George Allen Miller One Geek's take on all things SciFi

Ok, lets take a break from the paranormal and go back into another favorite topic of mine, though no less geeky, Video Games. I have played many of the MMO’s, that is short for MMORPG which itself stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, yes I know very geeky, including but not limited to Eve online.

Eve online, which has been around for a long long time, is a space based game in which the players decide the fate of the universe by blowing each other up. Basically. For years it was the number one rated MMO on mmorpg.com, a rating I completely agreed with. The one draw back of Eve online was you couldn’t get out of your space ship. You basically were your ship. You could change ships, as you were really in a ‘pod’ that got inserted into your ship, and then go fly off and blow someone up.

The fact that you couldn’t leave the ship hasn’t really detracted from the core players of Eve. But, what it has done, is always limited it to be ‘that game that could be AWESOME if only’. I don’t really know why but people love having an Avatar in these games. If you don’t know what an Avatar is, just stop reading, it’s too hard to explain. If you have ever played Second Life, that’s an Avatar.

Another big complaint about Eve has always been little to no Player vs Environment experiences. Mostly, Eve is all about PvP, player vs player, lots of people killing each other. And don’t get me wrong, it’s wicked cool, but doesn’t always appeal to every one.

Some good things about Eve, it is just one server, you can do anything you want in uncontested space and the system is all skill based. That brings us to Star Trek online. The much anticipated, once thought to be dead, SciFi MMO that dares to challenge Eve’s long standing hold on the Science Fiction MMO. As a side note, there are other Sci Fi MMO’s but they all suck and there’s no need to talk about them.

STO, Star Trek Online, plans to launch in February of next year. When you are in space you will be a ship. When you are on a planet, you will have an Avatar. There will be a skill based system. There will be ‘uncharted’ regions where you can do anything you want, I think. And if we take a lesson from Champions Online, a game made by the same studio making STO, there will only be one server.

Now, it sounds to me that Cryptic, the guys making STO, did something very smart. They looked at the current leader of the market, Eve, and decided to do what they did only adding Avatars and ground based combat. What does that all add up to? A possible challenger to Eve. Now, I’m not saying that people playing Eve will leave in droves to play STO, but you can bet that many people playing Eve are Star Trek fans and will want to take a quick break to check out STO for sure.

Another thing that may play into this is Eve’s creator, CCP Games, is creating a console based first person shooter that will tie into the Eve universe. Basically thumbing their noses at the loyal game players who they have hinted they would be getting Avatars one day, and instead creating Dust 514. It’s an interesting idea but will it translate to increased players? Not sure. I for one don’t like it. Give me my Avatar. Let me dock my NightHawk, jump out, take a shuttle to the planet surface, pop out, hop in a jeep, take the ridge with my rifle, throw some grenades, then back into a Cerebus and carpet bomb the f*!# out of some pirate a-holes! Ahem, sorry, got carried away.

The point is, having Eve split into two versions, Console and PC, may not be totally appealing to the long time fan base. If STO does all the things eve does and lets you go down to a planet and kill a few klingons, then it may give Eve a run for it’s money. We’ll find out in February!