Wednesday 25 February 2009

Online with EVE

1 comments
Well, I signed up with steam for my 21 day free trial of EVE. And then un-installed steam and used the seperately downloaded client.

It was a 1.1GB download but luckily I live in a city, the same one where my ISP has it's head office, so I generally get decent speeds. Last night, my 8Mb connection was actually running at 9Mb for some reason, so it took me about 26 minutes to get the full game. Not bad at all.
So I used the time to finish off another few levels of Army of Two.

Anyway, I installed the game, tweaked a few things, and logged in. After being guided through the setup process, I was dropped into the middle of the universe in a ship. And a little system-shock style computer guided me through a few of the basics.

Before long, I'd destroyed 3 other ships and mined a little ore. And then My other half came home so that was the end of the nights exploring. In total, I think I moved about 30km from my starting position. I guess it's "One small step for man" in this case.

My first impressions are good. It's a nice looking game, but only after much tweaking of graphics settings. At first I had giant black blobs on my screen where something was wrong with the clipping and shadow effects. But managed to get it sorted with only a couple of attempts.

The UI is a bit daunting at first, but I was expecting that anyway. At one point I lost one of my info screens, and never figured out how to get it back up. (The one that shows me what's nearby).
This was probably the most useful screen, so I was a bit lost without it.

The other good news is that at least 2 of the other Munquis also play EVE, and that would obviously make the whole experience much better. And from what I've read, it's much easier to function as a group, and easier to make profits etc...

I haven't made a decision on the game, after my only minimal amount of play, but things are positive so far. Who knows, if things pan-out maybe there'll be a Munqui Corporation?

Don't worry though WoW fans, I'm not planning on hanging up my hunters bow at any time soon. But it's nice to have a change of scenery now and then. And you couldn't ask for a bigger change than WoW -> EVE.

Watch this space... or that space... or any space for that matter, you just might see a player named Smythy flying through it.

EDIT: BTW Brast, I don't know if it's only happening to me, but every time I try to log onto the Munqui forums my Browser crashes. Never done it before. Any ideas?