I personally have a few goals for this new attempt of mine:
Do something with the Factional Warfare thing
Do some content stuff I never seen, like probing, complexes and so on
Join Brave Newbies to get at taste of things, since they seem to accept everyone and they catapult you directly in null sec
Oh, I’d really like to join Bombers Bar (I seriously doubt they need me in this lifetime, though)
I wonder if I can even theoretically do that with one account, given the contrasts between corps and activities and so on.
For example, doing the Factional Warfare thing probably excludes that character to do other stuff like PvE, since everyone can attack me and I can’t even enter certain sectors.
Exactly. It shows the highest points in EVE in that video but they don’t show the other 100x more time spent bored of of your mind. I remember trying to play it for a month with some friends. They even got me jump started with some expensive implants, ships, etc and I was still bored. It would take around 2-3 months until my skills were even at a good place. I remember asking for advice to make the game more active or ‘fun’ and was laughed at. Apparently I was supposed to be playing another game or watching TV while I played EVE. It was a unique month of playing and I don’t regret it but never again.
Top left there’s a new overlay that tells you the system you’re in, the waypoints with the colored square telling you the security of each and then also the useful stuff for the current agent/mission you’re in. So you can simply click and “warp to” the objective. All three can be each toggled on/off with a simple click.
The “radar” stuff is now made of the colored blips right around the ship UI, at the center-bottom.
You can now SEE the actual stars! See that weird lines in the right side of the screen? Those are the actual real waypoints.
There’s another weird vertical line on the left side. It’s mostly fluff and it’s probably the scanner. It regularly traverses the screen and makes everything pixelated as it passes.
Then there are those weird green and red marks at the top, also pixelated. And those I think are the “anomalies”. Some of these can be entered and they lead to what look like pirate sites. I almost got blown up because they jammed my locks and so I couldn’t shoot back.
Anyway, the UI in the current form is already very sleek. There are new warp and jump effects. It all looks great.
The only downsides are, as I said, animations/interactions (spinning ships, terribad collision, explosions), and the walk-in-station stuff that looks horrid and is completely worthless. I hate just the fact that my disk space is taken with stuff that doesn’t belong to this game in any way.
So when I last played, you couldn’t walk around in space stations, and there were no “colonies” or planetside doings. I gather you can run industry on a planet now? Does that require a huge collective effort, or can a small corp or solo pilot do it?
It’s definitely workable. I played long enough (though I always tried avoid large scale PVP, even without lag it was awful) to be at ease and comfortable with it. I’m not sure I’d call it good or slick though!
Eve has a problem with gameplay. Not presentation of such gameplay (beside tutorials and the like). Eve is a spaceship game with no actual flight mechanics, no collision, no real maneuvers and placement. That’s why it’s generally bad. It messed the basics of what makes spaceship games fun. It has described as “submarines in space” and that’s /exactly/ what it is.
Have you ever played Silent Hunter in manual mode? That’s a spreadsheet too. But no one complains about the UI when firing torpedoes. It’s the nature of the gameplay.
In both Silent Hunter and Eve the UI is absolutely great at delivering a MASSIVE amount of information. You can click on a name and go deep in Corporation history, alliances, wars and everything else. The whole database is completely open to use, and everything you need is easy to find. The map mode alone can keep one looking at all sort of details, who owns systems, where players are, where ships are blowing up, where activity is and so on.
All this can keep you busy for HOURS, just looking at things. But these aren’t hours wasted because you can’t find what you want. They are hours that are made possible because you’re looking into real complexity.
In fact I’m pretty sure that if an Eve2 happened we would have all that stuff REMOVED instead of improved. In the name of accessibility.
No other game offers so much insight in its inner workings as Eve. Not even a 0.01%. And there’s no clutter on the UI beside what you create yourself.
So. You can complain for the TYPE of game is, but the UI is a mess merely because of the amount of information it delivers. And for delivering THAT amount of information Eve UI is simply excellent. It was already excellent years ago, and it was much improved. There’s very little about the UI itself that I’d complain about.
I haven’t played in several years, but I gather that the upcoming expansion adds WASD movement for ships. Will that address any of your criticisms? Will it add “flight mechanics” or “maneuvers” or “placement”? I’m guessing not, but I dunno.
