December 2007 – Morphisat's Blog

Thoughts on Trinity

For the last week I have been playing a bit and my first thoughts on the Graphics Upgrade seems to be right, the new graphics dont really add much to the gameplay is probably geared towards new players and making a good impression on them. Though the Drone Parasites (the ones that use the Domi model) look awesome with their tentacles ;). The Drone changes are nice, they now attack in a group and it actually seems to work. Unfortunetely one of the things in the patchnotes, 100 new missions, was a bit of a disappointment. These all seem to be lower level and Mining Mission. The Level 4s so far all were the same as before.

Eve UI

Performance of the Eve client seems to be fine. Even when running two instances. Alt-Tabbing between them is pretty smooth with 2Gb of RAM. What isn’t fine though is the User Interface. The new feature that lets you detach the drone and (new) fleet windows in itself is nice, but where to put them ? And why not incorporate the Fleet Message window in the other fleet window ? I am just flying about with my alt (the whole convert to fleet bla bla thing is already cumbersome) and once the ‘fleet’ is setup I dont really care about these two windows. I ended up putting them on the left side above the chat window. You can’t let it sit where it used to be (down right) because it now also shows up while docked.

Then there is the drone window. Still not very handy to order your drones around, I am sure some UI expert could come up with some thing much better than the right click action menu. But where to put this window ? Tried first to put it upper right next to the overview, but that is ofcourse the space where your targets appear. Upper left wasn’t very practical, that’s where your current system info is, so it ended up under the target next to the overview, leaving my screen very cluttered.

All in all not very practical, and I pity the people that do not play Eve on a widescreen monitor. How do they handle all the various windows ? I am glad I got a 19″ widescreen monitor, even 1280×1024 would not be enough I think. CCP should have also invested some time / money in making the UI of Eve a lot better. This would also be nice for the new players that might want to check Eve out. What we have now, is shiny new graphics and a very cumbersome, outdated UI, that sort of works if you have been playing for a while, but is very hard to grasp if you just start out.

Links:
A Forum Thread suggesting a better UI from early 2007.
Blog about UI + screenshots

Eve Blog Links

Over at Hammer’s Eve blog, there is a nice guide for the experienced MMO player who wants to start in Eve. It looks very nice with screenshots etc. to ‘denoobify’ yourself quickly :).
http://hammer-eve.blogspot.com/2007/05/eve-for-wow-gamers.html
It’s from earlier this year, but still accurate. The tutorials ingame should be better now with the new expansion and they’re always improving. Yet Eve can be a harsh game if you’re new.
Keen and Graev are trying out Eve for the first time and you can read their experiences over at the Keen and Graev gaming blog.
The ancient gaming noob, gives his first impressions of the latest Expansion at his blog.

Trinity Deployed

Everything went smoothly for me (no boot.ini problems, I have my game on a separate hard drive :). I am a little surprised I still get frame rates of 70fps in space, with HDR on and normal shadow with low bloom.

Most ships look a lot better of course, though not as spectacular as in the trailers, but I am not too happy with the Caldari ships (‘cept the Manticore as you can see above). They look like big metallic blobs and when you’re in a somewhat darker system, the look like black flying blob. The raven is a lot more detailed but looks very boring and the CNR is even worse, it has a sort of camo green color now.
Most Amarr ships do look very nice though. The Apoc still has it’s golden glow. My Zealot somehow turned into a greenish shiny thing though. Was a bit weary to see the Gallente ships, but they turned out alright. The blueish tint could have been a bit darker but all in all very nice.

Not quite sure what I think of the Minmatar ships. They are much more detailed now, but they have also lost their ductape feel, which makes them loose their unique character somewhat.

I am wondering though whether this all makes the game more enjoyable. I think it’s more aimed to get more people in, it doesn’t really add much to Eve. And the improvement isn’t that spectacular that you want to play the game more or longer.

More thoughts on the patch / expansion later ;).