Eve Online: Exodus was my first chance to play
Eve Online, and as such, I wasn’t completely sure what to expect. One disappointment was that it
wasn’t the game to test out my new flight stick with. Well, that was my first thought anyway, as
Eve Online doesn’t support flight stick control. I was quite pleased to discover that Saitek’s
Cyborg EVO Wireless can be mapped to keyboard controls, and with the new hot-key control allowed in
Eve Online: Exodus, I can configure my button cluster to control the launching of my weapons, my hat-switch to pull up my map and allow for navigation, and map the stick’s X and Y axes to the mouse X and Y axes. All-in-all, it allows me to have pretty good control with my flight stick. (While this is less reviewing
Eve Online: Exodus, I feel certain that there are
Eve players that will appreciate the info.)
So, what can you do in Eve Online: Exodus? You have a universe of choices -- you can start your own mining operation (which is important when you consider that items in the game are player-manufactured), you can go on specific missions for Corporation “Agents” (NPCs that assign missions), you can hunt down pirates in the depths of space, or for that matter, become one yourself and prey on others in low security areas.
There’s a lot to do, although it might take a bit of poking around to figure some of it out. Luckily, you can interact with other pilots, who are typically ready to lend a hand with a piece of advice here or there. But the social aspects of Eve Online: Exodus go way beyond that. You can form (or join existing) corporations which can have their own agendas, wage war against other corporations, and, new for Exodus, you can buy and build Player Owned Starbases (POS). These Player Owned structures are similar to stations, but are movable. Now, more than ever, you really feel like you can make a major difference in the world of Eve.
There are lots of interesting manners of interaction with other players, from joining corporations to forming gangs, which allows for following each other through warps and locating each other when separated.
For those who prefer to play missions, there are new multi-level arenas called “Complexes” (formerly known as dungeons), which offer a story with a bit more depth than some of the Agent’s missions.
Other improvements and upgrades heralded by Eve Online: Exodus include: new environments such as planetary rings, ice fields, comets, orbital asteroids, and new planetary effects, a formal contract system for trade agreements and assassinations (along with extensions to the existing courier and escrow systems), alliances, enhanced aggression system (for determining criminal and contraband items), improvements to the market, an updated in-game browser, new ships, mining improvements, improvement of ease of control for corporations, a new War Declaration and Rules, new agent functionality, new NPC types with ultra-rare loot and very high bounties, mining operations and rogue drones, a system for Fleet Command and tactical view, and the ever-so-useful calculator and notepad tools in the taskbar.
