Gates of Horizon - realtime 4X space MMO - multiplatform

[Huw the Poo]

Official website

Desura page

Has been Greenlit (also the best single-page summary - Steam keys will be provided for Desura buyers)

This looks fairly similar to Eve Online, although I'm guessing (hoping?) it won't be quite the timesink that Eve is.  It's in beta but the videos look good.  It promises to be extremely platform-agnostic, even offering browser play at some point apparently.

Not having the time to play Eve but loving it all the same, I'm very tempted to go for this one.  It's currently 50% on Desura, priced at £3.50.  Anyone interested?

[RooksBailey]

I have to say that this does sound very interesting!  Gonna keep my eye on it.   O0

[Yskonyn]

As a mobile MMO it looks pretty fun, but I doubt it will even approach any of the depth of EVE. The interface seems to have been inspired from EVE no doubt. ;)

Talking about EVE: I have just resubbed and taken up Exploration. It pays decently and you can manage you time more easily because of the more mission-like structure you can wield.
Pretty great gameplay for busy dads who still want to enjoy EVE but have no time to engage in Corp Warfare or Deep space construction .

[Huw the Poo]

I took the plunge. :D

Too early to say much yet; all I've done is the tutorial and left the noob system.  It is very similar to Eve; you control your ship in exactly the same way, and the basic gameplay is the same too.  When you start you choose one of three factions, all of whom have bonuses to certain skills just like Eve.

The tutorial takes about 30-40 minutes to complete and shows you how to buy your first ship and agent (agents are people you use to buy/sell on the market or man specific components on ships - basically you do everything through agents).  It's a simple go here, do this tutorial but it does a good job of teaching the basics.  By the time I'd finished I had a ship, a laser, a mining laser, some ore and I'd crafted something.

However the tutorial did leave me high and dry.  It said that I can hang around in the noob system, which didn't sound appealing, or go elsewhere to really start playing.  I took the latter option but didn't realise I wouldn't be able to return to the noob system to pick up my stuff.  Now I'm stuck in a noob ship in the "real" game, and I'm finding it really hard to achieve anything.  The lowliest of NPCs put up an extremely tough fight, and I can't just mine because I don't have my mining laser with me.  My only hope is to keep fighting and gaining XP, which will allow me to skill up and hopefully start taking some pirates down for juicy lootz.

I did eventually manage to kill one NPC (and came within an inch of death myself) but the ore I salvaged from the wreck is almost worthless...although having said that, I forgot to refine it, perhaps that's the way to go.  And while my only agent is trying to flog it on the market I can't use him to fly my ship either.  I'm a bit buggered until I figure a way out of this!

Anyway, despite the dev's claims that the Windows and Mac clients are stable while the Linux client is still very unstable, I actually didn't encounter any technical issues at all.  The game is still rough around the edges - a combination of low budget and being early in the development, I assume - but there were no actual bugs and the client seemed absolutely stable, as did the servers.

I'll plug away at it a bit more and report back.

Pretty great gameplay for busy dads who still want to enjoy EVE but have no time to engage in Corp Warfare or Deep space construction .

Well, mixing it with corps is the kind of thing I prefer to do though, so as a busy dad, I simply can't play.  At least not in the way I would like.  Besides, Eve has no Linux client. :(

[Nefaro]

What's with the title?

Sounds like a Russian-to-English translation.  ;D

[Staggerwing]

Could Horizon be a place-name?

[Huw the Poo]

What's with the title?

Sounds like a Russian-to-English translation.  ;D

Heh.  I didn't even think about it until you said, but yeah, it is a shit name isn't it?

By the way I figured a way out of the hole into which I'd dug myself, so I'll hopefully make some progress tonight and will report back.

[Huw the Poo]

I've been playing this on and off all week.  So far I'm kind of enjoying it but can't yet recommend it; it's still early in development and there isn't a great deal to it yet.

I've found that by far the best way to make money early on is to mine asteroids.  You have to fly to waypoints then scan them down, an entirely hands-off process.  Then you click mine and let your ship do its thing until the rock blows up while you browse the Web in another window.  Fly the ore back to a station, refine it, sell it.  Rinse and repeat.  One of the problems with this is that, unlike Eve, this is a completely risk-free endeavour as there are no NPC rats at the asteroid fields, at least not in the areas I've been.  The only potential danger is other players but the playerbase is currently very small - not to mention very friendly - so it's quite boring.  In fact the only player ship I've seen all week was abandoned, so I blew it up and salvaged a full load of ore. :)

You hire agents, one allowed per character level, and it's the agents who do the work.  So you need an agent to fly a ship, and if you want to browse the market at the same time you'd need another one at a station - impossible until you hit level 2.  The agents have their own stats and level up individually so it's quite an interesting mechanic, albeit frustratingly restrictive to begin with.  I did suggest to the devs that players should be free to browse the market at any time without an agent and it's being considered, although the devs admittedly have their reasons for having things this way.

The main problem with GoH at the moment is the tiny playerbase and lack of content.  Admittedly I haven't explored very much, but considering I have a limitless supply of wealth where I am, and there being very few players to meet, it doesn't seem worth exploring at the moment.  Maybe when I get a bigger ship with better weapons.

The devs, to their credit, are extremely responsive to feedback and very agile when it comes to fixing reported bugs and adding suggestions.  I've reported a number of bugs this week and they've all been fixed already.  It needs more content; currently there are only about 5 ships per faction and a very limited supply of ship modules.  However there is an ability to build (or capture) stations so that will be something I'll want to look into if I make it to the hopelessly distant level requirements.

It's very much an Eve clone, replicating many of Eve's mechanics and design decisions but extremely lo-fi compared to Eve.  It needs work but it definitely has promise.  I hope the devs can keep up momentum, add stuff, and attract new players; the game could really go somewhere as a multi-platform alternative to Eve with very low system requirements.