Looking for a decent online sci-fi game

megruder · Looking for a decent online sci-fi game

I started playing Guild Wars earlier this year, my first foray into mmo gaming. I've heard of Tabula Rasa and Eve, but wondered if anyone has played them and can comment on them. And/Or have any other suggestions?

Cullen

It kindof depends on a few things:

How much time you have to play the game
How much you care about things like graphics
How much you care about things like game community
How much you like pvp

All that being said, there simply just aren't that many scifi games to choose from with a decent population unfortunately. Probably the only ones that I could recommend as having enough people available to even play with would be Eve, Tabula Rasa, Anarchy Online or /maybe/ Star Wars Galaxies.

Warning Maties: Wall Of Text Ahoy!

Eve:
Eve is a great in-depth space simulator game. One of the main things that it's missing at the moment is the ability to get out of your ship and walk around and do things, but they're developing that into the game.
Eve is somewhat of a "sandbox" type game in that more or less everything in it has to be crafted by players, though there are npcs that you can do missions for. The real fun with Eve is in joining a player-created Corp (a guild) and playing with friends. It's basically a requirement to have fun, really get far in the game because once you get out of "high security areas" it's free-for-all PvP out there.
I personally love Eve. It's still the space simulator with the best graphics in my opinion. Just a beautiful game to look at. The skill-training system is awesome because it lets you "level up" even while you can't be online. This is kindof frustrating at first because it makes it seem difficult/impossible to catch up to older players, but if you visit the game forums there are plenty of templates to level up the basic skills so that you can at least be more or less as good in your specialized skills that you decide you want to focus on.
Again the key with this game is finding the right corp. With the right corp you'll have more fun than you can have in most any other game, without it you will be bored/ganked/wondering what the heck i was telling you when i said this game was fun.

Tabula Rasa:
This game gets unfair hype due to being the name of a BtVS episode. Basically though it's a fps-sortof type game. It's alright, but they released it a bit early with probably not enough content. I don't know I tried the game for the free month, and it just didn't seem to hold my interest much. I'm not sure if it's because the enemies were really repetitive, or there just wasn't enough of a game community or what really. I think it's just that the game world itself just felt a bit too dull and not fully realized, but I'm aware that these are kindof fuzzy opinion things.

Anarchy Online:
If there is one thing that Anarchy Online has going for it it's this: you can download and play the basic client for free for as long as you want. People who play just this are referred to in-game as fr00bs. heh. This can give you a basic idea of if you like the game so that you can decide if you want to buy it or not. I realize that a lot of the other games have 7-14 day free trials or something, but really with an MMO that's just not enough time to tell if you really like a game or not unless that game is just obviously very bad. So that much I really like about AO.
That being said, this is an older game, and it is showing its age as far as graphics go. I personally feel like the graphics it does have are pretty well done in that they fit the atmosphere of the game really well.
The one has a ton of depth to the gameplay/character customization so I recommend checking out the forums to figure everything out.

Star Wars Galaxies:
This last one is a bit controversial because a few years back Lucas Arts and SOE decided that they didn't have enough subscribers and basically completely overhauled the game that they had and made a completely new game. This basically voided all the work that their existing subscribers had put into the game, leaving many of them feeling betrayed, bitter, and understandably canceling their accounts.
So, that being said Star Wars Galaxies has a population problem and a reputation problem.
Recently though they've added back in some of the things that they took out in order to make the game less of a "sandbox" type game and more of your standard "levelling" game. So I think if you could find a server that had a decent population on it and a guild that is somewhat active, you could have fun with this game. Unfortunately with Warhammer and WotLK coming out soon, it's probably going to be difficult to find those things.
Basically with SWG you have potential... what's there is almost a really great game, that might still be playable, but it would be difficult to find people to play it with.

There are also plenty of less well-known scifi MMOs out there with more population problems than these, as well as plenty of them in development. I recommend checking out MMORPG.com to see which if any of those you are interested in. Be warned though MMORPG.com's forums are filled almost exclusively with

fanbois who will give you a glass half-full to overflowing analysis of their favorite game
bitchers and whiners who will rail and grumble about the game developers of a certain game like those devs didn't just put out a bad game but instead forcefully sodomized their wife, children and family dog.
illiterate children who post large walls of text like this that are only one sentence long and you can't even tell if they are in category a or b
some combination of a b and or c

So there ya go. Sci-fi MMOs...

megruder

Thank you so much Cullen. This was pretty much what I needed.

I'm not a big fan of pvp and the time I can commit is really inconsistent. One month I might be able to devote some really large amounts of time, but the next month might go by without me even double-clicking on the game's icon or turning on one of my consoles. Those are the sad months. So, that was the appeal of Guild Wars.