Also, I gather this patch will ease the penalties for being podkilled. No skill loss, though you still use implants? Something like that. That might lure me back. The trouble is, I want to play EVE primarily as a PvE game and just dabble in PvP, whereas it’s really designed primarily as a PvP game. I like other PvP games – Planetside, and the PvP elements of games like Guild Wars 2, WoW, and DAoC. But in EVE, one loss in PvP could be quite painful. And I think the limits on maneuver that you describe may also make me less enthusiastic about PvP in EVE. Maybe it’s also the absence of “terrain”. I dunno. Still might try resubbing.
I’ve read some reports on Reddit and it’s a gimmick. To do it well they need to rewrite how the system works and how movement updates work. Eve was built for lowest load possible. Client/server communicate very, very rarely. That’s why you often have lots of rubberbanding. Yet, because of how Eve works, this kind of lag is irrelevant.
But in EVE, one loss in PvP could be quite painful.
There are groups like Reddit Brave Newbies where they basically give you the stuff you need. So it might be an option.
Though even joining that kind of large group can mean sitting waiting for hours and press a button when you’re told to.
Large scale PvP is actually very similar to PvE raids: coordination and choreography. Your singular contribution is close to zero, unless you do something very wrong. In that case your contribution is great, but no one is going to be happy.
You’re arguing that delivering masses of information = good UI. That’s it, no more depth to it than that.
You also described the UI as ‘slick’.
I’m guessing there is absolutely no point in trying to have a discussion with you on this.
I played Eve off and on from Beta until 2012. I never stopped finding the UI unnecessarily ugly and obtuse. Whether it was researching, manufacturing, running combat missions, trading, even the odd spot of PVP. It was always ugly and obtuse. Did it display vast amounts of information? Sure, usually too much, the wrong kind and in ways that I didn’t want.
Of course, it was throwing information at me and that’s all that counts for a good and ‘slick’ UI. According to you.
No, I’m saying that in my case I didn’t see “too much”, nor “wrong kind”, nor stuff “I didn’t want” (nor “ugly”). So for me it’s excellent UI. I don’t see anything at all on screen that is superfluous.
You’d have to motivate that claims, anyway, to make a point. I at least pointed out new changes that are good. Like the fact that now the mission target is right on screen, so you can warp to destination (or set waypoints) with one click. Stuff is where I want it to be, and I’m never annoyed about the UI itself.
There was a time when every single message on chat would make the whole client stutter. THAT was annoying.
What’s funny about all these UI complaints is that every time I see a screenshot of the UI (new or old), it makes me instantly want to play - despite everyone saying it is a spreadsheet simulator. Something about the presentation grabs me.
I have seriously never had any problem with the UI in EVE (except for that brief period when they switched things round a bit a few years ago and it lost some functionality for a short while, but it soon got all sorted out and eventually did improve and got even better overall), and never understood why people complained about it.
I’ve always thought Right-click context menus are the dog’s anyway, best way of having power at your fingertips. Plus I always thought it kind of onomatopoeic of the s-f theme anyway. It’s hard s-f, so … computers.
I think I agree with everyone. The biggest thing I didn’t hate about playing Eve was the UI. Takes some getting used to, but once you do every bit of info you need is within a couple of clicks.
So far the only TRULY annoying thing is that you can train skill only on ONE character. If you want to train the other, only a pop-up message comes up saying you can’t.
There seem to be no way to switch character quickly. You have to close the game. Restart the launcher, log-in, start the game, select the other character, stop his skill queue, then close everything and repeat.
Other improved things, instead: there’s now an elaborate skill queue, so you can plan and then let it go on forever. You can now warp/dock through autopilot. You just select the destination and when you come back you are right into the station where you wanted to be. Back when I played the autopilot only worked through system, it wouldn’t bring you to specific places, and for sure it didn’t dock.
Before, I ran through the probe/exploration tutorial since it’s stuff I never saw before. Quite neat. You go out with these probes, narrow down the location of anomalies, then there’s some hack mini-game that I haven’t quite figured out. The problem as usual is that the tutorial is very short and doesn’t give you any direction about where to go next. Just teaches how it works and that’s it.
The big problem with Eve is that you just don’t know where you can go so that what you are meeting is approximately your level. You could find a super easy thing, or an impossible one. You don’t know what kind of gear you need, how much money and so on.
In the case of this exploration/probing stuff it seems there’s no real context to it. No NPCs giving missions or the like. You only go into system, launch probes and so on. So it’s entirely undirected activity, based for the most part on luck.
