GamerNode: Columns - Beam Me Up, Shepherd

..article continued from page 1

In EVE's New Eden, the player can fly around the galaxy, blasting friend and foe alike, and have any job they'd like to in this fully-functional universe. Want to mine entire moons for ore? Sure. Feel like taking a battleship and destroying a fleet of enemy cruisers? Go for it. Hell, you can even set up shop as a journalist. As a journalist myself, I avoided that particular job: playing games and writing about them for a living is seriously fun, but playing a game where I'm writing about a game that I'm playing in order to write about it... that's just headache-inducing.

Sometimes I wonder what EVE's developers wanted me to find, out in space. As I sat downstairs earlier, mourning the loss of my Gallente cruiser, I realised that I was really, really into mining asteroids. Ironically, I was the main miner and jewelcrafter for my raiding guild in World of Warcraft, but that wasn't really something I had a ton of fun with most of the time, considering all the money I got went down the toilet the second we had a wipe night.

This said, maybe there are so many jobs and roles in space universe MMOs simply because the developers are looking at the title's entertainment value more closely than they were with titles like Diablo, where dying was painful simply because not only was it completely unrealistic (I do realise I'm saying this about a fantasy RPG, don't worry), but also because it was incredibly unfair. However, even in the dark void of space, I've got insurance, and an email account, though how in the hell it gets any Wi-Fi signal is beyond me, unless the world of New Eden comes equipped with cloaked Starbucks franchises.

As I sit here, I'm watching my fiancé play though her Mass Effect save a third time in her grind towards the level 60 achievement on the Xbox 360. What's interesting is, most level grinds that involve replay are usually boring, with no possible value in a title where you can apply the phrase "been there, done that" to almost every situation and gameplay mechanic. But even though she's not always reading the dialogue, opting to speed through it by mashing the X button, she still makes her moral alignment choices, and explores the hell out of the galaxy.

• (0)
• 
• 
• 
•