I started my free trial for Eve last night and I'm still working on the initial story-line missions. I agree with you that 14 days is not nearly long enough to really decide if a game is for you or not. Thanks for the suggestion about joining a corp. I usually avoid guilds and such, or only do it as a last resort, because I tend to like to the solo game. But, I'll give it a shot early than I typically do.

Thanks again!
megruder

Cullen

Excellent! Well my Eve charactername is Suzee. You should drop me an Eve-mail. Smile

Gayma

Stargate MMO is in the works too! : ) I am very eager to try that one. I loved the series.

Duran

Check this site, I used to search for games here all the time

Rusalka · EVE

I recommend EVE if you like the sci-fi type of game. Getting started can be kind of boring and a bit complicated to figure things out. Thus, joining a corp can be very helpful, folks are generally friendly about helping out noobs. I've been playing EVE for over a year and I haven't tired of it yet. There are times I just set a long skill train and take a break for a couple of weeks, but I always come back. A good corp is the foundation of having fun in EVE though. Without one, it can easily become a grind and rather boring. The major plus side for me is that you can PVP all you like if you are into it - but not at all practically unless you want to.

nekotine

:: EVE ::
granted, i only had the 14 day trial to try it out myself but y'know, i was pretty sure it wasn't my cup of tea after day 1. i'm kinda with Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation when i say 'okay, so i went to the trouble of making this human avatar...and now i'm NEVER going to actually see it?' i mean, i love making avatars. it's one of the reasons i loved City of Heroes/Villains so much. i could spend HOURS making up costumes and what-not. but to make something then never see it again just seems kinda...wtf?

i know a lot of people like this game but if you like something like GW, i would say it's not really for anyone who plays your typical 3rd person mmo. that being said, it's a very pretty game but it's not something i would recommend to someone unless they REALLY like spaceships but i figure there are better spaceship/mecha type games out there for them to play as well like Armored Core or the like.

:: Tabula Rasa ::
i wanted to like this game. i REALLY, REALLY did. but then they went and fubar'd it for me a short time before it went live. i should make the correction that TR is NOT an FPS. it tries to be an FPS and fails miserably. sure, you get to LOOK at things via an FPS point of view but unlike Hellgate London, no matter how hard you try to dodge whatever is being shot at you, the only way it will miss is if your stats allow it to. yes, you will be strafing for all you're worth but you see that laser beam cut corners like nobody's business to tag you in the ass because you don't have enough agility or whatever. if you can't tell, that's one of the things that REALLY, REALLY disappointed me.

along with that, they decided to bung up the ammunition by making SUBGENRES of ammunition when i felt it was perfectly fine to just keep things as they were: bullets, shells, rockets, energy cells, etc. of course, they did the whole subgenre thing because they decided to make enemies only impervious to XYZ type of strawberry jelly or what have you in order to kill them. don't get me wrong, i think all games should have some sort of system where ABC monster is more defended against strawberry jam but is weak to mint apple jelly jam but TR decided to make it just a bit ass harder than i wanted it to be, especially when ammo in the game (last i checked) we fairly obnoxiously priced. so while it'll have that WoW/GW/etc feel to it while being scifi, last i played there were just too many things that made it far less enjoyable to play in the end.

i did like the whole 'character cloning' thing that TR had though which made trying all the many jobs/classes you wanted to try a hell of a lot easier. basically, you would level your first character to a point where you could make a choice of what you wanted to be. i think the first choice is either Specialist, which is more of an engineer/medic route, or Soldier, which leads to your gun-toter or sniper/spy type of character. at that point, you can choose to make a clone of your character, allowing you to have a clean slate to try to be a Specialist rather than a Soldier. it's definitely something that appealed to the AltCharacter-itus habit i had but sadly, the bad outweighed the good.

so for me, there is no 'good' scifi MMO out there at the moment. we can see what they'll do with either the Stargate or Star Trek MMO, possibly the Firefly MMO if that's still in the works at all. until then, since they decided to make ShadowRun a PvP arena type game, we're all kinda SoL. :/

iFidget

OMG is anyone else looking forward to the star trek MMO omg I cant wa-. .. .. . .. . i mean... star trek? ... . thats the one with the light sticks right? *coughs*

Embarassed

phruits

You could always try Phantasy Star Universe or Phantasy Star Online (PSO Blue Burst). PSU has a monthly fee. Servers for PSO BB have shut down so there's this really popular private server that's okay. Both games have a single player mode to get a feel of the gameplay.

FallenRose

SWG is an awesome game. I've played it since it first came out.

Although...it use to be a lot better gameplay. Now you can roll a jedi. WTF! But, I still find myself hopelessly addicted.

Duran

Babycha

There are lots of light sticks at raves... LOTS!

Deja

URSwhizkid09

Deja

KiernanOClare