With EVE Online being today's Steam daily deal I thought "My bank account sure is £3.74 higher than I want it to be, why not buy EVE Online?" So that's exactly what I did. Obviously I knew a little about the game: it's player run economy, heavy focus on ships and mining, and it's love for spreadsheets; I forgot that it's also one of the most overwhelmingly, complex games to merely 'jump into'.

Qualon Crendraven

As soon as I logged in I was taken to the character creation screen, which is always one of my favourite parts of a videogame. I was able to choose my race and what I believe to be faction? I'm not entirely sure so I left it as it was - Gallente - and then chose the most caucasian looking character; not because I'm a racist, but because I'm white. The fun bit of this came at the end, where I was able to pose my character's face and take my portrait picture. Now obviously I made my character look as much of a buffoon as I possibly could and set it as the picture everyone else will see when they interact with me.

Stargates

Now, the first thing I had to do after creating Qualon was traverse Space, which is quite complex if you don't listen to the tutorial very clearly; something I wasn't doing due to listening to Will, Norm, and Gary. The first couple of missions are simple tutorial missions comprising of going from one Space station to another using Stargates and ship Accelerating machines that I've forgotten the exact name of; all very simple and straight forward, IF you know where to go and which stargate you need to warp to. After a while it tells you you can hit auto-pilot and then you never have to worry about that again.

After all the tutorials I got to choose a career path of sorts, and I picked the most business-y sounding one - I want spreadsheets damnit. So far all I have done is mined an asteroid for far too much of the material the guy wanted, converted a ship upgrade in to material by accident, sat and destroyed a part of space I didn't really need to, and complete about 5 courier missions, all in the name of Loict Mensier. Mid way through writing this I discovered the game has a windowed fullscreen mode - something more games need - and I have written most of the last paragraph whilst my ship is jumping through numerous stargates on autopilot. I imagine there will probably be more things to do whilst the ship is autopiloting, but at this time, I am glad I have this to do else I'd be bored watching my ship go to it's destination without so much as a click from me.

ISK

Now I'm not entirely sure what will come from these missions, and what happens when I get to see some spreadsheets, but I kind of hope I'll get to manage businesses or something, I really have no idea. The space warfare seems a bit boring if I'm honest, you just lock on to a ship and hit the blasters button, and I know it'll probably get more interesting with bigger ships and better weapons and such, but I want people to do that bit for me.One thing that I found odd for a videogames: I was taxed on my reward. Taxed I say. Admittedly once you think about it it fits in pretty well in this world, but still, it seemed weird at first. I have no idea how much is a lot of money in this game, but seeing a 40 billion ISK bounty on someone's head put things into perspective, especially compared to my tiny 500,000 ISK, but then I've only been playing for 3 hours.

The Future

The future indeed. I am going to try and further myself in the world of EVE online, as, I think, it is a game I should be absolutely interested in, but tbh we'll see, Battlefield 3 is out next week. But damn if I'm not going to try.

I also realise the title to this blog sets you readers up for some sort of fan fiction... Sorry, not from me. This is merely some thoughts I have that I felt like typing out. I should probably make another one of these, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. I may even write down some notes and save it all up for a larger, more interesting update for the end of the week, we shall see.

Thank you for reading, see you next time?

Alex.