What our customer's say!

"This game is not for kids! Inappropriate player made content!", Eve Online to be release in March. ESRB Teen! Not for kids!

Game creator is CCP, Iceland.
March 2009 the game will be published by Atari

Game Content is ESRB Teen
This game exploits a major loophole in the ESRB called Player Content. ESRB does not rate player content. Write the ESRB today to complain their policies.
Player Content is ESRB Mature+
CCP communicates and promotes a sexual, perverted, profane and drunken adult social community in this game.

You have read what the game is about. Here is what kind of Player content your child will be exposed to.
The average age in game is high, about 28.
A group called SomethingAweful ([...] largely controls the game at the moment.
They run the largest in game entity called GoonSwarm, ([...]).
This sick organizations members are extremely perverted and have inundated the game with inappropriate player content.
Their members have a majority of the Game Manager positions working for CCP in Iceland and ignore all parental complaints.

Your child will be exposed to:
Inappropriate chat discussions
Inappropriate voice discussions (both the games integrated voice chat, teamspeak, and ventrilo)
Links to porn sites in chat
Sexual stories from other players

Inappropriate Jokes to include: Racism, Sex, Politics, Drugs.
Your child will "hear" people doing drugs.
Your child will "hear" people drunk.
CCP the maker of eve will broadcast fanfest events through the ingame voice system. Your child will hear inappropriate things during their presentations.
While flying through space systems your child will see and be overwhelmed with content named with inappropriate names. I once saw someone had their ships out and they were all named a modified version of penis.

You will not be able to protect your child:
There is "No" in-game method or mechanism to shield your child from this player content.
There are "No" chat filters
The same person that posts links to porn will be talking to your child

"Keep coming back to it, and leaving for the same reasons", Eve is a really revolutionary product in the mass of me too MMO clones. All players on a single server cluster (and there are a lot of them), very scalable to older hardware (it helps if you draw a lot of empty space I suppose), casual-gamer friendly skilling system, the most robust and complex in-game completely player-driven economy ever seen, player-driven politics and territory control, scams, intrigues, assassinations, you name it, someone has done it somewhere.

All that said, Eve is well and truly a multiplayer corporation- (guild/clan) based game, and without a good group of players it becomes pretty boring. If you're a casual game who logs on once in a while to shoot some AI bad guys, there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but once you get to the point of breezing through level 4 kill missions, it's pretty boring. At this point you need to get into the PvP scene, and to do this effectively and enjoyably you really should have a good corporation. If you want to do this in 0.0 space (no-mans land where the players control territory, pretty cool concept) you need a good and big corporation, since you will be defending your territory from invaders. And here is where the problem is. Whether you're protecting what's yours in 0.0 or gate ganking with a small squad in low security space, it translates into a lot of downtime. Just a handful of guys sitting around, waiting for a target to come by, chatting. If you want to be that target, things are a little more exciting as you're actually going places, at least until you run into a bubble camp that traps you and you get shot to pieces. If you want to be a solo killer, you can do that too, but it's still a lot of sitting around, scanning for targets, picking your spots to charge in, etc. You could play the industrial game too, but it's not for me; I tried it for months.

So every few months, I re-activate my account and play, and ooh and ahh at the great design and gameplay concepts, then I get bored, maybe kill some people, run into problems because nobody I know is around or doing anything that is interesting, and I cancel again. Since other MMos tend to bore me to the point where I NEVER want to come back, I suppose this is a step up. Eve, love it or hate it, or, like me, be occasionally ambivalent.

"Mediocre in every way, very poor support", A friend purchased this game for me recently to try, since he has been playing it for approximately two months. I played the game for about two weeks, from about May 10th to 26th (2008).

Client Stability and Server Availability
In general, the game engine is about as sophisticated as many three to four year old games - regarding graphics, audio, and general complexity. So, it runs very well even on older hardware.

The servers are brought down fairly regularly. I didn't play every day, but it seems as though the servers were down every day, sometimes for several hours, sometimes just for one.


Audio/Visual
This game looks and feels three or fours years old. It's prosaic and unremarkable in this department. Really nothing worth mentioning.


