It’d be heavy-handed of me to call last week’s decision-making a “crisis” or “soul-searching.” But that’s kind of what it felt like on a small scale. I could have stuck with WoW and continued to make decent, reasonably steady progress. But I wanted to try EVE again.

So on Saturday (I pulled an all-nighter at work on Friday evening,) I signed up for a new EVE Trial account through Steam (21 days,) and reinstalled the current client build from scratch. I generated a Caldari trader/entrepeneur, ran the first tutorial and the first tutorial missions, and finished up the second batch of missions this morning. Being back in EVE felt a little bit like a homecoming for me – it was my very first MMO, before WoW or Vanguard, in the long-ago of May 2007. I actually started playing it on my old old computer, an ancient Dell, on which it ran a bit choppily. On the new new box, I’m getting a consistent 100+ FPS with premium graphics and everything at max, although I need to get some antialiasing going, which apparently cannot be done through the EVE graphics settings.

I’ve resolved to soak up at much atmosphere as possible and take my time to enjoy the game. My plan is to stick to Empire, do mining and missions and the like, although I will probably start another new character tonight, before I’ve gotten too far on the Caldari I created on Saturday. Funnily enough, a few of the people I was pimping EVE to a year or so ago when I was all hot for the game are still playing and going strong. I took tons of gorgeous screenshots, some of which will be getting posted.