Let's get one thing straight: you can't really "preview" a game billed as the largest massively multiplayer title ever to hit the PC. It's like trying to do a preview of your friend's life without knowing the decisions he or she is even going to make. Yet with Eve Online: The Second Genesis, scheduled to release for PC in March, that's the exact conundrum all gaming journalists face.
Eve Online takes place in a persistent online world in which gamers travel, work, trade and communicate across 5,000 solar systems. With such an expansive galaxy and thousands of gamers (the servers can handle more than 100,000 simultaneous players), it should come as no surprise that experiences in the game will vary from player to player. Add to that the ability to choose from one of 60 spacecraft, determine your player's appearance all the way down to tattoos, and choose from a number of professions, and you can see how virtually no experience will be the same. In fact, just about the only element that will remain the same from game to game is Eve Online's backstory.
Humans lived in complete harmony for thousands of years in a planetary system called "New Eden," which explorers discovered after traveling through a wormhole. Using this wormhole, humans expanded and colonized new worlds at an astonishing rate. Yet upon the catastrophic collapse of the "Eve Gate" wormhole, humans struggled to survive on their own. Five colonies gradually emerged to together control the world of Eve, yet the peace those colonies have enjoyed for 100 years is now in a precarious situation, one in which the wrong move might set the colonies in an intragalactic battle for supremacy.
Players choose to enter this story as a member of one of the five controlling cultures: Amarr (the largest state), Caldari (capitalistic but ruled by a few corporations), Minmatar (independent and determined), Gallente (protectors of the free world) or Jove (mysterious but technologically advanced). Players are also given the opportunity to "evolve" into the advanced Jovians as the game progresses.
After determining their race, players choose a profession, from bounty hunter to militiaman, in order to earn money. Work in Eve Online is either undertaken by accepting tasks from non-player characters or by working for a corporation formed by gamers who have pooled their resources to dominate the universe. Depending on your economical savvy, you can also earn cash by dabbling in the stock market to buy stock in the game's corporations. Amazingly, this exchange goes up and down as trades occur, just like the offline Wall Street. Imagine it as a tricked-out Sims Online, only the houses are spacecraft, the neighborhoods are entire solar systems, and your days are spent jockeying for galactic domination rather than a date in the Jacuzzi.
As you'd expect in a persistent-universe title available worldwide, Eve Online will continue to evolve even after players log off as battles are won and lost and businesses succeed and fail around the clock. It's not like you'll be out of the loop while offline, though. Gamers can use email, instant messenger and message boards to update offline companions on new developments the minute they log back into the game.
Eve Online has gameplay depth to spare, and from a graphical standpoint, it's no slouch either. Using DirectX 9, the game will take place in a fully three-dimensional galaxy and give even the latest video cards a solid run. The game will also support the Matrox Parhelia card and allow panoramic gameplay across three monitors, making sure gamers don't miss out on any of the intragalactic action.
If you want to see Eve Online in action, check out this new movie. You can also sign up to be a beta tester by going to the game's Web site.
