For those of you who don't know Eve Online is a MMORPG - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (also known as Many Men Online Role Playing Girls due to the fact that the majority of female characters are played by males). The MMORPG is a video game played online that can support anything from hundreds to thousands of players simultaneously. At peak times in Eve Online, usually Sunday evenings, the simultaneous player count can exceed 50,000. MMORPGs are set to become the fastest growing revenue earners for games companies earning far more than their offline counterparts. The "Online Games: Global Market Forecast" report by Strategy Analytics predicts that revenues from such games will reach $11.5 billion by 2011.
Eve Online is one the most popular MMORPGs along with World of Warcraft (WoW) but differs significantly in how it is presented to its players. Games like WoW are "sharded" which means that the game's world exists on several different servers simultaneously. This means that you only interact with the players connected to the same shard as you. In Eve Online there are no shards, all players participate in one huge persistant world, making it unique in its class. The Eve Online world, known as New Eden is certainly huge with over 5000 solar systems to explore and room to expand.
Eve Online is based in the universe of New Eden and is a space/science fiction themed MMORPG. It has similar elements to other MMORPGs such as several races for players to choose from and a skill system. The skill sytem though is where Eve Online again differs from other games. In most MMORPGs there is an element of "grind", boring repetitive tasks to level up your character i.e. if you want to improve your skills with a sword you have to hit things with a sword. In Eve Online this is not the case, the Eve skill system is passive. You purchase a skill from the commercial market and so long as you meet the prerequisites for that skill you can set it to train. Training takes a certain amount of time which varies according to attributes and modifiers that your character has and the level of the skill you are training. This can vary from a few minutes for a simple low level skill to weeks for a complex high level skill. The best bit about training is that when you log off the training does not stop, it continues while you are offline, so long as your acount remains active.
Eve Online is very much an open game, you are free to pursue any play style you like so long as you stay within the EULA. You can become a highly skilled industrialist with complex and profitable production chains, you can become a pirate living off the loss and misery of others, you can form your own corporation and become a great leader in a large alliance of players. Whether your interest is in an economic game, a political game, a fighting game an exploration game or any other type of game, Eve Online can provide you the platform to enjoy the game the way you and your friends want to.
I have been around in Eve Online for over 6 years now, I still find new things to enjoy and new challenges. You can try Eve Online for free for 14 days HERE
