How much Immersion, Part 2

August 14, 2006 on 2:32 pm | In MMO (Live), Eve, Playstyles

Well, I've answered my own question:

Just how much immersion do I want?

Less than I can have.

Eve is a great game, the very essence of open-ended experience, the sort of experience that defines "immersion" in a genre that seems largely to be veering away from it. Put another way, the immersion of Eve is about where you are and what you choose to do in it. The immersion in WoW, for example, is what you get and what you choose to get next. 

What makes Eve hard, and therefore niche, is a number of elements:

• No clear explanation on how to do, well, anything
• No clear goals
• Groups required.
• It displays time requirements in neon.

No Clear Explanation

There's a tech tree within the game that is not at all explained well. Skills required for a module do not point to skills that support it, nor to Implants that support that. Beyond the tutorial, players are told almost nothing. Worse, when they finish that tutorial, they're given one or two million ISK, enough to afford a new ship and equipment, but with no knowledge on how to go spend it effectively.

These factors are easy to resolve. There's more than enough information and off-line tools out there to get someone all educated-up on all aspects of Eve. Players are only ignorant by choice.

But then the real problem kicks in: what to do with this stuff.

No Clear Goals

What will you do? Mine? Pirate? Haul? Trade? Craft? Rat? PvP? You can eventually do all of these. There's no real cap on what you can learn as a player.

And that's an irony to me. The lack of any clear end-goal makes it very hard to find a good place to start.

What skills do you pick up? In what order? How long will it take to learn them? What skills can you learn to speed up the learning process for other skills? Where will you get the money for the ships and equipment and insurance? Where will you go with them? With whom?

So now we have a game that provides no clear-cut explanation offering no clear-cut goal.

Groups Required

Eve is a good example of an open-ended sim-like experience that is stable, enjoyable and has a good tight core audience. It's never going to give WoW a run for its money, but that's more because the type of player it appeals to is very different than the typical quest-grinder/Raider of the pinnacle of diku.

Players come together for more reasons than just helping one of them get a new sword. They form alliances, governments, ruling councils, squads, objectives. The people are the game. Find the right group and there's nothing you'll want for, be it knowledge or equipment.

This isn't the typical "ugh, I need to group to take down this boss mob" requirement either. This is the more immersive "I will get pulverized without the big stick of an alliance to back me up" requirement. There's only so much you can do in Eve by yourself. Even the most dedicated soloers eventually need to join a Corp if they ever plan to progress beyond the smaller ships.

But finding that right group is both critical and not explained. I can't imagine how many people were dumped into orbit above some random world and go so confused they quit in disgust.

I'm glad I started this third attempt at Eve with the folks over at F13. They're a casual-leaning group dedicated to having fun but also focused enough to achieve well in these sorts of games. My frustration of the last six weeks was that I was rarely on to help out.

I like games that compel groups to work together for larger goals. But I can't play them if I don't feel like I'm contributing. And that's what happened here.

Neon Time Requirements

What ultimately made me realize I had to leave was the Time factor. Unlike the typical "I can't Raid 10 hours a week" definition of Time, Eve's time was more direct. Other games which hide their time requirements behind lots of vague terms eventually decompiled anyway. Meanwhile, Eve advertises its time requirements in neon.

One of the few things the game is good at informing the player of is the amount of time it is going to take to do something. If a Skill is going to take 6 days to learn a skill, it tells you 6 days. If you need to learn five skills to unlock a sixth, the game can tell you exactly how long that will take, as tools like Future Falcon so helpfully tell you. And since Time is so important, it pervades lots of the tools available for the game. Heck, fire up QuickFit and it'll tell you how long your ship will take to defeat any of the enemy NPCs you tell it to calculate a fight against. Use a tool like Eve Tanking to see how long you'll survive under their barrage. The numbers generated are all fairly accurate.

I knew how long it'd take to learn stuff, how long it'd take to rat to get the money to make those skills worth it and how long I'd need to spend in the game each month to pay the fee with enough profit left over to make my time in the Corp and Alliance worth it.

And it just wasn't adding up.

The End

I needed to move on. I dumped my 0.0 holdings and evacuated what few valuables were worth transporting out. For now I'll skimper back to easier games, ones that don't require as much from me. Life has been keeping me off my computer more and more of late, and while it could just be the Summertime, I think it might be deeper than that.

I want to care. I really do. But I mostly don't. I've been through the immersive side of this genre time and again and I just don't feel a part of it anymore, not the way it's being defined by the old skool anyway.

Those who equate immersion with Time are a group to which I can no longer belong. Maybe when my kids are in college in fifteen years (heh, hopefully), things will be different for me. But by then, I think everything's going to be different.