I tried. I really did. I tried on multiple occasions over the course of many years. And this time, I got very close- I got the most involved with the game than I had ever been. I learned more. I cared about the well-being of my corporation and the friends I had made in this game. I honestly thought I’d be playing for many, many more years. I had even gotten my wife into the game!

But let me tell you- if you’ve heard all the amazing stories of what this game could be: the epic wars, battles involving hundreds of players, millions of ISK lost in betrayals: those days are long gone. Much as people will say that we were born too late to explore the Earth, and too early to explore Space, we are all too late to explore the peak of what Eve: Online was. And maybe we’re still too early to experience what Eve: Online could one day be.

All that’s left, then, is the core gameplay. And the bad news: the core gameplay is dreadfully boring. And as I and all the friends I had made slowly started to realize this (including, eventually, our CEO), we started dropping out of the game one by one. We all had said our goodbyes to ship-spinning, staring at our screens, waiting in Discord for anything to happen, mind-numbing mission grinding, and mobile-game levels of predatory monetization. Darn.

But what do I mean when I say the gameplay is boring?

Well, let’s take traveling, for example. Traveling from one location in the galaxy to another takes a lot of time. To be honest, I think is a super cool aspect of the game and it’s part of what makes it so grand, and it facilitates the economy since items will have different prices in different parts of the galaxy. However, we’ve all played games where it can take a while to travel from one part of the map to another. In a game like Red Dead Redemption, for example, it’s a relaxing and zen experience just jumping on your horse and riding to a new location. There’s stuff to do on the way, and you’re engaged most of the time. Maybe a better example would be a game like American Truck Simulator (which is comparable seeing as how both games have you hauling stuff a great deal). In ATS, they managed to make simple traveling from one location to another a great time. And this makes sense since this is going to be a LOT of what you’ll be doing.

In Eve: Online, you right-click from gate to gate and wait as you watch your ship go through its warp animations. It is mind-numbing, tedious, and it will take out a sizeable amount of your time. The only decisions you’ll ever make are whether to jump through a gate because you think it might be getting camped, which only means your trip is going to take longer. Some of these trips could take up to half an hour at a time. The game also gives you the option to auto-pilot, so you don’t have to deal with the tedium that is clicking on a menu every 15-30 seconds. But, of course, the cost of this is that your trip will take CONSIDERABLY more time (which makes no sense… why would a computer be less accurate with its warps than a person)?

Waiting and staring at your screen is this game’s core mechanic. Let’s look at another example: mining. Again, think about any game where you enjoyed mining. Mining can be a pleasant and relaxing experience all on its own. In Eve: Online, you right-click on a rock and just… wait. Again. For ages. No option even for a more actively engaging version of mining. Just stare at a pretty laser or gas cloud harvester for 30 minutes until you fill up, dock, drop off your rocks and repeat.

At least mining manages to be the perfect activity to do if you want to play a game passively while you do something like homework… except, no. Because of course, this is Eve, and you can still get ganked at any time. If you’re in high sec, this is far less likely, but there are players whose very existence is dedicated to destroying AFK miners. And if you’re trying to mine somewhere else such as lowsec, nullsec, or a wormhole… well then you don’t even get to enjoy doing homework because you’re there spamming the directional scanner the whole time to make sure you won’t get randomly attacked.

I want to make it clear that I’m not criticizing the open PVP of this game. That part is brilliant, and I’ll always love it. What I’m criticizing is just how boring doing some of the most basic stuff in this game can be: stuff that you’ll likely be doing a lot of.

This review is going to go on forever if I go this deep into everything wrong with Eve: Online, so I’m just going to mention a few more things:

- Joining corporations in this game sucks. Thanks to the early exploits and betrayals of players from a bygone age, trying to join a fun corporation can feel like applying for a real-life job. And many of these corporations still use old annoying third-party software like Mumble or Teamspeak, along with their own personal websites.

- The PvE missions in this game are extremely grindy and very boring. The industry missions literally just have you hauling stuff or mining stuff for NPCs, and we’ve already discussed how mind-numbing those activities can be. But even the combat missions were extremely dull. A friend and I tried to grind reputation so we could do any Epic Arc in null sec, and by the time we finally got the reputation we needed, we were ready to smack our heads into our computer screens just to feel something again. It might have helped if we could properly “party up” in the missions. We were doing them together, but we still had our own separate missions and the rewards had to be split 50/50 which means doing them together didn’t make the missions go any faster and didn’t make them any more excited because the missions don’t scale with the number of players.

- The experience in this game is gained in real-time, even when you’re offline. I always thought this was a cool mechanic, but it does mean you’re going to feel useless as a new player for a LONG time. So much of the early game will be focused on all the many things you can’t do. Naturally, there is a solution to this, in a game that already costs $20 a month for a premium subscription: buy more skill points to speed up your development. This makes the game feel like a straight-up mobile experience that you’re paying a premium for to play in the first place.

I’m getting tired of writing, so I’m just going to list a couple of things I still like about Eve: Online. Exploration is still fun, but it’s very lonely. I wish other activities had as much effort put effort into them as the scanning, but even that does begin to feel samey and boring after a while. I also still love the core ideas of Eve: Online- the completely open and free trade/economy, and the open PVP. Also, the game’s pretty, which is impressive given how old it is now.

People will often say that Eve: Online is only as fun as you make it. Well, I tried. I went out looking for more exciting things to do beyond mining and hauling. I tried PvE, PvP, Epic Arcs, and more. And no matter what the activity, they all gave me a very similar feeling: that is, I always felt like I was just waiting around for something more interesting to happen, and maybe sometime cooler could happen if I only had more skill points. And even though there were some fun and exciting moments, they weren’t even close to worth the amount of time and boredom I had endured to reach them.

I honestly don’t believe any number of updates could make Eve: Online a fun game nowadays. This game needs a fundamental rework of many of its core mechanics. What we need is the future that we are here too early to explore, Eve: Online 2, which could maybe take notes from other games that have managed to make traveling in spaceships fun, mining space rocks fun, and doing PvE missions with your friend’s fun, and so on. Until then, Eve: Online will remain an excellent MMO, but a mediocre game.

(Written during Version 21.02)