20 Years Later, EVE Online is Still Ahead of its Time

ign.com:

In recent conversations with fellow MMO fanatics, we always seem to come around to lamenting how the genre has reached something of an evolutionary dead end in the mainstream. With World of Warcraft leading the way to nowhere, the style of the developer-curated world we often refer to as a "theme park"-style game has struggled to do anything truly new since Blizzard's powerhouse came to dominate the scene in 2004. It's an entrenched set of conventions that rely on heavy phasing and instancing, limiting how much a massively multiplayer online game can take advantage of being, well, massive, multiplayer, and online.

But before Azeroth opened its gates, a spreadsheet-laden spaceship game from a small studio in Iceland went all-in on the idea of a player-driven sandbox and never looked back. Two decades later, that game – EVE Online – is still ahead of its time.

"Before there were petrol cars, there were electric cars," CCP's CEO Hilmar Pétursson told me back in April. "The first cars were all electric. Then someone had the idea of making them run on petrol and kind of killed the electric car. But the electric car came back again. There are many examples like this in human history, where some tracer bullet takes off, but it's so ahead of its time that it takes many years to be adopted by others. And I think EVE is like that."

That may sound like an almost arrogant thing to say, but from where I'm standing, as someone who has played dozens of MMOs for what must be tens of thousands of hours since the early 2000s, I think he's absolutely right. They have earned the right to say it, as EVE Online more or less stands alone in its trailblazing vision of a vast universe built on human interactions, not pre-built content. And its