So to my other brief encounter with the distant future; Jumpgate. This title, first released in 2001, is a fairly robust and involved space mining/trading/combat MMO, featuring full joystick support, twitch flight, aliens, equipment, credits and PvP.
The setting is the distant future; mankind has travelled to the stars, via some kind of intergalactic jumpgatey thing, which subsequently collapsed. The remaining humans split into three factions, the militarist Octavius, the mercantile Solrain and the spiritual Quantar. These three factions, under the shakey oversight of the TRI, then set about rebuilding society and looking for a way home, all the while fighting off the mysterious Conflux, and each other.
Enter player, stage left. You begin life with a modest amount of credits, (22,000 or so), a newbie ship with a mining laser, and a sector map with around 50 star systems in, each scattered with space stations, asteroids, gates and the occasional alien menace.
Three Good Things:
Physics: Jumpgate employs a very Newtonian flight model, which simulates how things would move in space for real. More specifically, there is no friction, so if you floor it in one direction, you’ll keep going that speed and direction when you let go of the throttle. There are braking thrusters of a sort, but mostly, stopping involved point the ship the other way and burning for an equal amount of time.
This is a bugger to get your head around to begin with – a velocity heading and a facing heading, both separate, and I splashed against the spacestation a few times trying to dock because of this drift and lack of X-Wing style handling, but if you can get good at it, it allows all manner of extreme gimbal strafing, Babylon 5 style, and must be quite a satisfying art.
Friendly: Although rather quiet in general (see below), several times, random passers-by threw me vast sums of money, for a newbie, and after only one or two days, I’d gone from 22k, to 11 million, just in donations. I guess they were pleased to see any new face at all. This twinkage is somewhat curbed though – the game uses a mission based XP Level system to control access to the bigger and more powerful ships and equipment, so I found that there wasn’t a great deal I could actually do with 11 million anyway. But the gesture was well received anyway.
Medals: You seem to get medals for everything! Launching, Docking, Using Gates, Doing Missions, etc, etc. In addition to these objective achievements, there are any number of player-wide ranking awards, and the entire system is extremely well supported by their JOSSH out-of-game web-based character database – possibly the best use of this kind of thing I’ve ever seen, ‘EQ2 Players’ included. The whole thing appealed greatly to my ‘Inner Mutley’.
Three Bad Things:
Harsh: I’ll be frank. You are not going to see combat for a number of weeks, and surviving against even the most basic of the alien Conflux drone ships is likely to take a much bigger ship and guns than you start life with, so put aside expectations of jumping in the cockpit and blasting bad-guys for Victory day one. Alternatives to asteroid mining seem limited, particularly early on; scout missions or small cargo deliveries – all slow stuff, and not terribly exciting.
One would imagine that the PvP is even harsher, considering those few pilots left in there by now have all the best gear, and can afford replacements.
Dated: The engine seems to require DirectX 7, and although passable, and playable in good high resolutions, is still pretty simplistic compared to Jump to Lightspeed and EVE Online. The look and feel is not bad, per se, but it becomes difficult to put aside the feeling that you’re playing a really, really old game. Superficial, perhaps, but noticeable none the less.
Empty: The JOSSH website lists currently online pilots, and I don’t think I saw it go over 50, US Peak time, and they only have the one server. I’ve no idea how many players the thing was designed for, but I definitely remember the place being a lot busier back in 2001 Beta days. This leaves you with a feeling of an extremely bleak and empty universe, something which is a particular danger in space-based games anyway, and compounded here.
The only way to cope would be to get right in and involved with all 50 regular players – such a small community can be a very tight knit one, but it doesn’t leave much room for the casual soloing tourist, like me. The game itself is only on ‘Episode 2’, after five years, and it doesn’t seem like it’ll be going anywhere further, any time soon – strictly a maintenance operation, if it even pays for itself at all.
All in all, I decided not to stay, but then I suspect I’d already made my mind up before trying it. I will say that for that kind of thing – space based twitch MMOs, there doesn’t seem to be anything quite like it, the nearest being Jump to Lightspeed, which always felt a bit arcadey to me anyway. Not so Jumpgate.
I would recommend it to anyone how ever thought they were any good at XWing, but bear in mind, it will take a lot of effort to get to like. If you preferred Elite, then EVE Online is probably still your best bet.