Game Play
Eve Online can be summarized as "the greatest experience for hardcore, long time MMO players". At the same time, one can easily refer to it as "the most boring, time sink filled, banal and repetitious computer gaming experience ever fabricated in mind or reality". Unless you're a masochist this game is not for you. In my humble opinion.


Support and Service
Your petitions for support/assistance are only handled during scheduled outages. Even so, it routinely takes ten or more hours for issues to be addressed, and roughly half the time the issues are not resolved. Once my character became "locked", that is, the client would crash whenever I attempted to log into it. I was told two days after submitting my petition that this was due to a bug that required game master intervention, and that they had corrected it. However, all of my resources that I had spent a week collecting were missing. I politely requested assistance acquiring the lost items (a typical and benign problem in all MMOs). I was denied, told that it was not in the EULA (odd that they would refer to the end user license agreement for software for this issue) and - get this - actually told by support that I can feel free to cancel my subscription. Heh. Amazing customer service there. So I did.


Conclusion
Old technology and graphics, constant outages, poor audio, repetitious game play filled with outdated time sinks, and extremely poor customer support. I recommend avoiding this game.

"I have seen the future. And it is boring.", In some aspects, EVE Online is superb. The graphics are jaw-droppingly beautiful, the sounds are great, the design of ships and stations is awesome, and you really get a sense that you are exploring a genuine vast universe. It is also perhaps the most realistic space simulation I've ever seen, but that very aspect of it might be it's greatest weakness.

Quite simply, EVE is boring. After the initial wow-factor of the graphic design wears off, you are stuck in a very dark (literally) and uneventful world, which can make the gameplay an emotionally depressing affair - seriously. Even the combat is boring because of its automatic nature. You pretty much just sit back and watch your ship trade shots with another one until one of them wins.

If you don't make friends within EVE to chat with, then you can add "crushingly lonely," to "dark" and "uneventful."

For me, if game isn't fun, then there is no reason to play. That's why I quit WoW. After awhile, I wasn't having fun anymore. With EVE, I never had fun. If a chat room with beautiful scenery is what you're looking for, then EVE is for you. But if you're looking for an engaging and exciting experience in space, then run away.

"Great Change of Pace", I love this game, but then again I don't like games that depend on how fast of a mouse I have, or how fast I can click my macros.

Some of what you read in these reviews is only partly true.

Can you lose skills that you've worked for weeks to learn? Sure, but only if you don't clone yourself.

Is fighting like being on Auto-Pilot? Not that I've seen. My missles don't fire automatically. Yes, I can set my ship to stay a certain distance from an enemy and it flies itself, but I still have to choose my targets, lock on, and fire.

PvP. Well, you don't die first of all. Your ship blows up (but you did buy that insurance right?), and you go to your homepoint in your life pod. Can the other players blow up your life pod? Yes, but I've never experienced it. Besides, I have my clone and lose nothing if they do.

With the huge expansion coming out, now is the time to get your 14 day trial, plus the 30 more you get when you buy the game code.

44 days of play for $20. What do you really have to lose? (Besides your job from losing track of time and staying up until 4 AM!)

Read this reviews before You buy...

"High learning curve, but hopelessly addictive", I've been playing EVE for about 8 months now, and although the first month or so was a bit boring as I did the newbie grind mining and ratting with my starter gear, I was eventually invited into a corp, and with a small loan from the corp, I discovered my niche as an industrialist.

Today, I have 3 accounts so I can fly three characters simultaneously (it takes a bit of work and practice, but due to the nature of EVE it's very possible), and make 4-10m ISK - the ingame currency - an hour mining and running trade routes. My second account runs "protection" for my mining operations, and the third account flies a freighter - the largest class hauling ship in the game - under an NPC corp's flag, so when war is declared on my real corp, I can still move massive amounts of corporate assets "under the radar" of the enemy.

There's something in EVE for almost everyone. If you want to become a tycoon without getting blown up, you can train for hauler-class ships: industrials, transports, and freighters. If you want to get into PVP, there are mercenary and pirate corps willing to take you in, and all sorts of ship loadouts to suit any style of combat you prefer. If you want to run missions, there are player-created courier missions and bounties as well as NPC agents to give you plenty to do.

