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“How Perpetumm is an EVE:Online Ripoff” or “Perpetumm’s Parallel Production”
I have actually known about Perpetumm‘s existence for a while. But it was through Tobold’s post yesterday, and by extension, Chris’ post on Perpetumm that I found out the upcoming MMO is merely two weeks from launch. More importantly perhaps, Chris highlights how much of a clone Perpetumm is of Eve Online.
I went through Perpetumm’s website, Perpetumm-Online, which is confusing because the game itself is just “Perpetumm”. Going over a lot of the content on the website I was able to draw the following parallels (or contradictions):
| EVE ONLINE |
PERPETUMM |
| $14.99 a month | $9.99 a month |
| In the future mankind exhausts all energy resources; wormhole leads to new galaxy ripe with resources | In the future mankind exhausts all energy resources; ‘strange anomaly’ leads to new world ripe with resources |
| There are five primary factions that fight within, between themselves and with several other splinter groups | There are three main factions that fight for control, but there is the common enemy: the synthetic life-forms populating planet Nia |
| Completely open, persistent, sandbox game world on a single-server | Completely open, persistent, sandbox game world on a single-server |
| Large-scale battles involving thousands of players | Large-scale battles involving hundreds of players |
| Complex crafting system; heavy focus on mining; heavy focus on player crafting and commodity creation; reverse engineering; planetary mining | Complex crafting system; mining raw materials; mass producing items; reverse engineering; build special prototypes |
| Player driven market with server enforced price fluctuation of key items | Player driven market; constant supply and demand between the players of different specializations |
| Players gain skill points even when logged out as long as they have an active subscription; you can specialize in a field, but older players will mostly have the upper hand; only one character per account can train skills at a time, you cannot transfer skill points between characters | Time based character progression, even when the player isn’t logged in the game; extension points gained this way can be used to immediately purchase skills on any character on the account |
| Asteroids belts get mined out and re-spawn after set periods of time; planet surfaces and orbital platforms can be created/transformed by players | A living world; plantlife continuously grows; battles leave vegetation into arid wastelands; minerals in the ground require regular scans to find |
| Players can build their own space stations and structures exclusive to their corporations/allies | Players can deform the earth to forge their own settlements |
| Real-time, asynchronous combat | Real-time, asynchronous combat |
| More than 200 types of player ships; thousands of different modules for a wide variety of roles | More than 30 various robots, hundreds of equipment items |
| Players can engage in a wide variety of missions from corporations through in-game agents | Several missions can be undertaken on the numerous Syndicate departments |
Example Stats on a ship:
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Example stats on a robot:
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Notice I am not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, but just that there are a lot of similarities. I immensely enjoyed Eve Online in all the years I played it, and it is the MMO to which I have returned seven times (only to be frustrated by how far ahead everyone else was and quitting yet again – but that is a matter for another discussion). Eve Online is an incredible experience, a niche within a niche. Perpetumm is shaping up to be quite similar in execution and style.
We talk about WoW clones all the time. Perhaps Eve Online, with nearly seven years of live server experience, hundreds of thousands of pilots, and an ever-expanding subscription base, has finally reached the level where titles can now be labeled “Eve-clones”.
More power to CCP I guess!
