Going from one system to another involves a lot of waiting, with the player issuing commands to warp or dock at a station and then waiting for the ship to do it automatically. One of the main points of contention regarding EVE is the huge amount of downtime between activities. My first experience of combat was once again shooting at a station and being turned into scrap metal, and this time accidentally ramming my ship into an asteroid didn't work out so well. It feels as if the game is designed for a controller rather than mouse and keyboard, but I eventually found a control scheme that worked for me after playing around with the settings. The standard ship controls were clumsy and unintuitive with the mouse and keyboard, and most of the user interface has to be activated with strange keyboard sequences since the mouse is busy aiming my ship. Starting Elite: Dangerous for the first time was a surprisingly similar experience! There were tutorials for most areas of the game, but it still very much felt like being dropped in at the deep end. I spent weeks searching through the market for new ships and modules that looked interesting, asking my corpmates questions and reading up as much as possible about the game on various websites. I felt as if I'd just been dropped into the deep end and had to figure everything out for myself, but that was a big part of EVE's charm for me as I love figuring things out.
It wasn't long before I found myself in an asteroid belt carefully approaching a veldspar asteroid at 10% speed because nobody told me EVE had no collision damage. The user interface looked complicated as hell, and my first experience with combat was shooting a station and getting turned into scrap metal by the sentry guns. I recall my first few moments in EVE Online vividly: I was dumped into empty space with a rookie ship, a 10-minute tutorial, and a virtual slap on the backside. In this edition of EVE Evolved, I compare my experiences in Elite: Dangerous to my experiences in EVE Online and look at their differing strategies with regard to server model, active and passive gameplay, and the new player experience. Elite may not be a full-fledged MMO, but with a sandbox made of 400 billion procedurally generated stars and an open play mode that seamlessly merges players' games together, does it matter? And both also have that same intoxicating notion of exploring the unknown and try to make you feel like you're in a living world, but they take very different approaches to world design, content, and travel. Both feature customisable ship fittings, open-world PvP with a criminal justice system, and real financial loss on death, for example, but the end result is two very different gameplay styles. Now that Elite: Dangerous is finally here, I want to see whether it can scratch the same sandbox itch as EVE and to what extent the two games can be compared. I've watched EVE grow from a relatively unknown game with around 40,000 subscribers and laggy cruiser skirmishes into a vast game where thousands of players wage war for territory, profit, or just the adrenaline rush of PvP with something valuable on the line. A big part of what initially drew me to EVE Online was the prospect of playing the same kind of massive trading and space exploration game with other people, and for over 10 years it's scratched that sci-fi sandbox itch. In fact, CCP's recently released stats on the distribution of ages within the EVE community shows a peak around 29 years old, meaning that most players grew up in that same gaming era. Like many EVE Online players, I grew up playing early sci-fi games like Elite and its sequel Frontier.
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