EVE General Discussion

CCP's problem is not only whether its devs and programmers can be competetent and proactive enough to deliver development of the game's graphic and physics engine and connection to the other EVE Universe titles. The main issue and obvious disadvantage to RSI is the direction given to development and the platform and marketing choices made.

Yup... we'll see...

Yeah. I'll either stay or leave based on what they announce for the winter expansion.

Years of "soon"(TM) has taken its toll.

I wouldn't be too quick to laugh. Other things languishing under the title "Soon"(TM) include

- modular POS
- comet mining
- Direct X 11 update
- farms and fields for low sec (as opposed to moon sized ATMs)
- most of what was promised for Dust514
- update to planetary interaction

So go ahead. Have a good laugh. But do so in the knowledge that nothing that CCP says is guaranteed to ever happen, or if it does, to meet their hype.

Sure, but Eve was also barely playable when it released. If they'd released it into the current MMO market it probably would have died rather quickly.

Sure, maybe it does things better than Eve but I don't think it's really going to be covering a lot of the same ground as Eve and seems more likely to compete with Valkyrie than Eve Online itself.



No, but I'm a designer so when I see them talking "pie in the sky" future vision stuff I place it in the context of "next 5+ years" not "next expansion".

Historically CCP have made a fair number of mistakes as a company in how they communicated things with their player-base and that's gotten them in trouble, but I've also been around long enough to see them learn and adapt based on those mistakes and that makes me trust them more rather than less.

Stuff like the ship rebalancing may not be as fun or exciting to some people as new content but it's still very much needed and, IMO, long over-due considering how long the game's been out.

If you feel, based on actual evidence, and not tin-foil plated paranoia, that CCP is taking the game in a direction you don't like then door's and can I have your stuff



^ A good example of a "pie in the sky" list, more or less with the exception of the PI update (since that ties into Dust 514 which has its own issues right now)

Overall, I've yet to see a game that really "lived up to the hype". This is something of a fundamental problem with both how gamers view games and how publishers market them. Players have fond memories of their first games when things were new and exciting and they want that feeling back, but that's not going to happen. But, they imagine a game before its released as giving them that feeling so when they don't get it they feel lied to and cheated. This is something of a simplification but I feel it captures at least the gist of the issue.



Well, that's your call. Personally I'm going to stick around and keep going since I like the direction the game is heading and I'd rather it get there in one piece rather than rushing and having bits fall to pieces along the way. That is, more or less, what caused the Incarna debacle.

I would, however, direct your attention to this blog post by Ripard Teg, CSM. Most of it can be ignored, the relevant bit pertains to the image down at the bottom.

The long and the short of it (and I do recommend you read the full bit) is that CCP does have long term plans going forward but it takes time to get there.

Welp, they've got two or more years before Star Citizen is out. Overall I wouldn't expect Star Citizen to deliver on their "Hallelujah plan" for the game at launch either, the things people expect out of them are way too much to get done in two years for the scope of game that they're talking about. If they pull it off I'll be pleasantly surprised, but the emphasis there is on surprised >.>

Which one? Eve or Star Citizen? (also editing to reflect that the "them" was talking about is Star Citizen)

No, I've got a pretty good idea of what it takes to develop an MMO from the ground up, and 2 years is a *really* ambitious time frame, even with a 20 million dollar budget.

For reference CCP has over 300 people working on Eve Online. 20 million is about enough to employ about 200 people for 2 or so years, at an average wage of ~75,000 a year (since they're based in Austin and Santa Monica seems pretty reasonable), with a little left over for business expenses like software, hardware, building rent, ect.

Overall CCP actually employs fairly talented people by industry standards. Maybe not top-tier tallent in every department but they're successful and can afford to pay good money for good people, which they have a history of doing.

RSI is a new company with a lot of buzz but they're probably not going to be able to pull in absolutely top-shelf people for every single position, which probably means their average can only, in absolute best case, be a little higher than CCP's or the industry's as a whole. The average in the industry says that good MMOs take a lot of development time, tend to be released somewhat light on features compared to what the devs have talked about, and then build up over time post-launch.

I present as evidence of this:

• World of Warcraft - Huge budget, especially for the time and spent far more than 2 years in development. Still released with a good number of bugs and issues and was fairly light on end-game content at the start, especially compared to these days.
• SWTOR - Huge budget, massively hyped, fell flat on its face on release. Not a ton of content, very linear gameplay, overall very disappointing.
• Dungeons and Dragons Online - Two years in development, unknown budget, still released with a fair number of bugs and issues and very light on content. Didn't really come into its own as a successful game until a year after release when it went free-to-play.
• Planetside 2 - Just released, 18 month development cycle, unknown budget, and still coming into its own a year after release. Optimization update planned "soon".
• Guild Wars - Great game, 2 years in development, still really buggy on release, though less so than probably most others on the list. Also less ambitious since most content was instanced. Also the people who founded Arena Net originally worked on World of Warcraft.
• Diablo 3 - Can't forget this one. Worked well technically but the gameplay had major issues that still haven't been fully resolved.

Star Citizen is a more ambitious project than most of these and has a smaller budget for the next 2 years than Eve Online does. Overall I'll be somewhat surprised if something doesn't give between here and there, either the feature list, or the release schedule.

Like I said, I'll be happy if they can pull it off, I just don't think it's going to happen. MMOs are notoriously problematic during development and the more people you're dealing with the more problems you're going to have. Hence why I say it's probably not going to release on time or it'll release on time but missing some promised features to be added... "soon"

They are releasing the features already, and when they are all out they will make the full release available.

It's funny/sad, this thread is no longer about what CCP can do to make EVE better, its more about what another company is about to do that EVE should have done a LONG time ago.

SC = Dust514 + EVE + Valkyrie all in one game on one platform.