is much the same as it ever was in games such as Elite and its sequels – fly somewhere, buy something, fly somewhere else, sell it. It’s when you try and do your first trading run that it really hits you – 90% of your time in-game is spent travelling. Every time you want to buy something, talk to an agent about a mission, it involves a jump or five. Even the missions that are nearby take as long to get to and from as they do to complete, forcing you to run the game in a window and get on with something else in the meantime.

Surely this isn’t the idea? Maybe there are mini-games you can play to increase your skills whilst you’re in transit? Ha, you’ll be lucky. All of the skill increases involve you choosing one and pressing ‘go’. Between an hour and a week later, the game will tell you that you’ve learned that skill. Some of your stats may change, and you may be able to buy new items that your character was previously too stupid to use. Set another skill going and come back in five hours.

With all this waiting, you’d assume the in-game communication would be excellent, so that you have something to keep you interested. Well, there’s no voice support, so you’ll have to make your own arrangements for that. The chat system is also horrific, lacking the most basic functionality that IRC clients have had for years. No nickname autocomplete, no searchable buffer, no highlighting, nothing. It really is a step back in time.

Any of you who played Wing Commander, or the Privateer games, or maybe Descent Freespace, or even the Elite sequels will be wondering when I’m going to mention the space combat. Prepare to be disappointed. As a ‘player’, your involvement in the exciting and deadly theatre of interstellar dogfighting consists of choosing a target and turning your weapons on. If you want to, you can tell your ship to try and keep a certain distance from your target, but if you’ve got missiles then you don’t even need to do that. Once one ship is destroyed, click another. If it looks like you’re going to die, run away. Put your joystick away, you aren’t going to need it.

So what are we left with? A Massively Multiplayer Waiting Simulator. That’s really all it boils down to. None of it requires any skill or practice at all. Want to increase your stats? Click a button then wait. Want to make some money? Click buy and sell a few times either side of a wait. Want to blow someone up? Click on them, click FIRE, then wait. It reminds me most of Football Manager, only with a worse interface, and minus the feeling of actually accomplishing anything. No matter how hard you try, there will always be someone else who has waited more than you.

This is immersion. This is the future of gaming. You can keep it. I’ll be on PGR3 or Battlefield 2, with real player to player communication, real skill required, and real time weapon change.