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Yawn

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 30 / 44
Date: September 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Based on play in various incarnations of the Beta, this game is not as strong as the best online RPGs (role-playing games) today. Your choice of characters is weak (only 6 different types), your initial outfit is what you'll wear for the rest of your life, and similar your spaceship is similarly limited in appearance. Goodbye to showing off your latest cool stuff.

Aside from buying and selling in space stations, you spend the entire game flying around the galaxy along wrap-drive "highways," maybe fighting something there, and perhaps doing a class-special activity. Explorers get to fly close to rocks, hit the "mining" key, and collect raw materials to sell at a space station. Traders get the ability to construct items, including copies or improvements of any ship equipment you can find. Warriors just fight.

Experienced RP gamers will find the usual select of root, dot, heal, resurrection and gate abilities spread among the six classes, but it'll take you a while to acquire them, and what you get is far less sophisticated and varied than most MMORPGs.

The end result is a boring game that most people quickly exhaust. After the nice graphics become commonplace, you'll be doing the same runs again and again, usually solo. The "FedEx" style quest is common in RPGs, but in E&B it's the majority of the gameplay.

There are other SciFi spaceship games either out there already (Jumpgate) or coming soom (Eve) that offer more gameplay, although you'll have to suffer PKing in those, and pretty taxing ship piloting in Jumpgate.

There are plenty of nicer land-based games with lots of character, personality and variety, including Anarchy Online and Project Entropia for SciFi, with Star Wars Galaxies due next year. On the fantasy front, EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot are justly the most popular, buty Asheron's Call 2 is looking very promising for release in this fall (2002).

E&B tries to be "a spaceship RPG for the rest of us," but succeeds only at being a game for very few of us.

On the other hand, I do like some mindless entertainment from time to time. E&B certainly provides that. My Terran Trader can cruise the galaxy, delivering goods, shooting up weak pirate ships, learn to make thing, and act as the "healer" in group combat. So, I may well get a copy, simply for that.

I appologize for not putting my name beside these comments, but as a 20 year veteran designer and producer in the computer game business, I'd be jeopardizing my career and the potential success of my startup firm by badmouthing one of the largest game companies in the world (EA). They have long memories there, and do carry grudges (aspiring workers in the game industry - consider yourself warned!).

The Executive Summary

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: September 24, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing for about 1 month in beta. Overall this game's worth the money.

PROS:

- HUGE game environment with nearly limitless replay value. You will not find yourself lacking things to do.
- This is NOT an arcade game. Combat is essentially a timed test of your ability to manage your ships resources. Exploration is fun, and you won't lack interesting sites to visit (like the Science Exhibit (Zoo) of space monsters.
- Interacting with other players is fun. You can form groups to do missions together, make friends, or even join a guild. In fact, it is the potential enjoyment one can get from this community that makes this game stand out.
- Graphics! Wow! and the sound is good too. The advertisements in the stations are an example of the realism. Nine out of Ten Progen Warriors agree.
- The story line, while I haven't paid much attention to it, is there. Apparently there's some bad aliens (they killed me once) lurking about as a result of the Progen activating some ancient relic.
- You will spend a lot of time playing this game.

CONS

- This is NOT an arcade game. Your desire, if you have it, for arcade combat will not be satisfied.
- Travel is very time-consuming. During some trips I have time to get up and clean the kitchen while traveling.
- Trade is so-so, but a great way to make money for upgrades to your ships systems. The thing that holds trade back from becoming fun is that becoming rich in the game doesn't do as much for you as becoming wealthy in real life. Also, there doesn't seem to be an overall shortage in credits, meaning players who trade to build in-game wealth can't even use it to purchase services from players who simply enjoy blasting stuff.
- Dealing with real-live players is also time consuming. Imagine trying to build a relationship with your neighbor, but with the only means of communication a series of one-line messages. Use travel time to catch up with your buds.
- Lag. I imagine this will get better as more servers are brought online. But, it stinks having your mouse locked up, leaving you helpless, while the games NPCs are blasting away at you.
- You will spend too much time playing this game.

