I finally got my new cruiser last night – an Osprey.

Once again I had to make a trip to pick it up in my pod, but this one wasn’t nearly as scary.  I didn’t have to travel into anything lower than 0.8 and it was a relatively short journey.

The Osprey looks a little weird…  Reminds me of some kind of insect.  Terri says a scorpion, but I’m thinking more like a dragonfly since the back end doesn’t actually curl over.

I’ve barely got the skills to fly the thing, so it is a little sluggish.  You can definitely see the difference that skill makes when you hop into a brand new ship like that.  I doubt if I’ll bother training it up much though…  This Osprey is just a stepping stone, I’m aiming for a mining barge ultimately.

I’ve fitted my Osprey with three mining lasers, several cargo expanders, and several mining drones.  I’m now hauling nearly twice the ore that I could fit into my old Cormorant.  And the Osprey gets bonuses when using mining lasers, so I’m harvesting the stuff much faster.

I’ve decided not to try to do everything on the one character.  Instead, I’m going to get Olvel into a mining barge and train him with the sole purpose of making money.  He’ll mine, refine, and maybe do a little trading…but nothig more.  I’ll never use him for any kind of combat.

I’m going to roll up a new character to use for combat, and focus him almost entirely on piloting and weapon skills.

I used to play a game on the Macintosh called Escape Velocity.  It had kind of simple graphics…  Looked an awful lot like a shinier version of Asteroids.  Everything was viewed from a top-down perspective, you used the arrow keys to move around and the space-bar to shoot.  But the gameplay mechanics were a lot more interesting than a simple shooter.

You could buy different ships, and upgrade them.  Fit them with different weapons and gadgets.  You didn’t even really need to shoot anyone – you could make a living hauling cargo from oe place to another.  There were a few different factions you could side with…  A couple different storylines that you could run through…

I always wished it had multiplayer, and the graphics could have been better, but it truly was a spectacular game.  They’ve released a couple new versions over the years…  Including a new one that runs on the PC.  But it still doesn’t have multiplayer, and the graphics could still use some improvement.

Freelancer seemed like the perfect improvement on Escape Velocity – much shinier graphics and multiplayer.  But the gameplay was a lot more shallow.  You couldn’t take over a system and you couldn’t get any big ships.  You were basically stuck in fighter-sized stuff forever.

EVE Online is basically the game I always wanted to play, the game that both Freelancer and Escape Velocity fell short of.

It’s got shiny new graphics…  Lots of beautiful lights and shadows…  Cloudy nebula, blindingly bright stars, detailed ships…  All sorts of good stuff.

It’s also got more depth than I can really grasp.  You can fly around shooting people, or you can mine, or you can build things, or you an haul cargo around, or you can be a pirate, or a bounty hunter…  There are literally dozens of different ways to play the game.

You can build your own space stations.  You can purchase absolutely ginormous ships.  You’re playing with thousands of other people.  And there is a storyline to run through, and different factions you can join up with.  Or you can create your own faction.

It has, very literally, everything that both Escape Velocity and Freelancer were missing.

It’s about damn time!

There’s a teaser trailer that looks beautiful…  But then again, all of Blizzard’s cinematics look good.  And they usually have little impact on the gameplay itself.

But there’s also a 20 minute gameplay video that looks amazing.

Everything is 3D now, but there are still swarms of enemies on the screen.  The Barbarian looks absolutely badass.  The attacks look just plain brutal.  The environment is now more interactive…  You can topple walls onto your enemies and things like that.

They also show a new class – the Witchdoctor.  He looks fairly similar to the Necromancer from Diablo II…  Can summon some critters to fight for him, can cast spells.  He’s got a really nasty Locust Swarm that literally eats enemies alive.

It looks like you can finally choose your character’s gender too.

They only show two classes – the Barbarian and the Witchdoctor – so I’ve got no idea what else will make an appearance.  I sincerely hope they bring back Assassins though, that was one of my favorites.

They mention Battle.net, and show a party of four people playing, so there’s obviously some on-line multiplayer.  But they don’t mention how that is going to work.  I wonder if it will continue to be free…  Or if it’ll be ad-supported somehow…  Or if there’ll be a monthly fee, or microtransactions.  I wonder if there’ll still be a distinction between your single-player and multi-player characters.

I was thinking, last night, about rolling up a new character in EVE…  Whether there was any real point or not.

I’d like to have a second character trained more towards combat…  Pick some of the military backgrounds and stuff…  Train up some different skills, build myself more of a combat-oriented ship…

I can certainly do all that on my miner.  There’s nothing preventing me from training up some combat skills and taking him into battle.  But I don’t know if that’s wise.  After years of playing class-oriented MMOGs it seems completely wrong to play multiple roles on a single character.  It seems like I’d be taking a Priest out to tank Gruul or something.  Seems like there’s just something wrong with the idea.

But, given the training times, I’m not sure that it actually makes a whole lot of sense to do multiple characters like that in EVE.

There’s a terrific comic up on xkcd today…

Last night I didn’t spend too much time mining.  I made a few trips, to make sure I’d have enough cash for repairs/ammo/whatever…  But then I went off to run more missions for my agent with Lai Dai.  I got a few fairly easy missions…  One was kind of interesting, I had to rescue some rare birds from some eco terrorists.  But it was basically flying around and killing random pirates.

Eventually I was given the exact same mission that I had to drop the other night, the one that almost got me killed in my Bantam.

This time around it was much easier.  I was flying my new Cormorant and had it loaded out with four weapon turrets.  I was mowing down the little guys with no effort at all.  And the bigger guys with the rockets were barely scratching me.

