It’s good but not comprehensive in the ways I had hoped, which he admits that when the credits roll. I really think the only mistake he made was focusing so heavily on the minutia of nullsec politics and spending a lot of time reading direct quotes that could have been summarized with the full quote displayed on screen for those interested to read. I liked the way they attempted to explain huge battles non-players may have heard of but never really grasped.
The majority of people watching something like this aren’t going to be eve players and I feel it was a mistake not to highlight incredible moments that impacted everyone, such as the goons/trigs blowing up the Jita - Amarr trade route, orgs like Red Frog (“Yes our delivery people are unionized in Eve Online” would have been funny.) and events like players assassinating certain NPCs (Amarr, movie star yachts, etc) or the player graveyard (Which I live near, and visit every week. Still moves me to tears to read some of these cans.) aren’t even mentioned. Such a missed opportunity for storytelling and highlighting the nature of a sandbox when buzzwords like “metaverse” and “emergent gameplay” are in vogue. All of these are true video game history moments like the assassination of Lord British.
With the way the video opened I expected a much bigger focus on player agency shaping the digital world and how things like space bushido are genuinely practiced (and often enforced) because of the concept of a single-shard server. Games like Overwatch famously struggle with “toxicity” because of the nature of “quick match” and never seeing the same people again, where as Eve - these people are often your neighbors and even the roaming pirate gangs in lowsec are familiar names to the locals.
Players being able to shape or impact the game world was the reason I grew disenfranchised with other games/MMOs, and I think a video essay like this only goes to prove my point. Our actions impact the world, Who would have ever thought your text chat from 20 years ago would be getting documented, read out loud, and discussed because your internet space ship blew up?
It’s just a shame to me that things like the zombie smartbomb exploit get so much coverage and paint the game in such a harsh light so early, when Eve truly bloomed into… well, it’s a gangly mess of tentacles more than a tree, but there’s still more to it than the roots. He mentions at one point skill injectors and the negative impact, but no mention of how you used to lose SP when your clone died. Also, the Prospector Pack is still for sale, it’s just cleverly hidden as an in-game offer instead of blatantly displayed on the store, and CCP was brazen enough to put the odd pay-to-win “standard” cerebral booster back on sale last week (20% damage boost for characters up to 35 days. Why does this exist again? And behind a cash price tag?) Dust died, yes, but as a console video game. It’s like saying Call of Duty 14 died. We’re on Call of Duty 30+ now. It was launched and supported, it just didn’t reach the Peter Molyneux levels of promise it was hyped with at the time. A console game has a fixed life expectancy just like the console it is tied to, and died right about on time, but what do I know? I just don’t think it “not doing well” was worth harping so much on.
Nitpicky perhaps, but overall a good vid. I binged it all the day it came out in true MMO player fashion.
