Author: Walker Moore (Second Life)

This article is quite good, so i paste it here, and hopefully you will find something here you’ve not thought about before.

Entropia Universe is an online virtual universe designed by Swedish software company MindArk.

1. The avatar is nowhere near as customizable as the one we have in SL(Second Life). It doesn’t even come close. There are more sliders for your avatar’s head in SL than there are for your entire body in EU. You also can’t change your shape until you’ve acquired more skills in game, so make sure you like the shape you’ve moulded when you first sign up. You’ll be stuck with it for a while.

2. You can’t make your own stuff. Only ‘manufacture it’ from items you obtain in world. Forget creating your own textures in photoshop, or building stuff. What you end up with (clothes, arms, armor, etc.) has ultimately been designed by Mindark and has to be paid for or manufactured from items you paid for.

3. Here is the most ludicrous bit: Most items decay and have to be repaired at a repair terminal, and this costs PEDs (10 PED = 1USD). So it’s not good enough that you paid for a fabulous gun or armor. You also have to pay to keep it in good enough condition to use. So the larger your inventory, the more money you’ll need to subsidize your game.

4. You can’t fly. (This feels like a serious disability after SL.)

5. You can get killed. There is no such thing as a safe area like in SL. Death is just an inconvenience though. You’re just transported to the nearest revival point (which can sometimes be as much as a ten minute run away from where you died). You don’t lose posessions in death.

6. You can swim! No Siggy Swimmer attachment required.

7. You can only teleport between ‘teleporters’ you have discovered while exploring the landscape. When you arrive there is only one teleporter on your map (either the one at Port Calypso or Port Oxford, depending on which you chose to arrive at) so you can’t TP anywhere until you ‘explore’ more of the landscape. It took me over an hour to find my second teleporter. It’s difficult because there are so many dangerous dinosaur-like creatures roaming the landscape outside of settlements. You learn the habits/capabilities of different species over time though, and can often figure out how to avoid them. (Still a lot of skill required to avoid some species though.)

8. The landscape in places is absolutely gorgeous. A mountainous area on one continent reminded me of the Scottish Highlands. There were pterodactyls hovering above prey here and there .. which was beautiful. The visible land area was the equivalent of about one hundred mountainous SL sims laid out in front of you in perfect, fully drawn detail, and the height and atmosphere very realistic. From one side of a mountainous valley I thought “it’s gonna take me an hour to reach the misty peak on the other side!” I wasn’t wrong. It’s true to life in that respect and SL can’t touch it.

9. Sweating is EU’s equivalent of camping. Your avatar has special mind powers that allow it to extract sweat from animals using telepathy. This is a mind-numbing business (no pun intended) though because most times it fails, you keep getting killed because the animals don’t like it and the pay off isn’t that good. You can expect to obtain between two and twenty or so bottles from an animal when you successfully sweat it, and I’d expect it to take a couple of days to earn the equivalent of a single USD (10 PED) when you sell it to another player. (In combination with other items, it can be used to manufacture stuff.)

10. Mindarks business model is dependent on each player depositing $1USD into each game for each hour of play. You don’t HAVE to do this, but the experience won’t be much fun if you don’t. It’s very much frowned upon in EU culture for players to take money out of the game. If you visit the EU forums you’ll see that the overwhelming consensus about Mindark’s marketing hype about earning decent amounts of money in game is BS. If you think Lindex fees are bad…sheesh. They really *don’t* want you to cash out.

关键字: 第二人生, Entropia Universe, other