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.

I have, for many years now, been telling Terri that I wish I could be a pirate.

No, not a modern-day literal pirate…  Not the kind of pirate that illegaly distributes copyrighted materials.  Not the kind of pirate they’ve got boarding ships and killing people on modern shipping lanes.  No…  I want to be the kind of swashbuckling do-gooder pirate that Hollywood made up.  Someone like Jack Sparrow, or Han Solo.

I’ve always enjoyed a certain type of movie, game, or book…  The kind of setting where there aren’t a whole lot of rules and the protagonist is making their way largely on their own.  Movies where you can hop aboard your space ship, or horse, or boat and ride off into the sunset.  Movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, and the Star Wars movies.  Games like Freelancer, or Edge of Chaos.

It annoys me that in the real world it is basically impossible to make a living off literally the sweat of your own brow.  It annoys me that in the real world just about everything is already owned by somebody.  It annoys me that in the real world there is very little that is unexplored or undiscovered.

If I were to just pick a random direction and start walking…  Off into the woods, over the hills, across a river, up a mountain…  I’d be trespassing.  Somebody owns that land.  Maybe a private individual, maybe a business, maybe the government…  But somebody already owns it, and I could get in trouble for tresspassing.

If I were to start chopping down trees to sell firewood, or digging in the ground looking for gold, or trapping critters to sell the meat/fur/whatever I’d be breaking the law.  Not only would I be trespassing on somebody else’s land, but I’d be hunting out of season or breaking environmental protection laws.

If I were to start building a house or shack of some sort I could get in trouble for that, too.  Again, it’s not my land…  But everything you build has to be up to code, and you need permits for it all.

And there’s a real appeal to the idea of living outside the lines.  Of being able to carve out your own existance somewhere in the wilderness.  Of being able to basically go where you want to, do what you want to.  Of not having to show up to work on time to get a paycheck.

That’s one of the things I really enjoy about William Gibson’s stories…  He presents a near-future cyberspace as a kind of new Wild West.  Full of opportunity, freedom, and danger.

And EVE Online captures this feeling very, very well.

You’ve got your ship and you’re basically free to do whatever you want.  You can mine minerals, you can build stuff, you can go out and PvP, you can even become a pirate.  There’s really nothing preventing you from doing that, except your own ability to survive against the automated police force…

There’s a real sense of living on the edge.  Of there being very little between you and pure chaos.  There’s the feeling that you can really discover new and unexplored territory.  That you can carve out your own place in the universe.

And I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.

Sure, I haven’t done a whole lot of consequence so far.  I’ve been doing a lot of mining, done some training, bought a couple ships…  But I haven’t gone out and done battle with hardly anyone.  I haven’t been fighting back the pirate menace or rebelling against the system, I’ve just kind of been earning a living.

But the setting is absolutely terrific.  It feels so open and full of possibilities.

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.