How does a nearly 20-year-old game stay fresh and relevant? According to the team behind the colossal MMO EVE Online, you do so by constantly reinvesting in your infrastructure and working to maintain your new player experience, those early hours introducing newcomers to the basics of mechanics and fiction. game. relevant and attractive. The latest effort in this line of thinking, called EVE Evolved, was deployed to the game’s servers a few weeks ago. I asked a few of my friends to give it a try, to get an idea of whether the result really is a better and more welcoming experience for new players approaching the famous dense and complex game.
The EVE Evolved update is twofold in its efforts to update and renew EVE Online. On the one hand, there are the visual and audio enhancements, the introduction of DirectX12, and new shadow and ray tracing technology to drive EVE’s graphics and sound into the game’s third decade of life. And then there’s the completely renewed presentation of the new player. Accurately or not, EVE Online is considered by many to be a notoriously difficult game to tackle. Perhaps in an effort to make it more accessible, the game now integrates the recently revamped AIR Career Program (ACP), a guided tour of three of EVE’s top careers, into the introductory experience. This interactive tutorial guides players through their first ten hours of the EVE experience.
Screenshot: CCP Games
Each iteration of the New Player Experience (NPE) makes me want to review the first hours of EVE with new eyes and see what the experience is like for those entering the game for the first time. However, at this point in my EVE “career,” it’s hard to separate my knowledge of the game from my experience, it’s hard to avoid shortcuts, it’s hard not to spend on better ships and bigger guns because the experience be more familiar to me and put a bit of a brake on what the game is trying to show me. Luckily, I have a few friends who have never played EVE in any real way, so I decided to recruit two of them to run the newly revamped game and try it out for myself.
Topic number one, NoobOnTheRun, told me that he had played 3 or 4 hours on EVE in the past, probably at my request, but the game never clicked on him. Topic number two, Archigos, had played EVE a little more seriously than Noob, but never had time to devote himself to the game, and went in and out over the years, always having to relearn it. every time he came back. I asked these two players to try to get over the introductory stage and the newly renewed ACP experience, without my help, and to let me know what they thought of it afterwards.
First impressions are very important. EVE’s NPE seems to understand this and is trying to make a significant impact. “As soon as I loaded the game for the first time, you’re just a little human in a small pod,” NoobOnTheRun explained to me via Discord. “Behind you is this exploded space station, and a fiery-looking giant cluster of stars in a ‘celestial box’ behind it. It’s kind of amazing honestly. I love stunning views like this and EVE seemed to be full of them. You’re really just a point in this game, and it’s a hell of a way to start. ”
After getting into the incredible immensity of the space and fleeing the wreckage of the destroyed facility, the game will guide you through a brief tutorial. How to control your boat, what the different user interface buttons do, basics. Then you are introduced to a little story.
“I never felt lost,” Archigos told me, “The user interface is better than I remember, and the little skill boost they give you to unlock better skills when you start is fantastic.” It refers to the “Expert Systems” that EVE added some time ago, items that temporarily unlock players ’skills, giving them some boost, or allowing them to fly ships they might not otherwise be able to. Once this introduction is complete, players head to the recently improved AIR Career program.
The ACP is a set of missions designed to introduce players to different aspects of the game and serves to demonstrate three types of player paths that EVE announces: Explorer, Industrialist, and Enforcer.
“I’m usually an explorer in MMOs,” NoobOnTheRun tells me. “I went right after the scanning agent, but it really wasn’t for me.” Explorer route missions provide players with scanning equipment to connect them to their ship. When activated, the scanning team launches a mini-sounding game that allows players to find hidden relics or enemy ships in space. According to NoobOnTheRun, this is an area where the new tutorial was missing. “Scanning areas like treasures or anything was very confusing and not explained at all, but once I saw a video of it, it was easy to get.” He told me he searched for a YouTube video made by another EVE player explaining how the scanning interface worked, and then he was able to successfully scan the game’s hidden relic sites and loot them for their “hidden treasures “.
Archigos had similar reservations about the exploration path, and explained to me that “exploration does a good job of teaching you a few things, but I don’t remember ever showing you how to use the probe launcher or the user interface to increase / decrease the radius and scan things afterwards “. He said that the previous time he had played EVE, he had had to do something similar to NoobOnTheRun and look for a video on exactly how the scan minigame worked, in order to be able to navigate it successfully.
As much as the exploration route seemed to fall for my two themes, the game’s Enforcer route, which guides players to equip their ships and then send them to fight NPC pirates, attracted them. “I found the combat a lot of fun,” NoobOnTheRun told me, “I was practically constantly trying to load my ship with anything small to give me an edge in battle. complicated in EVE, and even veteran players can spend hours crafting theories about what load to put on their ships to get the most out of them, without creating any obvious defensive weakness.
“I like that one of the agents sends you to die a few times so you can think that dying isn’t a big deal as long as you just carry trash,” NoobOnTheRun said. Two of the most important lessons EVE players need to learn are, “Ships are ammo” and “Don’t put away what you can’t afford to lose,” and Enforcer missions do their best to reinforce -ho. At EVE, losing a boat can be a costly mistake and every time you decide to take one out of the safety of your hangar, the risk is very real. The ACP highlights this by sending players on a mission from which they are not expected to escape. In fact, the explosion of his ship is the whole point of the mission.
Neither player had much to say about the NPE’s efforts to introduce them to the industrial path, which attempts to give a very basic overview of EVE’s incredibly complex crafting system. Players are asked to collect asteroids for minerals or to buy raw materials on the market, and then make a few simple ships and some weapons. “Sitting for an hour waiting on a boat that is being built for a tutorial was not the most fun,” lamented NoobOnTheRun.
Screenshot: CCP Games
Archigos had a complaint along a similar line. “An annoyance with one of the missions in the industry was to make rockets or something. I used the plane to do the maximum amount of executions that made me completely lose the end timer bonus.
The industry is one of the most complex systems in EVE Online and is therefore very difficult to fully explore on a small scale. Waiting for new players to host all the necessary materials, or even buying the materials off the market and then sitting and waiting while the items are created, can cause them to be misunderstood during the first few hours of play. NoobOnTheRun even admitted to me that instead of finding something else to do in the game while waiting for the timer, he simply left the game to make his own and went to prepare dinner.
Despite scruples about how exploration and industry are introduced, my two subjects seemed to enjoy their foray into EVE and have played a little beyond what I asked of them. I asked them if they thought the ACP left them equipped to play EVE anymore and not feel lost in the massiveness of the sandbox.
“I feel very equipped,” NoobOnTheRun said. “The first time I played EVE, maybe two or three years ago, I had my hand a bit grabbed by people who had played before. When they weren’t around, I was totally lost. Now, I get the feeling that at least I have an idea of what’s in store for me, what the main clues are in the game – I’m sure there are more things, but it’s comforting in a way to know that I at least have rails to follow, agents to report to and things I can be doing to move forward “.
He also told me that he had an experience with one of EVE Online’s Game Masters, game staff members who help him answer player support entries, enforce rules, and moderate the game while playing. Often, new players will have a member of the GM team help them to lend a hand in their first few days in the sandbox. “They gave me a lot of materials and a pretty thick mining ship that I used for most of my non-combat trips. I know a lot of MMOs send you a lot of things like these at first, but it’s nice to receive them from ‘a person,’ he told me during our summary of his time at EVE.
“I’m still playing!” Archigos told me. “From experience I made my first Caldari [one of the player factions] to play with rockets / missiles. It’s been fun! …