This week I have been bored, bored, bored. Sins of a Solar Empire is everything I hoped it would be but it's such a big decision to decide to start such a long game where the rewards come thin and slow (rather than thick and fast) that I often end up admiring it from a distance instead of actually playing the thing.



For some reason I got it into my head that what I really wanted was an MMO. My history with these games is shaky at best. I enjoyed Earth and Beyond for a while and my flirtation with WoW got me to about level 45 but so far I haven't been the sort of person who can keep on playing the game indefinitely and still get something out of it.

First, I thought: 'Well, in that case try a free one.' I had a look around to try to find the free MMO that would annoy me the least and decided to try RF Online, so there began my quest.

RF Online



Oh, dear. If you've never played the tutorial of this, I thoroughly recommend downloading it and giving it a try because it's quite special. I suppose in a way, the amount of detail it goes into is admirable but on the other hand its tendency to explain the most basic concepts (like dragging a weapon into a weapon slot to equip it) in the most painfully slow detail, drove me mad. I had to turn it off in the end. I could just see that I wasn't going to get on with this game.

From past experience, I suspected I might have similar problems with other free stuff, so I decided to move into the realms of the commercial.

Warhammer Online



This game is like WoW. I enjoyed WoW while it lasted, so I should get somewhere with this. That was my idea, anyway, so in a fit of boredom I bought the thing.

Oh, dear. Whatever frame of mind enabled me to play WoW for 45 levels, I can't access it any more. The whole quest system bored me in the first hour and so many of the systems seem contrived to give me a game to play rather than immerse me in the world. But also, this game is ugly. That may not be the be-all-and-end-all but it mattered to me - it's difficult for me to get immersed in a world that just doesn't have any character. Also, it's frustrating to play a game that looks like it was made in 2004 but runs worse than CoD4 on my PC. The draw distances were particularly awful - what should have been the kind of sweeping vista I remember from WoW was instead a foggy mess.

In what was possibly an act of desperation, I turned to something I had tried and failed to enjoy about a year ago...

EVE Online

Last time I tried this, I got approximately halfway through the tutorial and quit out of sheer boredom (rather than out of exasperation, in the case of RF Online). You may be noticing a pattern by now of me not really giving things a chance. In my defense, though, MMOs are such a time-commitment that if I find myself bored by the tutorial, or the first hour, then I feel very little encouraged to put the time in that's required to 'get it'. Start with a bang, I say - I can always figure out the details later.

To cut the story short - my, my... how EVE has improved. The visuals are far more stunning, the interface easier, the tutorial and so many little things have made the game welcoming, despite its complexities. Before the game had a cold, clinical face. It said: 'Here's how to do a bunch of stuff. Get on with it. Oh - and try not to have too much fun.'



Now, the game chooses to provide a taster of the sort of things you might get up to with a couple of brief missions and offers up additional tuition for those who want to go deeper in. Everywhere you look there's easy to find help on any subject so that I left the tutorial knowing exactly what I wanted to do next instead of feeling like the tiniest of cogs in an inhuman machine.

I've even joined a corporation, Eve University, which promises to help me get on my feet in the universe. Normally one of my complaints about MMOs is something like: 'They'd be great, if it weren't for all the people.' On the other hand, my experience with EVE has so far been much better. The fact that within a day I've found a friendly bunch to hang out with who not only are fine with me being a n00b, but rely on it is promising indeed for the future.