#FF00AA

This post’s first paragraph suddenly made me realize why space combat is the ideal MMO settings (maybe it was already obvious to everyone, and maybe Eve Online masterfully leverages this, but I don’t care what everyone thinks, and Eve Online’s most major success is that it isn’t operated by a huge publisher that would close the servers down because it doesn’t have millions of subscribers).

The nice thing about space — everywhere except the Battlestar Galactica universe — is that you expect ships to have heat- or laser- or whatever-guided weapons that only require you to point to a target and click “fire,” and you also expect your targets to have shields that will deflect your blows more or less effectively. That is, space combat is the one place where life and death are solely governed by stats, just like any RPG fighting system. Unlike the worlds of orcs or barbarians.

I could insert here a rant about how I don’t believe that shields “deflate” like they do in Star Trek, with percentages of efficiency being chipped away one after another with each blow — in my opinion, a shield is powerful enough to protect the ship, or it isn’t; but if the first missile doesn’t traverse it, sending a million more identical to the first one shouldn’t change a thing — but the point here is not theoretical exactitude but common expectations. I’m annoyed when a sci-fi show has a computer voice counting down damage to the shields, but I wouldn’t really mind it in a game; it’s much better, at any rate, than seeing arbitrary numbers float on top of the boar you’re bashing in a traditional RPG.