Why WASD Felt So Good for EVE Frontier?

Okay I will start this entire mini splurge of mind juice with a bit of a caveat, I know a lot of people hated it, I will only go into why I thought it was a great thing to have and then address why perhaps it wouldn’t work for a CCP product.

EVE Online to me has always been a game where you feel like you are telling the ship what to do as if right clicking and selecting orbit was telling a ships AI or similar to go do your wishes. This obviously was fine and made perfect sense given the back story of you being in a goop filled pod.

What this resulted in was a remarkably simple game…. Giant fleet fights would be no more than 100 people clicking ‘keep at distance’ to an anchor ship while that one pilot acting as the anchor simply clicked orbit at 100km on some distant object or vaguely double clicked in space somewhere and sat back watching the show.

1v1 PVP obviously has a more involved process to ship control and can mean the difference between winning and waking up with a sore butt, however, EVE Online was never a ‘dog fighting’ style space opera game and this to me was always a bit of a shame.

WASD controls always had a role to play in space games as this makes you feel more involved and present, when EVE Frontier finally added this feature recently I was surprised how suddenly there was a joy to manually orbiting asteroids, drifting around silos in my base and generally smiling as I tried to do dare devil antics to my ship, I think it is this unexpected joy that made me realise this was something that made the slightly disconnected ship piloting of EVE more enjoyable.

There are massive drawbacks to this change as suddenly the game was much slower, ratting NPCs for their precious loot became a chore, trying to avoid wrecking damage from rats suddenly was not as easy as right click orbit and generally the game felt…harder.

The upside of this was suddenly I was dogfighting npcs, I was trying to stay behind them and follow, what was a passive activity of shooting rats, suddenly was an active…. Well….activity once more and I was rather enjoying it.

Will WASD controls say in EVE products? No, the general player of EVE based games is not a huge ‘fighter pilot’ style player, they want to use the automation of telling their ship to do things while they plan intergalactic conquest.

I like the WASD controls, I can see it changes the game potentially forever, this is a real cross roads for the game in my view however I can see that the developers will likely not want to make such a drastic change, keeping both control types in the game will not work as everything tends towards entropy and ‘effort’ will become a major reason not to bother piloting your ship.

Overall I salute the devs for trying this sort of thing, I do hope it stays and I would even say ‘go for it’ as the most ballsey move in CCP product history to keep this as the primary way to play this game.

Let me know your thoughts on this via our Discord, hate the manual piloting? Loved it? let me know.