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World of Warcraft is fun and all, but sometimes you need a change of pace. I had been looking for a good space-sim for awhile and it looks like I found the best there is in EVE.

EVE Online is a MMORPG in space. In it, you play the role of a freelance pilot trying to make a name for him/herself in the universe. But you are just one among tens of thousands in the same galaxy at the same time. Like any MMO, your task in the game boils down to killing bad guys, fending off the PKs, and amassing ludicrous amounts of wealth. These types of games are self-fullfilling: it's the journey that counts, not the destination. What's more, the sky's the limit as far as the journey is concerned and this is especially true of EVE Online.

EVE is easily the slowest paced MMO I've played - ever. I've already put in about twenty-four hours total and about all I've done is the tutorial (which takes three hours itself), run courier missions, and mine. In fact, when you first start out, mining is about all you can do to make money. The introductory mission sequences are nice for breaking you into playing the game and getting your initial cash flow going, but this is no World of Warcraft. As soon as those are over, you'll quickly be thrust into missions you can't possibly handle. In other words, you get sent to die. So you're left with no options except to mine ore for money to buy a better ship. Mining (farming) is something that is not well handled in other games, but in EVE it's the rule of the day. New players always form the baseline of the economy by mining ore for corporations to buy and use in production. Mining is simply a matter of warping into an asteroid belt, finding the best rock you can get your greedy mitts on and mining it to death. When your cargo hold fills up (takes about five minutes), you drop off the ore at your base for reprocessing and sale and then go out and mine some more. Do that again about thirty times and you can afford a better ship.

Now if mining and fending off the bogies while you're mining was the only thing you could do in the game, EVE would suck ass. However, EVE goes out of its way to provide many unique and interesting career paths. For example, you could take the mining and expand on that. You could upgrade your measly frigate to a massive Mining Barge. These craft have loads of cargo space, space for remotely controlled strip mining drones and defensive drones, additional mining laser mount points, and more. This would increase your income very quickly and allow you to mine in more dangerous areas for more valuable ores. On the other hand, you could start your own production company. Every base in the game has factories that you can rent. Feed the factory a blueprint and some ores and you're in buisness selling player-made ships, weapons, propulsion upgrades, et cetera. Yet again, you could be the guy making the blue prints and selling them to the highest bidder. Each base also has research labs that you can rent and conduct reasearch on new equipment and technology. After a certain amount of time and depending on your skills, a brand new never before seen blueprint pops out of the technology pool and into your greedy hands. And those are just the paper work career paths. In EVE you can make a career out of hunting down players for bounties, foraging into unknown territories and scavenging lost shipyards, transporting deliveries, shooting down larger baddies... The list goes on and on.

Enterprising players can bring all this under one roof and form a player-owned Corporation. Corporations of players could theoretically research, mine for, and produce all their own products and then have them transported all over the galaxy for sale. You then pay your players with dividends based on how much stock they own in the corporation. All these careers are just examples. It would take books to describe all the possible career options available in EVE.

Speaking of careers, your character is never locked into one career choice on creation in EVE. Each player must download the nescessary knowledge into his brain. This takes untold amounts of time but gets rid of the experience curve. No longer do you actually have to go out and do something. Instead, if you want to equip a particular weapon or upgrade to your ship or you wish to follow a specific career path, you just buy the starter skill pack from the Market and start yourself on the path to enlightenment. I've seen some pretty rediculous times in the game - as long as two days realtime to learn level five Gunnery for example. Fortunately, you can set a skill to learn and log off the game and it will still learn whilst you're logged off. Unfortunately, you cannot queue up skills and walk away from the game for a month and come back to a level 1,000 character (there are no levels!). However, the game does allow you the option to suspend learning on a skill and begin learning on another one in the meantime. You'll definitly need them to survive in the galaxy.

In EVE, space is big. No, I mean really big. There are over ten-thousand inhabited star systems in EVE, each with dozens planets, stations, asteroid belts and ship graveyards to explore. Don't worry though, there plenty of players to interact with the whole way. One of EVE's greatest achievements is the non-sharding of the player universe. In layman's terms, there are no separate servers in EVE - all the action takes place in a single galaxy with over fifteen-thousand players logged in at the same time. On the flip side, this means really long transportation times.

Travel in EVE consists of choosing a destination from the sea of stars in your map (or alternately from a variety of other sources like location bookmarks) and hitting the Autopilot button. Your ship will then warp to the first jumpgate in it's transportation path and make its way to the next star system in its route. It will then automatically warp through that star system to the next jumpgate and continue untouched until it reaches its destination star system. The longest trip I've made so far is to get to my new Corporation's HQ. Travel time in EVE is measured in jumps. Each jump takes approximately five minutes. Curiously, the actual traveling part is quite short, as it only takes about thirty seconds in warp to get from one end of the system to the other. The rest of the time is spent loading, approaching and docking with jumpgates, and entering and exiting warp. The trip to my HQ was twenty-one jumps. It took me about an hour and a half to get there!

EVE gives you plenty to do in the intermediate time span. You can browse the market, chat with your corporation, view and send EVEMail, and even view webpages all inside the game. As an aside, the game runs quite well in windowed mode, making it easy to set the autopilot and check your email or browse the web in Windows. In fact, the user interface in EVE gives you enough to do while you're warping around the galaxy that you might actually forget you're going somewhere. There's simply massive amounts of stuff in the game and most of it is accessible from the game's very comprehensive and functional UI. Reviewing your costs and expenditures, starting production, buying, selling and trading are all accomplishable from space at any time. This goes a long way toward alleviating some of the boredom involved with getting from A to B. Admittedly, the UI has a huge learning curve to it. Once you finally get the hang of it, you'll be amazed at how elegantly designed it is.

This game is absolutely gorgeous. From the warp effect, the bump mapped lighting on the asteroids while you mine, to the beautiful lens flares of the nearest star, EVE always does a fantastic job of giving you a pretty picture to look at. The game's sound is also top notch. EVE sports an enchanting trance sound track, appropriate weapon firing sounds and various interface clicks and whizzes.

As you might have gathered, there isn't a whole lot to actually playing the game. Most of what you'll actually do in EVE consists of clicking through menus to go somewhere, buy something, attack something, or moving around cargo. Really, this is a game about running your own little space company. Therefore, most of the game is managing the paper work that flows out of your various exploits in space.

Since I haven't been playing the game that long, there's really not a whole lot I have to say that's negative about the game except for it's slow pacing. Doing anything takes a lot of time in EVE. This is definitly not the game for armchair gamers. This is a game for the hardest of the hardcore who enjoy long and immersive play sessions. The greatest part is that you can try the game for $20 for the first month, complete with a free download (no store nescessary). For now, I'm giving the game a big thumbs up. I'll be sure to post a full review after I get some more time into the game. In the meantime, I have some more ore to mine, so if you'll excuse me...