I'm a little surprised no one's mentioned this game yet as a possible alternative to CoH. I've had free accounts with WoW, Aion, LotR, STO, CO, and SWtoR, but never could keep my interest in any of them. I'd played a trial of EVE about five years ago because I liked the pure science fiction setting, but it was tough to figure out what to do because it was so drastically different from a traditional MMO. I decided to check it out again because the levelless design now intrigues me, there have been significant upgrades for contact missions, and who wouldn't want to be captain of their own spaceship?! (I've also been trying TSW because of the levelless design, but EVE is a lot friendlier to my computer. I don't think I'll be able to seriously get into TSW until I get a new rig, but I really dig that game's ambience.)
The original game intro video (no longer used):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjbwsyhJjUsCurrent pilot training video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI4VkO6qr0UThe character creator had also undergone a complete rewrite since I'd last played, and you now get to create a full-body avatar rather than just a bust, though most of the customization is still available just for your head and face. The only "avatar" other people will interact with is what ship you currently happen to be flying, but you do actually get to interact with it while you're docked in your captain's quarters.
PROS:- As mentioned, as in TSW, there are no distinct levels to train. Rather, you develop ranks in individual skills that affect how well your ships perform or how you interact with other players and contacts. You can purchase individual skill books on the market or get them as mission rewards. There are over 400 different skills you can learn (each with five ranks for better bonuses), allowing for extreme flexibility in how you develop your character's strengths.
- Training happens in real time, even while you're logged out of the game. There's a community-developed monitoring program you can download to keep track of your characters' training queues, progression plans, market status, and other info. (Think HeroStats, but directly linked to your account and useable offline.) If you've got space in your queue, you're wasting time, so you should always be training some skill. (This has been really nice for me over the last couple months. As I've been tied up with RL and PWiki documenting stuff, I can monitor my progress and log in when needing to update my queue.)
- There are certificates you can earn upon training skills to certain ranks (similar to books in TSW). The certs don't do anything specific on their own, but they do indicate that you've reached a certain level of competence and some are required for unlocking access to ships and equipment.
- Speaking of that, there's an incredible amount of customization you can do with your ships, depending on the role you want them to have. EVE is basically a min-maxers dream when it comes to calculating how much of a bonus you can eke out by increasing equipment or skills. The role you perform when solo or teamed is primarily determined by what ship you're flying.
- The game "world" is huge, as in an entire galaxy, complete with stars, planets, asteroid belts, space stations, and more. Each star system is basically its own zone with its own local chat channel. There are regularly 20-40,000 players online at any given time on the single server shard.
- Depending on how involved you want to get, you can join corporations and alliances (EVE's equivalent of supergroups and coalitions), or join hundreds of other players in epic fleet battles. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDVEHE10nHc)
CONS:- You can only have three characters per account. However, because everyone has access to all skills, given enough time and ISK (Eve's inf), you don't need a lot of different characters slots.
- High-end character builds can take a looong time to train (read: years). Some of the tertiary skills I'm learning now for core certificates take over a week to train from level 4-5, and I saw someone mention in chat that their next skill level would take 31 days. You can get boosters that increase each of your five attributes, thus reducing the needed training time, but be prepared for a long haul.
- Although the revamped player tutorial makes it much easier to learn the ropes than it used to be, there's still an overwhelming sense of drowning in all the options you have in deciding your career path.
- The game world is huge and, as you might expect in the real universe, there's a lot of empty space where you won't meet anyone. Travel between systems follows pre-set paths and can take a while to get to your destination. (Auto-pilot helps, but is slower.) With so many possible destination systems, there's not one place (that I've seen so far) where a majority of players congregate.
- PvP can be a big part of this game, primarily if your corporation decides to go to war against other corporations. You also have people who thrive on ganking you, especially in low-security systems, and some of them have equipment that perma-holds your ship so you can't escape. Watch your scanners.
These are just some of my observations so far. I don't have any thoughts on the finer points of the game yet, as I'm still trying to determine what area(s) I want to focus on, learn different ship designs and roles, and haven't spent any time teaming with anyone. But the game now seems interesting enough for me to stick around at least for a little while.
Edit: A couple nicely-informative reviews can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Eve-Online-Commissioned-Officer-Edition-Pc/dp/B003VJID7E/