A few months back, a friend of mine (Hi Andy!) introduced me to City of Heroes. It’s a fairly interesting game, though I find the concept of shards of the world being wholly independent a bit restricting. If there are people all around the world playing, I’d like to be able to interact with them – much like how MUDs are.

Browsing around the other day on Ars Technica, I hopped into the Gaming forum and browsed a few of the threads. One of them was about a game called EVE Online, and the concept seemed quite cool. It’s essentially Elite on 3D steroids and a much, much bigger universe. Even better, everyone is in the same universe at the same time – there’s ‘one’ server (in reality, a cluster of blades), and everyone is visible. Well, sort of visible. If you’re not in the same region, or even solar system, you won’t see the person (other than perhaps the Corp channel etc).

There are several preset character types, and a custom path. The only real difference is that the custom path lets you tweak the character more at the start – all characters can pretty much learn any skill there is, it just takes time. Lots of time. The game functions in real time, not a hyper-accelerated time frame, so things like learning skills actually work offline. You set a skill to be learnt, the game tells you ‘12 Hours’. 12 hours later, after you’ve had dinner, slept and showered, your character has learnt a new skill, all in the safety of a space station. Alternately, pick a 1 hour skill, and go gating around the universe trading in items, people, information or whatever you like.

MMORPG.com are offering free trials if you give them some information about yourself – 14 days to poke the game and see if it’s your thing.

I think it might be my new gaming addiction – the slow burn of the game means I can just log in every day or so to set a skill to be learnt (heck, one of my skills is at a level where it’ll take 26 days to get another level on it) and go on with life. When I have a few hours to play, I can run courier missions, or go fight pirates, or try to make a profit by travelling the trade routes.

Quite fun really – even on an older laptop (P4 1.7, 640 MB, GeForce 4 440).