We enter the most progressive MMO in existence, and talk to the Icelandic renegades behind it

Over the past few years, Eve Online has become known as the MMO's land of opportunity. At least, it has to those who see Second Life as nothing more than a sticky conglomeration of garish shanty towns and pubic hair shops. It’s a place where you can commandeer fleets, drive viable enterprises into the ground, and assume control of entire star systems. More than any other videogame currently in existence, EVE offers a world in which your in-game exploits may well be talked about for years to come.

And so we find ourselves getting to grips with EVE’s exacting character-creation system. It comes on a little strong: a bit like your blind date starting the evening by asking if you have any prior criminal convictions, what your life goals are, and to which nursing home you sent your mother. Coming from MMOs where the most you’re asked is whether you’re (meaninglessly) good or evil, whether you like swords or spells, and what colour your skin is, it can be difficult to understand the in-game implications of, say, being a socialist dissident miner in a nation of corporate sharks and master-slave dynamics. Intimidating but exciting.

In the end, we choose Caldari belonging to the Deteis bloodline. The Caldari sound tough and businesslike, which is more or less the exact opposite of how we conduct ourselves in the real world. EVE’s astonishingly detailed face-creation tools carve out a visage that looks like the ill-begotten mutant child of Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke. We name him Luther Cassius, after Martin Luther, the charismatic founder of the Protestant church, and Cassius, the conniving prat who helped Brutus kill Caesar. It seems to encapsulate the balance of charm and subterfuge we’ll need to Be Somebody in EVE’s universe. We also think it makes us sound clever and literary – it doesn’t, though.

Our goal? Rule The World, or, failing that, Blow Up A Really Big Spaceship.

Until very recently, new players had to contend with a tutorial window that instantly appears upon being plonked into space. It does a fairly efficient job of outlining EVE’s basic features, but does little to convey the depth of the universe and player dynamics now laid before you. It’s hard not to feel like a goldfish in a tank of piranhas, but that may well be the whole point.

As we soar around an infinitesimal portion of EVE’s vast game world, shooting down several pirate vessels and indulging in the odd FedEx task – odd jobs that form the bulk of most MMOs’ content – it becomes obvious just how little of the game we’re actually witnessing. We are a cog, a spindly little newbie in a standardissue rookie ship keeping low-level station agents in business. We’re nobody, but in EVE you don’t stay nobody for long.

EVE Online was released by CCP Games in embryonic form in 2003. At that point, lead designer Noah Ward admits it was little more than “mining and building ships.” Six years later, on the eve of its tenth expansion, Apocrypha, things are radically different. “I mean, wow, we’ve done ten expansions since then,” Ward laughs. “Most everything else that’s in there now – the invention and reverseengineering, the alliance mechanics, so many classes of ships ... I mean, we’ve done all sorts of things.”

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