A while back I was trolling the intertoobs for a new game when I stumbled across Perpetuum Online; A Hungarian borne MMO based in the distant future on a far away planet where the avatars are Mech based as are the mobs with a large skill based PVE and PVP system.. Booya! It sounded great!
So when it came out the other day, I was one of the first to sign up. And I have to say I’m having a good time with it, but I’m getting ahead of myself..
Now I want to give a fair description of the game, and I want to do my best to review it for its own merits, but its going to be really hard for me not to point out the similarities with Eve Online.
That is to say, its really similar in a lot of ways.. You could sum up a lot of the game by saying; Eve Online has space ships.. Perpetuum Online has mechs.. And you’d get a pretty fair idea of how Perpetuum works.
But so far it doesn’t have some of the issues Eve has..
Firstly, the UI. Eve Online has been notorious for having a dreadful user interface. Everything is a right click and nesty in sub-menus which sucks, people have gone so far as to call it “right click online”.. They went more of a “windows” route in Perpetuum which I wholey support. Each tool you open, opens in its own viewlet within the interface that you can move and customize as you see fit. My only complaint is that they probably should have had a bunch of defaults for the windows when opened and they should better track previous locations when opened..etc.. As it stands now all newly opened windows tend to tile, or open center screen.. Minor complaints and things that will likely come out in the wash over time.
Secondly and quite possibly the most important difference is that they have simplified the game in some ways. It doesn’t seem to have that death steep learning curve that Eve Online has.. Plus, Perpetuum has a fairly robust help system and the help channel is actually helpful as opposed to constant spam and nonstop egregious asshatery that you often find in the Eve help channel.
I also really like the fact that they are paying more attention to the PVE aspect of the game. Eve online had some meager PVE grafted on but it was horrible, boring and kinda pointless. You could grind faction in Eve but it really served little to no purpose.. In Perpetuum there is a much larger PVE element to the game, and faction means something. I hope they go so far as to add PVE bosses ala some of the fantasy games out there. I like that there is PVP, but all PVP all the time is made of fail.
Something else that appeals to me is that this game is being developed by a very small group of folks by an independant developer and I want them to succeed. The dev team is a group of like 5 guys in their garage.. Okay it may be a few more and they probably aren’t stuck in a garage, but you get the idea.. Something appeals to me about a small independent team as opposed to a huge corporate group with \(\) as their only goal.. (that’s not to say that a small group isn’t also concerned about profits, but they usually are more open to game changing things..)
There are a lot of things that still need to be done and the devs are fully aware of that. But it’s a damn good start..
I really like that I am coming to in fresh from the very beginning and can expand as the game expands. I wonder what the game will be like in a year when new players show up and everyone else out classes the new player 10 fold.
In Eve that was a bit of a problem, but was solved by making small new player ships still somewhat competitive against the bigger ships so you could still play and not be completely out matched. Since there are nothing but small ships in Perpetuum as of yet, I am hoping they took this approach too. It would be bad if after a year new players show up and just repreatedly trounced.. There is no velocity or angle of attack defenses in Perpetuum, so a small bot can’t “speed tank” a big one.. Not sure how they will handle that..
Also right now the economy is completely broken.. Prices are out of whack and I’m making money faster than should be possible, but thats because I’m exploiting the market while it stabilizes.. This same thing happened at the beginning of Eve.. But as an old Eve player I understand how the market works and can make the best of it.. heh.. yay me..
All in all its a good game.. its fun.. it’s an open world sandbox that allows you to do whatever you want ala’ Eve Online, but with mechs.. How cool is that?
