Ambrocio Hanaya
Belmont Consortium
0
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Posted - 2013.01.30 18:05:00 -
[1] - Quote
As an Eve player it was interesting to hear the idea behind Dust 514. With it being integrated with the Eve universe and can have an adverse effect on industry and all that. Having now played the game a bit, I'll throw my 2 cents into the mix and see how it goes.
Played for the past few days. So still learning the ins and outs but anything remotely resembling Eve pretty much came as 2nd nature. Using the market to buy equipment, mods for your Suit, augmentations, etc. The only thing in this area I would like to see done better is way less AUR items. When you are looking for a new suit or weapon, you will find one you like and then notice it is only sold via AUR. Hate that. Almost makes the game feel like it is pay to play, with limited items to those who just want to play the game, gain ISK and buy everything that way. There are plenty of items to find though, so the selection is quite large. Except for Dropsuits it seems. Not much variation in those yet, or perhaps I haven't skilled up enough to even see the rest of what is available.
Dropsuits are pretty much designed like ships in Eve. They have low slots, mid slots, high slots, weapon slots, etc. They are also controlled by CPU and Powergrid ( quite odd actually ) so everything you add like shield extenders or shield rechargers or armor hardeners adds to the powergrid / CPU load. So you'll have to find a nice medium that is both functional but also makes the most out of your suit.
Then you have the way skills are used. Instead of like Eve, where everything is time based and it is always skilling up. In Dust 514 you are initially given like 500k skill points and you just " buy " the skills. They go up just like in Eve, with 5 levels each skill and as you level up you may unlock another skill to go " buy ". The tough thing about this structure is that you gain SP extremely slowly. Also, you run into a very poor design decision where you are only awarded 50SP each battle after so many battles per day. Essentially making it a pointless effort to spend time in a battle. Basically, after 10 battles or whatever you are doing it only for ISK and not for SP. You gain SP points over time, but it is a trickle, a very very slow trickle. For example's sake, skilling up to lv. 3 or 4 will cost about 150k SP. Winning a battle in skirmish mode grants about 2.5k SP, plus a little extra from a " potential booster ". So maybe lets say 5k for a battle won. Then 200k or so ISK. Then it drops to as I said before, 50SP each battle after a certain number each day. So if you do win 10 battles and get full SP, it will only amount to about 50k SP each day. Then a small trickle from the auto-SP and then the 50 per battle after that.
Essentially making the process of gaining SP in Eve a very slow process. It will take weeks just to get anything to lv. 5 if I'm not mistaken in this regard. Poor design decision indeed.
How about the battles? They are actually fun! It is a unique battle each time because you never know what type of skills the other guys will have on their side. If they have someone skilled up enough to send in heavy assault tanks and whatnot, your squad if unable to counter will have a much more difficult job on their hands. If they have a ton of high skilled armored soldiers, you will have a tough time on your hands. The list goes on. The quality of your enemy is defined not just by their point and shoot skills but also how much training they have done and their specialization. Making each battle unique.
Which is a wonderful thing considering there are only currently 2 game types. Skirmish ( find control points and take them over, then defend ) or Ambush ( essentially team deathmatch but each side has a limited number of clones available. So kill 80 opponents and your side wins ). While they get the job done, after just 2 days they have become repetitive already. Hopefully the live version of this game has many more modes to work with.
The worst thing about Eve is yes, the graphics. Holy moses. I never thought I would see such a horrible looking game on the PS3. My TV switches from 1080p to 740x480 x 60p for this game and there is still absolutely 0 AA, the textures are washed out and blocky as hell and it is all just a garbled, blocky, blurry mess. The design of things is good, and the environments from a distance look fine, but man, walk up close to anything and your greeted to a screen full of blocks. No AA blocks at that. How CCP could make a game coded this poorly is beyond me. Hopefully, they are just messing with us and the final product is 10x better. It will take 10x better for this game graphically to match anything out there currently. The only good thing is that you have 32 people on screen battling it out and it is lag free, so far.
Anyway. So far so good. It is an enjoyable game to play, just not to watch. Even my wife, a non-gamer to the extreme, stated how ugly the game was. Not good! |