As other reviewers have mentioned, the skill training system is nice in that you don't have to spend time online to train the skills up - you train them in a fixed amount of time, whether you're online or not. You simply have to buy the skillbook, meet the prerequisites, and start the training, and the rest is automatic.

"Constant Revisions and a Growing Community", I began playing this game in 2006. There are often more than 20k players at one time in the game, but it's so massive that they don't create a crowd. The company is constantly updating the thing and adding new features. The PvP aspects increase their potential as time goes by, to the point where you can eventually control areas of space and build bases, etc. - and go off and sack those owned by others. Good, fun stuff. Also, not as repetitive as games like DDO (Dungeons and Dragons Online) despite the necessity to mine, especially early in the game.

You don't need to buy this box though, just download it directly from the company website.

January 2007 - still play a LOT. Amazingly addictive gameplay. There is now commonly more than 30k players at one time, all on the same shard (there is only one single shard). Good fun, plenty of different things to do, always something to strive for.

December 2007 Edit - Still playing a LOT. Eve now has had more than 40k players online at the same time, the game continues to grow. The number of professions you can choose has grown, in addition to being a miner/hauler/combat pilot, you can be a researcher, builder/developer, scrap salvager, stealth recon pilot, explorer. But, you don't CHOOSE a profession per se, you simply develop skills that develop the ability to perform those activities. Ultimately, your character can choose any profession and, with patience, pick multiple professions. Awesome game, I've been playing a year and a half and STILL have no desire to merely TRY another MMOG.

March 2008 edit: I'm still playing this game almost daily. That's got to be about the best recommendation a video game can ever have. Go to Eve Online's website and download the free trial.

"There is no going back...", 4 months after subscribing to EVE I've decided that I have no need to purchase another video game. EVE provides an outlet for the several genres of computer gaming I enjoy. There's fast paced hard-core PVP combat, in depth RP, cutthroat financial simulation (ala Railroad Tycoon), and a vibrant and active player community.

That said what EVE lacks is dynamic NPC content, instant gratification, grossly time dependent advancement, limits in character development, "Easy mode", and "the one true way" formulaic success.

Complaints about new players being grossly disadvantaged versus old players are largely unfounded, because there are hard limits to how good a character can be at any one thing, and these limits are achievable in within the game's 14-day trial with focus on one area of growth.

In 4 months of game play I've discovered that EVE is best in moderation, and in groups. The NPC encounters and quests do get repetetive, and in my opinion strongly encourage playing with the other kids on the playground. The content really shines when you add the social interaction of other players, and it becomes intensely more personal and compelling. Several hours of EVE will give your brain a workout unless you activly avoid it. Whether you're figuring out the best way to outfit your ship, what market items to trade on, which skills to train, where to get the resources you need to build your own space station, or how to deal with a hostile fleet, there's always something to keep your brain busy.

CCP staff involment with the EVE playerbase is intense, and deeply concerned with quality of the service as well as quality of play. Volunteer's and paid customer serivce agents are available in game to handle problems, questions, and complaints. Play stopping in game problems are resolved in a matter of minutes, and unplanned outages of the service are handled at most within hours.

All in all EVE may not appeal to everyone, but it has done away with the MMORPG tradition of kill stuff while you chat. There is enough to do that appeals to several styles of computer gaming, and it all ties in to the same game world. Choose EVE for a game experience that won't run out of newness for a very long time.

