Comment by dantillberg
7 hours ago
It helps me to just think of all these games as early 20th century naval warfare sims with a fantasy space theme. We like dreadnoughts and have a hard time with extraterrestrial physics.
7 hours ago
It helps me to just think of all these games as early 20th century naval warfare sims with a fantasy space theme. We like dreadnoughts and have a hard time with extraterrestrial physics.
To me it seems like the engine (and the mechanics) are focused on being an MMO first and a "simulation" second. From their website "EVE Online is a community-driven spaceship MMORPG where players can play free, choosing their own path from countless options."
There are concepts in the game that would be unlikely in a simulation game but are common in MMO's. Think of fast travel, instance dungeons and more.
One of Eve Online's strengths is that it conforms gameplay to the MMO setting. That is one of the main driving factors in it's design and allows for example for Time dilation, huge battles and continuous universe and economy that it is famous for.
This is different from for example World of Warcraft, in my view that is a RPG first MMO second. That is one of the reasons it has sharding and smaller pvp battles.
Indeed, I would even say that EVE chose to be unsharded/monolithic first, and many of the key design choices flow from that, including the fantasy space setting itself.
The monolithic world needs to be big to spread everyone out. And it's easier to create ten thousand "systems" than it would be to create an immersive terrestrial world with a similar scale. Each EVE system is just a bunch of objects floating in a 3D space that you travel between.
Positioning of things in orbit around a point in space is cheap. The issue was probably how much more complicated it would be to make all the missions if things kept moving around. You could end up with things on opposite sides of a solar system that are currently right next to each other. But to me it takes me out of the game when I see stuff like that in the engine.
Well, even in Naval battles the environment is not this static - weather playing a major role in many naval campaigns, from hiding your ship in a rain squall to braving freezing waters during the polar night with the arctic convoys.
And of course tide played a major role, with the Germans during the Battle of Jutland racing to get past a sand bang to avoid being stuck at open sea & be mauled even more by the British.
Even more accurately, these generation of games are chat rooms with set dressing.