I recently stumbled across the game Vendetta Online, a very small fun space MMO. What makes this game different from the rest, aside from the whole space part, is the physics used in game. There aren’t a lot of them out there, but the ones that are use a standard terrestrial physics. As in you turn right, your whole ship turns right as well as your direction of movement. Anyone who knows physics knows this is not true in space. As an old physicist once said, “Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.” This would mean if you thrusted forward, then turned your ship around without actually applying a force to change the direction of your ship, you would be flying essentially backwards. Which is how it should be. Thus what this game has adopted. Now you can turn this on and off, as in you can let your on board computer compute the proper course adjustments to simulate the standard flight model for games, or so says their website.
I played this game 8 hours almost solid. The combat is fun, not so challengeing to me at the moment, although I understand 3D movment very well and am able to avoid
any most shots fired at me. What makes this game kinda interesting is you can create your own sorta macros. If you wanted to bind a button on your keyboard that would do several actions for you, you could and very easily. I’m using one to toggle the turbo button rather then having to hold it down. I wanna make one that simplifies mining, which is the next topic of discussion.
Other than combat as with any (space) game, there are two other activities you can do. Mine and trade. Now mining is fairly boring, to me anyways although I would have to say a bit more interesting when your in a sector with combatants shooting at you while your trying to mine. Also, the asteroids get kinda close together, to get one that you really want to mine might be tricky and take a lot of course corrections, unlike EVE where you could mine 15k away, safe from the other asteroids, you have to be within 100m of the object. I thought it was kinda fun to mine within an asteroid. There are a few that are hollow ones with green something in the middle of them. I doubt that helps mine anything better, but it was still fun to show off my mad skillz and navigate though this tiny asteroid. I hope there’s more stuff like that later in the game.
One thing that is different is the monthly cost. Most MMO’s now are 15+, this one is 10 a month with standard discounts for paying for bulk months. The last really neat thing is development for this game has spanned across all the platforms, so its not discriminative to the OS you like. Linux, OS X, Winblows they all play the same. I’m playing as Wedgen, if you deside to give it a try, hit me up.
