Earth And Beyond

Earth and Beyond is an MMORPG based in a sci-fi universe. The player takes the part of a character in this universe, exploring, fighting and trading. In several ways, it’s reminiscent of elite, although with a much heavier RPG tint. I recently started playing it both because it was the first of the Elite style MMO games, and also to examine as I am currently working on a proposal for a MMO space game, and wanted to see how they have done things.

At the time of writing, the game is a month or so old, and I have been playing for a few weeks. No doubt over time many of my criticisms will be addressed, not because they are written here, but because the community will demand it.

There is a lot to recommend in EAB, but equally there is a lot they have done fairly badly.

Radar

It’s difficult to describe how to improve the “radar” system in EAB. It’s not that it’s close to excellent, needing a couple of tweaks, it’s that the whole thing is so bad, it needs ripping out and redoing. I suppose to clarify, EAB doesn’t really have any radar in any useful fashion, although it does have a feature that may claim to provide that function.

To me, the fundamental point of a radar is to allow the player to easily and accurately see the relative positions of nearby objects. Elite managed this more than 15 years ago, and a multitude of games since have performed similar heroics. EAB doesn’t. Not even close.

In EAB, there is no clear radar item. Instead, objects that are nearby but off the screen, are drawn as icons in the border around the play area. These are selectable, at which point the player receives extra information – a small image, any extra information etc. All reasonable so far. However, there are a number of problems.

You can’t tell where an object is by its position on the screen. Since the icons are positioned based on their direction relative to the camera (instead of a more traditional “top down” radar), there is no accurate positioning to be gained. For example - if an icon appears in the left border of the screen, it means that the object can be anywhere from just off the left of the viewing area, to almost directly behind you, but slightly to the left.

Since icons appear around the borders of the play area, you have to scan the entire screen, including borders, to try and spot potential threats (since icons only appear when objects are off screen, an object can also appear anywhere in the view window as well.

There is no indication of mob power on the icon. EAB seems to love placing lev 40 creatures very near a whole bunch of lev 5s. Since all you see around the screen are a bunch of little enemy icons, and selecting a whole bunch of them tells you that they are only low level, it’s easy to miss some ubermob which can kill you in a single shot. I would say that Westwood are trying to make exploring a little more nervy, by not supplying information as to the power of mobs, but selecting them give the player an exact level count, so adding a small coloured circle around the mob icon wouldn’t appear to cause too many problems.

Lack of Content

Westwood have performed admirably in terms of releasing a stable product. In the weeks of playing, I’ve experienced a couple of crashes to desktop, but no noteworthy bugs.

But all this stability has been achieved by losing out on content. In a different article, I talk about the future of MMO games, including what they need to do at release. Stability was one of the points, and seems to be the one that new MMO games are concentrating on. But to have stability but little content is another way to damage a newly launched product, and reading the message boards for both EAB and Asheron’s Call 2 seem to suggest that whilst stability may have been the problem for Anarchy Online and other games of that generation, content may be today’s bugbear.

There just isn’t enough to do in EAB, and what there is to do is just not interesting enough. At the moment, there are three main things to do in EAB. Fight, do trade runs, or do missions.

Fighting in EAB is much more similar to other online RPG’s than to other space games. To attack something, you select it and select the weapons to fire. You don’t have to dogfight, you can’t dodge and weave to try and avoid fire. As with most RPG’s, your chances of success depend upon your character, as opposed to you. However, it does make fighting less exciting. So fighting basically involves finding a group of mobs, and then pulling them one by one to kill. So just like camping in most MMO games.

Trade Runs are taking goods from one place to another. Since all the trade routes are static, there isn’t any skill involved, you just pilot from one place to another. Since you can warp, you just select your destination, hit warp, and then every couple of minutes select a new destination. There is so little involvement that you can actually just have EAB running in the background, and just ALT-TAB to it every now and then to make the next move. In fact, I tend to do trade runs whilst surfing the internet, writing e-mails, or watching TV. So not very inspiring.

Missions. Ah. Now we are getting somewhere! Well, we would be, but the missions…. Aren’t that exciting either. Missions come in 3 formats, Trading missions, which function exactly like trade runs (i.e. you can actually do them whilst not really playing), combat missions, which involve killing a bunch of mobs, and explore missions, which TBH I haven’t actually done, but reports tell me are not that inspiring.

And that’s about it.