Warning : EA Games has Closed these Servers

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: October 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

EA Games decided to close out the game on Setpember 22, 2004 so it can no longer be played. Please keep this in mind when purchasing this game.

Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 14 / 16
Date: September 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I beta tested it for close to a month. I found myself playing it non stop. When I wasn't out at work or sleeping I was playing this game. The graphics are incredible, Has an endless amount of entertainment. I've heard that EA has a 4 year story already made out for the game. Giving this game long life, instead of playing it a month and being done with it. There are 150 levels! for your character. Every 20 levels or so you get a new position in whatever field you choose to be. There are 6 different characters you can be (that I know of EA might add more). Each character has there own special skills and places to test these skills out. You can compelety customize your character from hair color, to eye color, to facial features, sunglasses, ear pieces, skin color, clothing color, etc.. You can customize your ship make a custom color scheme or pick on of the already made ones, you can put logos or not, you can change the wing shape and the hull design. There are so many things you can do with this game and so many more things coming out for it. this game has an endless amount of oppurtunity. 5 STARS!!!

E&B has good points and bad points

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: September 24, 2002
Author: Amazon User

It looks like people either love it or hate it, with very little in-between! Well, here's another "I love it" review, but first let me respond to some of my fellow reviewers.

It looks like a person's playing style has a big impact on whether or not they'll enjoy Earth & Beyond. For example, some people would want a lot of options when it comes to space combat. This game has a few combat choices, but contrary to the opinion of one reviewer there _are_ combat tactics. You can cloak and decloak. You can teleport yourself, your enemies or your friends. You can jumpstart friends that have been damaged. It's more than just warp in, attack, and hope you win.

Myself, I really enjoy the exploration aspect of the game. The NPC personalities are very well done -- they're as good as the ones in Wing Commander or the Ultima series. Most of the quests may be FedEx style, but is there really much else that you can have in space? However, if Westwood would craft a greater variety of quests, there would be a lot more draw to the game, IMHO. I think this is in the works, given the sightings of unknown aliens and the alien capture of one notable NPC. If I were to compare this to a novel, I'd say give Westwood a chance to get past the prologue, for goodness' sake! There's a lot of potential here.

Now to the other reviewer beefs. Some reviewers have complained about how long it takes to get anywhere. Well, there are races that have much slower engines than others. If you want to do a lot of traveling, choose a different race. One reviewer claimed that E&B was just Everquest in space. I beg to differ! I personally can't stand EverQuest, but I enjoy E&B very much. EverQuest takes forever to get to the point where it's actually fun to play whereas E&B is fun immediately, and getting from place to place in EverQuest takes MUCH longer than in E&B. Quests in EverQuest are harder to find and they don't seem quite as satisfying. (I do enjoy the greater variety of classes, monsters, weapons and environments in EverQuest, though.) Maybe E&B could use some more play-balancing to make things a little more fun, but the game is very enjoyable as-is.

In conclusion, if you like the idea of a MMORPG in a space environment, and if you'd enjoy the "flavor" that the NPCs and the storyline-relevant quests give to the game (a-la Wing Commander or the Ultima series), by all means buy it. However, if you're looking for a space sim or are anxious for lots more content right away, you might be wise to take your $$ elsewhere.

Do not buy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: May 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I played this game for 2 months and it had periods of severe lag even though I am on a T1. It's rather pointless to begin playing this game now; as with EverQuest and UO, the people who have been playing this since the beginning are ridiculously powerful. Takes ages to gain levels in this, and with little reward at each consecutive level.

Worst part of all: I attempted to cancel my account before I was automatically billed, but their web site was down. I called them up and they said they would cancel it, but the next day I logged into my online banking account only to find that they had billed me again. They refused to refund me, saying it was "against their policy." What did I miss here? They had a web site failure, then I called them up and they failed to do what I told them to do. Then they billed me again. Oh yeah, and there are only a small handfull of people at tech support (often times only 1), and they have HEAVY accents that make it nearly impossible to comprehend what they are saying. Just a little personal opinion of mine.. if you are serving a group of people with whom you do not share a common language, you should not be in the customer service center.