"By far, greatest Sci-Fi MMOG.", When I first played this game, I couldn't believe it. Everything I loved about a game, was captured perfectly by the games creating company, CCP. The only downside to the game I thought of for a second, was eather the fact A) You were always in a ship. B) You couldn't land on planets and C) The beginning of the game is what throws people away. For those that read my third issue (the other two, in time, you won't care about) is why the games population is not as vast as it's countpart, World of Warcraft. But these two games cannot be compared, as they are two completely different MMORPGs. If your a fan of the Sci-Fi genre, then this game is for you. If your more of the medieval fantasy theme, and like to be annoyed by strange 13 year old kids that act if they were 5, then go to World of Warcraft. The games community is beyond reliable. I remember first starting out, total newb player, and I was complaining how my ship was massacred by evil NPCs! There was one guy in the chat channel, who I am still in debt to even today. He loaned me (never payed him back...) some ISK (ISK is currency unit) to re-buy my ship, and go kick some NPC arse (I'd go back there and do it again to!). Graphics (for that time and year) are breathtaking as you fly about in space and witness beauty beyond imagination. The possibilities for ships is also very vast, thousands upon thousands of different ship combinations are possible. Another downfall to the game, is the skill system. It is, impossible to keep up with those who have been playing since the games release (2003) as skills do not require long hours of grinding fests, but the skill system is completely automated. Meaning, it trains by itself and the higher level the skill is that you are training, the longer it shall take. It could perhaps take hours, days, or even months to train a single skill. But the game is just to great, every aspect of the game is perfect, from the economy to the PvP system. From the corporation system, to the quest system (Quests = Missions in this game). I would recommend this game, to anyone who has the patience for long space travel (keep something on the side while traveling like books, handhelds, anything). If you want to see how great the game is for yourself there is also a 14-day trial.

"An EVE Online CEO", It's definitely a game for the intelligent, decisive, high-initiative player. Sci fi fans of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation", or Frank Herbert's "Dune" will love this game. If you need to be told waht to do, and how to do it, you'll get lost in the numbers of items, things, places, agents, players and ships.

It FEELS like the real world, in space, thousands of years from now, after the apocalypse as decribed in the trailer.

It's not all about mining, though that is a large part of it.

Hundreds of thousands of ISK can can be made in a few minutes by keeping a careful watch on the market and buying low and selling high (and remembering that the Gov't charges 10% sales tax, off the top).

Low volume cargoes of .1 or less mean you can haul 90,000 items, per load in a 9000 capacity ship (Industrial hauler class not available to trial players).

With a profit margin of 10 per unit, there's almost a million ISK in just one or two jumps, about 10 minutes' work.

Rigging a ship up is a combination of needed skills, and equipment, most of which can be found as salvage. Offensive defensive, power, scanning, jamming, targeting, maneuverability, and even larger cargo bay options are all avaailable, for a price.

Weapons range from autocannons to guns to lasers, including a variety of missiles and rockets, each also able to be adjusted or modified, with a specific attack profile to target an enemies' shields, armor or hull.

Definitely the type of game for a long term player, as it takes time to do the tutorial (which is crippling if not completed), find a corporaton to join, and grow in skills, wealth and power.

A few other reviewers have stated that "You can't compete against veteran players".

This is just not true.

On a one for one basis, a battleship piloted by a veteran will will against a new ship. But the corporations dynamic allows for large scale tactics, and strategy, with all kinds of real world options for political intrigue...penetration agents, turncoat spies, doubles, even triple spies, I've seen it.

Mercenary strike forces hitting targets, paid for through cutouts, who never really are sure who they are working for, and to what ultimate goal.

Savvy play is required, as there is a lot of double dealing. Don't give the keys to your station to some guy you just recruited off the street.

Definitely Ace for graphics, sound, and intrigue.

I see a lot of players go out "Pirate hunting" and then quickly get bored, or dismayed when attacked by a real pro, with a tricked out ship.

But pirates only typically hit the frontier zones of security .4 or below. So it is a case of "Don't go there, without a gang of friends, it's a bad neghborhood."

Yet some still go, and cry foul, even though, If given the chance they themselves would skyjack a new player.

Fun, and nice to meet good solid players that are in it for the roleplaying aspects.

As a CEO, I had earned the 2 million requred in 2 days of play, and thorugh a combination of mining, dealing, and shrewd market transactions, made it to Megacorporation status with 51 employees on the roster in two weeks.

Making the first 100 million was difficult, but do-able. Of course it will take the average player some weeks to buy that bigger ship, but as in the real world all good things must be earned through effort, (in this case patience) or they're not appreciated.

For those seeking hard core shoot 'em up, go play a Doom-like game. If you've ever wanted to trade among the stars, or run a stellar megacorporation, this game is your vehicle to accomplish it.

Planning and flexibility are essential, and if you've ever played the real world financial markets, those skills will directly transfer to this game.