Lately I’ve been playing CCP‘s EVE Online. I’ve played a lot of MMOs in my time as may be evident by my previous posts ( no links to previous posts right now, but I might add the history later ), but never has the term “Massive” been so apt. EVE is huge. When they say that it has the world’s largest game universe, they aren’t kidding. Now I understand the concept of forced perspective, and scale, and the like, but they’ve got some things right in EVE that other games just haven’t quite mastered. Like planets.
Allow me to explain.
You are a person in a slightly-larger-than-person-sized pod. This pod is then injected into a ship, which is how you play in space. The starting ship is very large compared to your pod. Like comparing a person to a whale. Now, comparing the starting ship to a space station is like comparing a 5.5″ action figure to a blue whale.
I don’t think I can emphasize that scale enough.
Comparing the starting ship to a space station is like comparing a 5.5″ action figure to a blue whale.
There we go.
When you zoom out from your ship in front of a space station, you can actually reduce the view of your ship and the station itself to little specs of pixels on your monitor indistinguishable to the human eye. Seems pointless, right? Well, consider this.
When you do this, the planets in the background stay the same [expletive] size.
Because planets are [expletive] large. And space is bigger than that.
When you warp from one destination to another, as you approach a planet, it gets very big, very rapidly, and then stays in your plane of vision as you pass it, and stays that big for a while before you finally pass it, and then it gets smaller in the distance again. But even as you zoom through space, and adjust your magnification, stars don’t change size, planets don’t get bigger or smaller, but all the minuscule little man made crap that we think is massive changes.
Welcome to the total perspective vortex…
— Vid