Simply imagine you are piloting your space ship through space, on a search for fortune and fame. Perhaps you are in the process of working a trade route, transporting ore from a central mining area to a heavily industrialized planet in order to sell it at a huge fortune. Just as you are flying through the star system, your sensors pick up on something…it’s the pirates after you, and you sire off a few shots to keep them away.
One of them shouts out at you, “You must hand over your cargo or die.” Though you consider negotiating with them, but realize it’s of no use. However you fire off a missle salvo at the pirate closest to you, and he crumbles into dust. As you make a run back to planet, another two pirates open fire thus weakening your shields. Miraculously you duck into its protection just as your shields breaks up, barely escaping death and heading towards the biggest sale of your life.
Eve Online is one of the several MMORPGs that can be found on the internet. An MMORPG stands for a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. A MMORPG like Eve Online is unlike a number of computer games in that in a regular computer game, where you are the sole human player; as for all the other characters you relate with are simply computerized “bots.”
On the other hand in MMORPGs you’re interacting with other people who populate the world of the game. There are NPCs (Non Player Characters), who are just a part of the game, however for the most part you’re interacting with other people. For instance, the pirates in the Eve Online form the other people, at times on other parts of the world, linked through the Eve Online Server. If you receive messages, these are sent out by someone on the other end.
Although MMORPGs have been around for a long time (Everquest was definitely one of the most popular of all time), they are at present becoming increasingly more popular. Despite the fact the earliest MMORPGs were almost all fantasy based games that were full of wizards, warriors and dragons, many MMORPGs have split out. For instance, Eve Online is a futuristic, space-based combat and trading game, while The Sims Online is based on the popular Sims living and building game engine. A number of people are drawn to MMORPGs since they allow them to play an interesting computer game which enables them to interact with other people, keeping the player’s interest and avoiding the predictability that some games can lapse into. Eve Online and other similar games function much alike small worlds with their own leaders, heroes, crooks, followers, wars and politics thus making the fantasy worlds that much closer to reality.