I suppose you could argue that this is about the sum of most MMO games, but in games such as Everquest, you can go to interesting and exciting dungeons, and fight in carefully set up environments. In EAB you don’t seem to get any of that, and instead are just left with camping.

XP Gain

EAB is a MMORPG. As most players of this genre will know, a significant proportion of the play is based around getting xp, and getting new equipment. In an ideal world, this is gained whilst performing a large number of entertaining and interesting adventures.

In EAB, the fastest way (in my experience) of gaining xp is by doing trade runs and trade missions. Not a big problem, you might think, but if you look up a few paragraphs, you will see that you can actually do both these things WHILST RUNNING EAB AS A BACKGROUND TASK. Just think about this. The fastest way to improve your character is to do things that involve you clicking the mouse a couple of times every few minutes.

In games of this type, the fastest ways of doing well should involve MORE interaction, not less.

Static Trade Routes

I’ve been a bit scathing about trade routes in the game, which is strange, because trading has always been one of my favourite things in games. The reason for this is that the trade routes in the game (the routes one can do to make money) are completely static. There is no skill involved in trading whatsoever. You can sit there for days on end ferrying certain items between two space stations, racking up the xp, and the money, regardless of how many items you have delivered, and how many other people are doing the same routes.

To be interesting, the trading system NEEDS to be dynamic. Give me a trading computer. Let me know that Mars needs 300 war novels, and are willing to pay 500 creds each, or that Earth has a surplus of Tri-d video games and are selling them off cheap. Once that demand has been fulfilled, or the excess supply sold, that’s it! Not everything has to be one time orders – Net 7 may need 1000 news information items every hour for example, but making the markets more dynamic will reward those who pay closer attention, actually putting some decision making into the trading process.

XP Debt

As with most MMORPG games, dying has a penalty in EAB, and in the main, the EAB system is fairly decent. It does have a flaw though. I don’t think it’s enormous, but it is worth mentioning.

When you die in EAB, you get something called an XP debt. This debt is a number of xp you need to “pay” back. Whilst you have xp debt, half any xp gained goes to your character, and half goes to your xp debt. In addition, xp debt goes down over time, so if you have an enourmous amount of debt, you can still get rid of it. The problem is that the rate at which xp debt is reduced is greater whilst a character is logged on, than when the character is logged off. This might not seem like a bad idea, but all this means is that it is better to leave your character logged on when you go out for a few hours, than to log off, potentially causing lots of extra lag issues. This isn’t an issue at the moment, but I can see people doing this.

Player Made Equipment

I really like the basis for player made equipment in EAB. In order for a player to make something, they first have to analyse one in order to see how it is built. Only looted or shop bought items can be analysed, so knowing how to build a rare item can be a way in which traders excel themselves.

But there are a few issues which I think could be improved.

Quality. Shop bought items are 100%, looted varies somewhat, and player made goes up to 200%. The problem here is that 200% is so easy for players to make, it is all anyone ever asks for. Most players have 200% items for most slots, and therefore anything less is seen as “poor”. I think that very high quality items should be much harder to make, and therefore cherished more as a result.

Proliferation of the “best” stuff. This is something that is common to a lot of games with a complete crafting economy (indeed, player economies is something that will be covered in an upcoming article). When all objects are dropped from mobs, the amount of items coming into the game world can be controlled and altered to keep demand high, and make equipment much more varied. However, when objects can freely be made by players, using items bought in any number at vendors, what tends to happen is that masses of the best items are produced, and players are able to buy any of these items. This results in most people of the same level having very similar equipment, and devalues the process of hunting or questing to get newer weapons or devices.

Camera Changes

During the course of playing the game, you will find out that certain actions cause changes in the camera view, almost like a mini cut scene. When entering a space station, or warp gate, the camera angle switches to a more distant view, panning to show your ship docking. In some situations, this doesn't really make much of a difference, but sometimes it can be really annoying.

For example, when prospecting for minerals, completely depleting a mineral source causes the camera to move back and to one side whilst the minerals are dragged in. During this period, which can take 5 to 10 seconds, you are vulnerable - since the camera isn't behind the ship, navigation is awkward, and since the camera is panning, the radar icons around the edge of the screen move around an awful lot, making it difficult to keep track of approaching enemies. The change in camera doesn't provide any purpose - it doesn't even look that great, but it does provide an irritating and disorienting distraction at points.