This game is no longer running! Servers closed!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: June 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Westwood Studios was purchased by EA Games and they decided to close out this game on Setpember 22, 2004. I suppose if you wanted it as a keepsake of a fun game, then the price is worth it. There was never a single player mode, so it is non-playable as sold here.

Good back story, interesting races, BORING GAME.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 16 / 24
Date: August 21, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I was one of the recent beta testers (Phase 4) and witnessed the game right before a major revision. I only played as one of the the races (a Progen explorer) but that's all I needed. The games starts out fine with a great story and missions that tie in with the story being the best missions. You can go on scavenging missions for experience or combat or trade missions to level up. When you get promoted you get a slighly better ship and have access to better engines, armor and weapons. The game's combat and asteroid (mineral) mining is very boring. All you do is target an enemy and hope you are stronger than it to win. If you win you get combat experience. Enemies tend to look alike after a while. They either look like blobs, shrimp, or bacteria cells. New enemies are just different colored and have a different name, but all share the same model as a lesser version.

Mining asteroids is an exceedingly boring way to gain explore and trade experience. Target an asteroid and wait as the minerals are mined. No fun!

Traveling can be OH-SO tedious. I had an important mission where I had to mine a certain mineral and thanks to the tips of other online players found where I could mine it. The trip to get to this sector clocked in at 30 minutes. That's 30 minutes of bringing up a star map selecting the star gate and staring at the screen while you get there. Once you get there you "jump" to the next sector and repeat the process again. Jumping from sector to sector. Some gates are closed to certain races so the trip could take longer and you could even be ambushed by pirates on your way there Weeee always "fun" because you are always the weak one... Staring at the screen on my way there.... Once you mine the mineral, the return trip still takes 30 minutes. That's one hour where I whipped out the latest novel and had more fun reading it than playing this sleep-inducing game. This game is not fun. Period. Get a real RPG like Neverwinter Nights or even Baldur's Gate (1 or 2).

Dracer's Take

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: August 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Fortunate enough to have been invited into the first wave of beta testers, I have watched Earth & Beyond's development unfold from the rough early beginnings to the awesome product already in active open beta.

The development of this game has been wonderful to witness. The back story promises to be magnificent in scope, depth, and complexity. Exploring and discovery alone should engross the player beyond what has been seen in gaming before as the three races of Humanity struggle with an enigmatic power from Beyond. Yet exploration is only a third of the games' design.

The graphics are supurb, the music tastefully artful, and the complexity and depth of the game's design shows the consequence of the years it has been in development.

If you are a serious gamer who enjoys a good sci-fi theme this one is for you: see you among the stars!

Ok game, but not really Multi-player

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 14
Date: October 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Beta tested this game for months, but after the first 2 weeks, this game got extremely repetitave. You fly around for literally 10-30 min just to get to a spot to attack some enemies and get experience, but you have to constantly deal with everything from kill-stealing players to enemies that kill you as soon as you come out of warp which semed pretty unfair to me. I worked my way up the ranks to Commander, which was like level 53, but there appearently seemed to be no real reason for a ranking system as a Lieutenant that was computer controlled constantly referred to me as a cadet and absolutely gave me no authority what so ever. Also, constant crashes were extremely annoying as once I was kicked back to the log in screen 12 times in a row every time I went through a jump gate. This game really seemed to me as a step back i as far as these massive on-line games go...dont get me wrong, graphically speaking the game was done very well with planets getting larger and smaller as you travel to and from, and stars looked real good as did the ships. The one other let down was the character creation...there is like 3 different faces, 3 different shirts and pants, and very few occupations to choose from, but I am sure future expansions can fix this, but I doubt that this game will last too long after Star Wars: Galaxies and Freelancer are released. Trust me, ($) a month is not worth it at all, maybe more like ($) and they send you the game fro free, then I say go for it...otherwise, save your money for something a little less boring.

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