I flew around blasting things for a while…  Killed pretty much everything…  And the mission still didn’t flag as finished.  Then I noticed that there was some “leader” guy who would eventually show up that I had to kill.  So I waited…and another batch of flunkies showed up…and I killed them…  And then another batch showed up…  But this group gave me some trouble.  One of them was fairly smart.

He kept out around 8 kilometers – well outside of my weapons range, but evidently close enough for him to shoot me.  He wasn’t doing enough damage to actually hurt me, and I couldn’t touch him at all.  I chased him around for a while…and then realized that the stasis tower in the area was keeping me from moving as quick as I should be.  So I destroyed the stasis tower…but it didn’t help much.  That guy was just plain faster than I was.

I had to warp back to the nearest station and pick up a rocket launcher, then warp back out to the encounter.  I was able to kill that guy easily with my rockets, and they made a very satisfying kaboom every time they hit him.

Eventually the leader showed up, and I was able to kill him without too much trouble.  But I was not able to kill everyone that showed up with him…  There were three of the stand-offish guys and their combined damage was more than I could deal with, given how long it took to kill one of them (my rocket launcher fires slow).  So I warped back to base and turned in the mission, and was paid quite well.

I have, for the moment, given up on getting an ORE mining barge.  It is just going to take too long.  There’s no way I’ll have all the skills trained up and the money available to buy the thing before my trial runs out.  And even if I did, I’d only be able to use it for half a day or so.  My new, slightly more realistic goal is to get into an Osprey.  They aren’t much bigger than my Cormorant, but they’re designed more for mining than combat.  There’s a bonus to mining lasers, and it has room for a few drones as well.  And it should only take three or four days to train up all the skills – so I might actually be able to get it done before the trial runs out.

I finally trained up all the skills necessary for my new ship, but the price changed on me.  I guess the whole dynamic supply/demand thing applies to just about everything in EVE.  When I first priced out Cormorants they were about 600,000 ISK…  Last night, when I tried to purchase one, they were going for 5,000,000 ISK at my station, and the cheapest one I could find was six jumps away in a 0.5 security system.

So I had to earn some money, and I didn’t feel like mining at the time, so I picked up some more missions from my agent.  Most of them were simple and straight-forward enough…  But the last one I got from her was absolutely brutal.  I nearly died, and wound up abandoning the mission and going back to mining.

They sent me out after some NPC pirates who were hanging out around a stargate somewhere.  When I showed up there were four pirates and some kind of space station type thing.  The space station didn’t seem to be attacking me, but I couldn’t really tell…  Three of the pirates were the same kind of standard-issue wimps that I’d been killing for a little while now…  But one of them had a missile launcher and was pounding me for lots of damage well beyond my weapons range.

I killed a couple of the little guys, then had to warp back to the station and repair my ship.  Then I went back out and was able to kill the remaining pirates.  The mission still wasn’t marked as complete though, so I started shooting at the space station looking thing.  I was damaging it…but very slowly…  It was like trying to chop down a tree with a herring.  And after a few minutes I noticed some red blips on my overview – more pirates coming to play.  And one of them was a missile ship again.  That’s when I gave up.  Ran back to the station and abandoned the mission.  My poor little Bantam just wasn’t up to the challenge.

So I went back to the School of Applied Knowledge and did some more mining.  I picked up a mining drone just to see how it worked…  But I don’t think it added all that much to my profits.  The Bantam only has room for the one drone, and the cargo hold isn’t that big, and I’ve been filling it quick enough with just two mining lasers.

And after an hour or so of mining I had plenty of money for my new Cormorant.  But the best price was still several jumps away in a bad neighborhood.  I didn’t want to fly my Bantam there, because then I’d have to leave it behind.  And I didn’t want to have to fly back there any time I wanted to use my Bantam.  So I left my ships behind and made the trip in my escape pod.

That was a very tense journey…  The escape pod moves pretty slowly and it has absolutely no room for weapons.  I kept expecting to get blasted by someone.  Each jump put me closer to my destination, but also further from safety.  The last few minutes as I warped through a 0.5 system were absolutely terrifying.  Sure, I had a clone…  And I haven’t been playing for long enough to even need to upgrade that clone…  But I still didn’t want to get killed.

I made it to the station, bought my ship, and then had to get back to safer territory.  And my shiny new Cormorant had no weapons at all.  I had to leave them behind when I came out in my escape pod.  So the trip back to the School of Applied Knowledge was even more tense than my trip out.  I was moving faster, and had more protection, but still no weapons.  And if I got killed now I’d lose my brand new ship.

But I didn’t get killed, and I made it back to the School of Applied Knowledge in one piece.

Now, the Cormorant isn’t really designed for mining – it’s a destroyer.  You’re supposed to load it up with guns and go kill things.  And I’m sure it would work pretty well on some of the missions my agent was handing out.  But it has 7 turret hardpoints and a bigger cargo hold than my Bantam, so I figured it ought to do a halfway-decent job at mining.

Despite the fact that I’m now mounting four mining lasers, instead of just two, it still seems to take just as long to fill up my cargo hold.  Part of that is because my cargo hold is larger.  Part of that is because the Bantam had bonuses to mining, and my Cormorant doesn’t.  But it certainly does work.  And I’m able to mount a few defensive weapons as well, in case I run into any trouble in the asteroid belts.

Eventually I’d love to get into an ORE Mining Barge…  But I don’t know if that is going to be possible.  It looks like it’ll take 9 or 10 days to train up everything I need in order to pilot one of them, and I’m not sure I’ve got enough time left on my trial.

Actually…  I’m thinking that at this point it may not make a whole lot of sense to spend a lot of time mining.  It’s a great way to make money, and has a certain appeal to it, but it isn’t the most exciting way to spend an evening.  And if I’m not going to be able to play anymore in a few weeks then all the money I make isn’t going to do me much good.  I may just devote some time to killing pirates over the next few days.