The Not-So-Vastness of Space in EVE
One of the paradoxes of EVE is how ridiculously vast it is - see the colored galaxy map below, each dot being an entire star system with moons, outposts, asteroid belts, and from zero to thousands of players - yet how unbelievably small it can be in practice.
By MMO standards, the place is enormous. You can career out in EVE without ever leaving a relatively small section of space, given the depth of content and geography in every star system. I generally have, over time, ended up mostly in Amarr space and the Tash-Murkon and Domain regions (mid-southwest on that map) and those could provide me with a lifetime of gaming fun if I so chose. I so happen to have “lived” in a dozen or so other regions in all four corners of the galaxy, and that alone illustrates why this is a paradox:
By game design, EVE really is a small place. Thanks to interplanetary warp drives and interstellar warp gates you can traverse dozens (or more?) star systems in less than an hour. You can, in effect, crisscross the map of the entire galaxy in an afternoon. This leads to some weird gameplay effects that really stretch the “realism” of the experience - massive “roaming gangs” of ships who randomly decided out of boredom or ambition to go kill some other folks on the other side of the galaxy, and yet be home before the six-pack runs out. Or, for example, the massive economic focus on one star system, Jita. These wouldn’t be possible without the hyper-efficient means of interstellar travel built into the game.
While convenient, it really highlights the one thing that I love in good space games and yet fled from me after a couple weeks of playing EVE - the awe-inspiring vastness of space.
Playing Freelancer a few years back, I got some of that. The core, safer systems had travel means similar to EVE and you could almost get around as fast. But the outer systems required you to mosey along outside of travel lanes at a relative snails pace. When you were out there, the time, distance, and mixture of great atmospheric graphics just screamed “damn, this place is eerily big”.
In EVE, that feeling is definitely there when you first try it - early missions may have you go one or two jumps from home, which seem like a big deal especially when you fire up the galaxy map and see the thousands of star systems that await you later on. But play for a bit, and you realize that running a few hundred or thousand light years, sprinting through 2-3 dozen star systems on the way to a trade hub is the in-game equivalent of running to the corner store to buy some milk - albeit in a particular nasty part of town.
I miss the empty, chilling, awe-inspiring vastness of space in EVE.
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