One of the biggest parts of the new player experience in Eve Online is character creation, and I pretty much skipped right over it in my initial reviews!
So, to make you all happy (ok… to make myself happy!), I decided to go through character creation again, starting with step 1, choosing a race.
While I won’t bore you with detailed descriptions you can find elsewhere, the choices you have in Eve are Caldari, Minmatar, Gallente, and Amarr.
Basically:
Caldari are like a supra capitalistic society that will do anything for power and gain.
Minmatar are a more spiritual people who were enslaved by the Amarr for years, and have recently broken their bonds.
Gallente are like space faring Frenchmen – at least they look that way to me – and they’re similarly politically passionate democrats.
The Amarr are the oldest and largest empire in Eve, and are a deeply religious society. They were (and still are) the enslavers of the Minmatar people.
Each of these races has a detailed back story available in the race selection screen, including a really professionally done video which wraps them up in a nutshell. The vids also have the benefit of giving you an idea of what the ships generally look like – an important aspect for a lot of Eve players (I pretty much chose the Minmatar due to ship looks).
Eve races no longer affect your attributes. This is important because it means you can now choose solely on the role playing, or ship appearance, rather than “power gaming”, which means only choosing a race because they’re the best at missiles, or have the best trading stat line.
Race choice also effects where in the galaxy you start – each race starts near a large population center in high security space to break them into the game, but be aware if you want to play with a friend, you might want to both choose the same race, or be ready for a 20 jump route to meet up.
Here’s a few race selection screen shots from Eve:
Amarr Race Selection
Caldari Race Selection
Gallente Race Selection
Minmatar Race Selection
If you click any of the images you can read the short back story there, but the videos are really nice to watch. Unfortunately I don’t think I can get them onto this blog without some major hassles.
Tomorrow I’ll post about Step 2 – choosing a bloodline.
Until then, you can jump in and try Eve Online yourself for free for 14 days.
