Eve Online is the MMO where real cash has gone down in flames along with virtual space ships. One player lost a super carrier worth approximately $8-9000 in real cash in a well-planned and well-publicized ambush. The game’s been around for over a decade, and in the latest attempt to capture a new generation of players, is offering a two-week free trial. There’s a new trailer for it, which is one of the best gameplay trailers I’ve seen in a while.
The trailer doesn’t showcase a narrator with a British accent or misleading cinematics. It’s got real gameplay featuring voices of real players. It’s intense. It promises high-action, high-teamwork, high-everything. It’s also edited very well, which is the fake, misleading marketing trick here. It’s like a trailer for a lame comedy – all the best jokes are in the trailer, the rest is blah.
I tried it several years ago. The game takes time. It takes money. It’s like raising a kid or a pet. If that’s the only game you play and don’t mind the babysitting, then it might pay off. For me, it never did. I got bored. I’d get beat up and I didn’t care to rebuild. You don’t even put an enemy frigate in your crosshairs. You program it in and the game does math to figure out if it’s a hit or not. Sometimes that’s cool. Usually, I want to blast things in a game like this.
The concept is cool. The freedom and the organic nature of the game has been very interesting to read about. And there may be moments of heart-pounding action as one of the dudes says in the video. But I’ve got a life and too many other games to play.