The Entropia Universe
Today at Gen Con Indy 2008 I had the opportunity to learn about the Entropia Universe. To quote their marketing literature:
The Entropia Universe is more than a game. The Entropia Universe is for real. Real people, real activities, and a Real Cash Economy in a massive online universe.
Join people from around the globe who use the Entropia Universe currency, the PED, to develop their characters everyday on the untamed planet of Calypso. The unique and secure Real Cash Economy allows you to transfer your accumulated PED back into real world funds.
That’s the gist of the game. You play it like any other MMO. You wander around, killing monsters, and picking up loot. The loot you pick up can be sold to NPCs and other players for the in-game PED currency. You can also buy PED with real-world money if you want some.
Given that in-game money can be exchanged for something you can spend in the real world, you might expect the game to come with a hefty price tag and monthly fee. If that’s what you thought, you’d be wrong. The game can be downloaded and played without ever paying a cent of real-world money for it. The manufacturers make their money in a variety of creative ways. They sell advertising in the in-game cities. They sell virtual real estate. Recently, they received $400,000 to establish in-game banks that operate the same as banks in the real world, allowing players to deposit and borrow money.
I played a few minutes of the game this afternoon at Gen Con. The user interface is pretty straightforward, much like the interface in any of the other MMOs out there. The W,A,S, and D keys move the character around. The mouse allows the player to turn left and right. Left-clicking the mouse attacks an enemy.
The graphics are probably a notch or two below those you’d find in more-recent MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online. However, they aren’t “dated” or mediocre. Given that I was in a loud convention hall, I didn’t get a feel for the sound quality, though I would imagine that they are on par with the visuals.
As with most MMOs, there is a crafting system in Entropia Universe. Players loot item blueprints from the enemies they kill. They also loot raw materials and components. The raw material and components can be combined at crafting stations, using the blueprints, into items that can be used or sold to other players.
That’s as much as I can tell you about The Entropia Universe at the moment. I plan to load it up and spend a little time with it once I get back home to my desktop PC. The Asus Eee PC I have with me doesn’t have quite enough horsepower to run it.
Update 08/17/2008: After returning home from Gen Con today, I decided to fire up Entropia Universe and see what I thought of it. Unfortunately, they don’t support Windows Vista yet. I haven’t been able to get the game installed and running on my main PC because of this. I’ll try on a Windows XP Pro laptop later and see how it goes.
Hi Michael,
We experienced this same issue. It is actually Vista that defaults to install Entropia Universe into the /Program Files directory. That is the issue.
Rerun the installer and choose a different directory… then you are golden. :)
GL and say Hi in-world (darri is my avatar name)
kpward
Thanks for the tip! I’ll give it a shot.
Update: It worked. Now to find time to login and play!
Hi Michael,
We experienced this same issue. It is actually Vista that defaults to install Entropia Universe into the /Program Files directory. That is the issue.
Rerun the installer and choose a different directory… then you are golden. :)
GL and say Hi in-world (darri is my avatar name)
kpward…