Vendetta Online

[Jon]

I recently discovered a new MMORPG called Vendetta Online. One of the best features of this game is that it is possible to try it without spending any money. There is, of course, the standard "buy the boxed game and get a month free" option, but you can also download the game from the website and sign up for an eight hour trial. After the free period, it costs $9.99 a month. It is also available for Mac and Linux, in addition to the standard Windows client. I tested the downloadable Mac client with the 8 hour trial.

Vendetta is a sci-fi game, taking place entirely in space. As such, you will never see another player "face to face". Rather, you will see his ship. Of course, that's if you see him at all. This game is rather lacking in players -- there's only one universe and, at the time of this writing, only 90 players online. The only other ships I ever saw were NPCs.

The interface could stand with some improvment. The station screens, quite frankly, suck. The spacecraft interface sucks much less, but it still has problems. The default physics model is a fake inertialess model, where turning the heading of the ship instantly changes direction and where it is not only possible but very easy to come to a complete stop. The webpage indicates that it can be switched to a true physics model, but I never saw any mention of it in the game. The Enter key, which is used for a variety of actions, from engaging the FTL drive to entering a docking bay, is called the Activate key in the onscreen messages, which is not terribly confusing, but nonetheless annoying. What is worse, sometimes these messages appear on screen beyond the point at which pressing the key will do anything. I discovered this when I was trying to enter a docking bay and accidentally flew past it. If you're going to implement automatic docking measures, they ought to be able to be enabled when you're more than a meter away from the bay.

On to combat. Unlike every other MMORPG I have played, new characters are pretty much unable to kill anything. You can't even blow up asteroids for minerals. You do start out with what looks to be a fair amount of money, but without any guidance as to what upgrades would help you best. (Actually, a new character can kill a drone, but there aren't too many of those flying around. Furthermore, when I managed to kill one and picked up the ice it dropped, I could not find a way to sell the ice. The station menu had a "Sell" tab, but the only option under that tab was to sell my entire ship.)

So I got bored and decided to go explore the universe. The FTL drive, which is required to actually get anywhere, requires you to be at least 3000 meters away from any object of any size. This is not a problem, except that your ship's main drive is really freaking weird. It has a "normal" top speed of around 50 units, whatever the units are, but by holding down a Boost key, you can get up to about 150 units, by consuming your FTL charge. Which charges right back up once you let go, so they could have easily just made the ship able to go 150 units by default, and required you to slow down to 50 or below for FTL jump. I suppose it makes about as much sense as the rest of the game, which is not much. So you boost irregularly until you can FTL jump to a wormhole, then travel the 4500 meters to the wormhole, FTL jump through that, travel 3000 meters away, FTL jump closer to a station, and then travel to the actual station. That's three jumps, all of which require you to travel at least 3000 meters each, just to get from one station to another. Again, it's comparable with the speed of travel in other MMORPGs, like FFXI. It's just more annoying.

What actually made me stop playing, though, was that, as I was exploring the universe, I somehow managed to emerge from a wormhole in the middle of a freaking ion storm. Which is basically shorthand for "you have to travel like 7500 meters in a given direction before you can FTL jump". While I was trying to do so, some wacky AI warcraft shot my ship apart and I respawned at my home station, 20 FTL jumps away. At which point I logged off and deleted the game.

Verdict: If you're really looking for a waste of time, FFXI is a lot prettier. And actually has other people playing it.