EVE General Discussion

There's already a thread on a subject related to this, but I've decided to make another, more general one on roughly the same topic, because my opinion is important and I'm a special snowflake, and I want the devs to notice this subject.

Let me preface this by saying at once that the art department is doing a fantastic job in terms of graphics quality and attention to detail - nobody can dispute that. EVE is one of the best looking games on the market atm, both spaceships and avatars-wise.

But this is about the overall art design direction of the game, and how it's gradually going down the pan.

A year or two ago I saw a video of (it may have been) Hilmar talking to the art department, asking them to look at s-f movies and base their art designs around them because CCP didn't want "goofy" in EVE.

WRONG!!!

What he should have said to the art department was: "knock yourself out, let your imagination run free and wild, picture what a civilization cut off from the mainstream for hundreds of thousands of years, that's had its own rises and falls, might look like"

"Goofy" was what made EVE special. Now it's turning into generic movie s-f spaceships, generic movie s-f avatars, generic movie s-f clothing, just ... generic.

The art design used to be evocative and mysterious. The different races had unique characters - Gallente were sexualized and semi-organic, Amarr were bombastic and golden with useless ornamentation, Caldari were pure utilitarian, and Minmatar were ... well, Minmatar. The avatars looked genuinely like space people - crazy, far future, so different from us the way we are now. The clothing was weird, with all sorts of bits and pieces the practical/social function of which you could only guess at.

Now, the art design is suggestive of us as we are now, only a few hundred years from now. It's basically just gay bikers in space, with a few old paedophiles and some punk chicks mixed in. The ships are all being "Caldarified", all becoming just various flavours of "utilitarian".

In Seleene's CSM blog she mentions that the art department are very keen on making things look like they have a function. That's commendable - but also, SOME THINGS SHOULD NOT HAVE AN OBVIOUS FUNCTION. Some things should be mysterious, so that the player fills in, in their own mind, some function for them. It's part of the rp aspect - part of feeling you're far away, thousands and thousands of years from now, in a civilization that's so different from us now that it appears alien.

So yeah, let's have some "goofy" back in EVE.

+1, would read again.

Also, some response from the art department on their lack of creativity would be appreciated.

OP is right. CCP, where is my swirly module of uselessness? All ships should have one. Then we can pretend it's a shield generator or something.

I would not like to see my old avatars ingame again. That was one aspect of EvE I cringed at, they were like comic book caricatures, and everyone knows, Internet Spaceships is a Serious Business. I was thankful every time I logged on that I didn't have to stare at the avatar while playing.

That said, I did capture for posterity every old portrait I created.

There are plenty of other options for goofy and cartoony. Eve is serious business.

The original Scorpion looked great. But non-Caldari complained, not understanding its weird functional beauty. Eventually their whining got foothold at the art department and now we have the ship actually look like a sodding symmetric scorpion, instead of just sharing some defining features.

With its asymmetry and tail it looked weird but VERY Caldari. Now it just looks ridiculous. Same with the Ibis both look more like something that belongs in from some high-budget SF anime.

edit: The old Scorp, together with the Raven and the Blackbird are the reason why I chose Caldari (I played the beta as Amarr and Gallente). I HATE the new art direction.

I'm not old enough to remember this, but this does sound very nice to have mysterious looking ships that don't entirely make sense to us.

At least then it was possible to determine the player's race by it's picture. Now everything looks the same and the only way to recognize a race is by it's limited choice in wardrobe.

Yeah that's what I'd hoped too, and I would have been willing to pay moderately for extra out-there bits and pieces. But the paid-for stuff is as bland as everything else (although of course excellently well-done for what it is - beautifully done "bland" lol) .

While I'm not sure I'd like to see the old style avatars returned as they were, some of them were really awful and embarrasing, I do feel that the new 'cgi' perfect look that has made some animations bland has taken something away from our avatars somewhat and if they keep applying this blandness to the ships then the unique flavour of 'oddity' will be lost and that's a shame.

As mentioned above it can be difficult to determine the race and bloodline of a lot of characters now, some have distinctive features but some can be mistaken for another of the races entirely. I remember a thread a week or two back where someone had an avatar and was asking what race and bloodline it was as they wanted to recreate it. A lot of us guessed and perhaps got it right but there wasn't a great deal to give us any real clue.