The new player experience in EVE is a fantastic thing and I heartily recommend playing it through to everyone, old farts included. Why is that, you may ask? Well, I remember starting as a new player was an awkward thing in 2009 and until I began my hiatus in 2014 that didn’t really change. Yes, there were career agents (sort of) but they soon handed you over to the first Level 1 agents of your choosing or said something about a story arc waiting somewhere. And that was it more or less.
You know the song “Into The Great Wide Open”? Yeah, it was the unofficial EVE Intro Anthem for new players and had memes already been a thing then you’d see Tom Petty all over the place laughing at all the Velators and Ibises from Oimmo to Orvolle. You were left with an ungrateful universe and not a clue about what to do.
Not so in 2023 and apparently it all started in September 2021 with a thing called “AIR NPE”. That's the Association for Interdisciplinary Research - New Player Experience. The AIR is the in-game agency that somehow seems to introduce new infomorphs (that’s you!) to the universe after your cultivation process in a fluid tank was finished. As is common with a number of CCP’s game mechanics they introduce them all via an in-game entity and towards the lore background so it all kind of makes sense to you and you know your place and where you came from. I like it.
This AIR project conveniently starts with putting you in danger, a feeling you will often have in the game. After being blown out of a space station you’ll find yourself in a number of — no spoilers here! — interesting situations in which you will have to follow a set of orders that also smoothly introduce you to the various overviews and ship commands.
It’s important to stress here that the NPE takes it slowly. EVE can be a bit of an UI overload and CCP apparently took great care not to “UI-frustrate” new players. A wise choice and through a chain of space encounters they show you the ropes on how to navigate through the New Eden star cluster.
Here it will be burned into you that EVE is not a cockpit dogfighting game but rather a tactical simulator in which you’ll need a good grasp of your environment, a decent deal of spatial awareness and a lot of ‘cool’ to stay alive when things go south.
When your ‘cool’ has served you well, you are then brought to a nearby space station and referenced as a ‘potential asset’ to a guy/gal who is called a Career Agent. Here the real fun starts: In essence you are offered a choice of up to four career paths, Explorer, Industrialist (which basically has two acts), Enforcer and Soldier Of Fortune. In each path you will find ten tasks or assignments you need to finish. Each task in turn has a number of milestones not unlike those from other MMOs like killing a rising number of pirates, first 5 then 10, 25 etc.
Again, the trend is to take it slowly and wrap it all up in a background story you can always come back to and also later expand upon in future story missions and whole story arcs. But we’ll get to that later…
The career paths are all very detailed (for a new player experience) and teach you even more of the necessary mechanics to judge what you’re going to do in the game and also how to stay alive while doing it. I heartily recommend doing ALL the career paths and if I was asked I’d say start with Exploration, because it shows you a couple of things you can later use to find more lucrative locations while out and about.
Let it be said that you get rewards for literally everything you do here, from interstellar kredits (ISK) to modules to ships. In the industrial career you even get your first hauler to haul all the stuff away you receive. It all adds up and makes for a very fresh experience.
Not only that but if you complete all career paths, which isn’t that hard, there are 350,000 skill points waiting for you along with tons of ships, modules and ship skins for your colourful entry into this equally colourful game.
The NPE through the Soldier Of Fortune career also brings you into contact with ship modules typically used in player versus player environments like Webbers and Warp Disruptors. I never knew there actually was a Civilian Warp Disruptor module. Funny, how is warp disrupting someone else civil? Well, it’s for science I think…
But CCP’s direction is clear on this and it falls in line with the revamp of Factional Warfare, the recent Shadow War campaign, the Edencom-Triglavian theater and the realignment of certain Sov mechanics. They not only want new players but they also want them to push them into conflict with others — which, well, ultimately is what this game is all about.
At the end of the day, if you think it through from beginning to end the NPE also acts as a strong potential magnet drawing players into their first lowsec or nullsec engagements. It’s still quite a step from these systems to the bigger player driven alliances, because as a new player you can’t really judge what they offer and how to get in touch with them —or if you should even try with your 2-days-old newbie char. I mean, what can you possibly offer them that they haven’t already got, right?
Wrong. Player alliances are ALWAYS interested in new players and I guess that’s the reason you often see recruiters from these alliances posting their advertisements in starter system local chats like Uitra or Akiainavas.
Well, at least Shadow Ultimatum does so and if recent events in the North are an indicator there’s more than enough situations where your knowledge of a warp disruptor will come in handy — or of an interdiction nullifier — or the fact that a Venture mining frigate can cyno in a horde of Black Ops battleships eager to ruin your day.
After all, EVE is EVE...
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