EVE Online

EVE Online was released by Icelandic studio CCP Games in 2003 and differed from other MMOs from its very foundation - all players move through a single shared universe divided into thousands of star systems, with no separate servers or parallel instances of the same world. The game is built on mining resources, trading, manufacturing ships and equipment, and moving freely through an economy that is largely shaped by the players themselves via marketplaces and production chains. Instead of linear level progression, the game offers a skill system that develops in real time even while offline, so the character grows even when the player isn't currently online, and decisions are more about which abilities to train than how fast to "grind" experience.

A key element is the politics and diplomacy between player corporations and alliances that control entire regions of space, forge alliances, negotiate, and wage large-scale wars - battles with thousands of participants have become famous for their scale and their impact on the virtual economy, as the destruction of ships worth real transferable value has drawn attention even beyond the gaming community. The risk of losing a ship is permanent and keenly felt, which gives the game a tension that MMOs with standard "no-risk" zones don't have. Visually, the game relies on spectacular views of ships and space scenery; technically it's distinctive for an interface that resembles a spreadsheet editor and trade-route map more than a classic action game.

Thanks to its approach, EVE Online earned a reputation as the title with the most complex player-driven economy and politics in the genre, and became a popular source of widely covered stories about betrayals, espionage, and massive battles that regularly spilled over into mainstream news media. Despite being an extraordinarily demanding and specific game with a long learning curve, it still runs today and is considered a unique, hard-to-replicate experiment in online gaming and the simulation of an entire virtual economy.

Why play: For players interested in politics, economics, and space battles, EVE Online, despite its steep learning curve, is a unique, hard-to-replicate experiment in simulating an entire virtual economy.