To be fair, the most memorable times I've played in games have nearly never been about the graphics or presentation, and nearly always about what something __means__, whether to me personally or to me as a player.

In MMOs, I remember the hard things I did solo, the hard things I organized a team for, and the personal milestones. The zones might be ugly or beautitul. The task might simply be to kite some big demon through a wintry landscape, or it might just be doing something in a new role for the first time. (First time tanking, early raid leading successes.)

In the brief (trial!) time I played EVE, there was a lot I had to learn, and never mastered... but I could see the appeal. While a lot of the success comes down to planning (ship loadout, where you quest/farm/etc), at some visceral level I was still hunting pirates, and trying to solo hard fights that I could not quite beat. It's a rush, even if it doesn't look as cinematic as Homeworld or action movies.

This is likely the same reason people can get amazed or excited about chess or poker. :-)

Those images look like in game graphics. The game really is beautiful, and spreadsheets in space is mostly a joke these days, but there are in game professions that may include actual spreadsheets.

That said, its likely someone spent some time getting the right angle to take that screenshot.

Those are actual EVE Online graphics, zoomed out in game.

The game is shockingly good looking these days. Normally there's not that much going on in one place, and instead it's wide, desolate space (which has it's own beauty). But there are a great many special touches, from the mild red/blue shift in warp to the unbelievable overkill on the character creation, the game looks like it has had years of tweaks and refinements added.

Those are indeed in-game graphics, but they don't animate well during large battles, and controls become unresponsive. It's a bit better since they added time dilation, but it's still frustrating to be in a huge fight. Usually the beautiful graphics come from one guy set up at the edge just to film; people trying to actually fight turn off the eye candy.