EVE General Discussion

As far back as I can remember, the marketing line around Eve's universe has been that the capsuleers are amoral, immortal demigods, unfettered by the bonds of mere humanity. You only need to watch the opening cinematics for Eve (including the new Eve Origins one) to pick up on this, and it gets restated pretty much every time a new expansion is discussed. CCP Seagull played the part this time during the Rubicon announcement, and for the umpteenth time watching CCP talk about it, my eyes rolled back in my head and I let out a long, heavy sigh.

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(...)While Rubicon sounds like it is firing on all cylinders from a game-mechanics point of view, it sounds like the expansion is continuing down a course of using the fiction as purely a justification for game mechanics, something that drives me absolutely batty.

Eve is Real?

The root of this issue is that CCP has an obsession with trying to make the game mechanics justified with regards to the lore – and not just some, but ALL of them.(...)

Unfortunately, this creates this dissonance where NPCs are incredibly powerful on the one hand, but incredibly impotent on the other. CONCORD can vaporize any ship and has a vast armada that can be sent anywhere at any time, but they aren't capable of taking any kind of preemptive action. Their headquarters is blown up by a fleet of ships smaller than what even most second-rate nullsec alliances can field. The Amarr Empire is ruled with an iron fist, but you can suicide gank all day outside the Emperor Family station and that barely raises a 'meh' from them.

CCP's focus on player interaction is not, by and large, a bad thing; after all, over the last ten years, it has created probably the closest community of players I've ever seen and an MMO. A feat unique in a field of mostly WoW-clones. On the other hand, it has also made the lore look increasingly ridiculous. When I write those lore spotlights, I'm hardly surprised when there are comments to the effect of “lol nerd nobody cares.” And really, why should you, when CCP constantly harps on the fact that the lore and the world of Eve is meaningless to players? Why even bother with it at all if CCP is so afraid to make the NPCs act like actual people instead of vending machines for ISK and LP?

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Don't Tell Me Who I Am

The other thing that bugs the hell out of me about the constant “you are an uncaring ******* demigod” line CCP loves to repeat is that it simply isn't true. Yes, a great many players do relish the ability to give in to their darker instincts and pillage and scam their way through space, but not all; maybe not even a majority, considering how many people are content to mine, mission, and trade their way through highsec. On the other hand, there's many players who do want to play the “good guy,” whatever that happens to mean to them, and I'm certainly one of them. There's a reason a fairly good number of people have settled in Providence with its NRDS rules of engagement, despite the fact that the game is clearly not designed to support such an ROE.

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What's worse is that this mindset seems to lead CCP to neglect anything that doesn't fit into that “I'm only out for myself (or my corp or alliance)” box. Factional warfare? It's an arena that is pretty much only about keeping score and getting the phat lewts at this point. You're Minmatar, or Intaki, or Krusual? Who cares, it's completely irrelevant to anything. Who should you run missions for, the Amarr Navy or the Republic Fleet? I dunno, which faction gear do you want? In essence, most players only make decisions on interactions with the game world based on what gives them the most tangible benefits right now because CCP has a) designed the game in such a way that that is the only criteria worth considering and b) made your past choices utterly inconsequential with regard to your future choices. That latter element is almost completely the opposite of the marketing done around everything that happens outside of highsec, yet it's tolerated there because heaven forbid anyone make the “NPC world” relevant to anyone outside of RP nerds.

Final Thoughts

I am not laboring under any delusion that this opinion is going to be the majority opinion out there among the Eve player base, nor do I think that Rubicon, as it has been revealed so far, is going to be anything other than good for Eve as a game. Hell, even with all this bitter RP nerd grumbling I'm looking forward to the expansion for the changes to warp acceleration mechanics alone. I'm just disappointed that for as much as CCP seems to be focused on making the game of Eve better and better, they seem just as insistent on making the world of Eve weaker and weaker. The promise of Rubicon from a gameplay standpoint stands as a rather stark contrast to the months-long lull in any sort of metaplot development of live events, after a number of FanFest panels where it sounded like we'd finally get some momentum on the storyline front. Even if reports of the metaplot's death have been greatly exaggerated, as CCP Falcon claims, it appears to at least be in a rather deep coma.

When it comes down to it, I don't play Eve to live out some sort of Randian ubermensch fantasy, I am playing it to be immersed in a rich science fiction world. Unfortunately, CCP seems focused on making that world increasingly irrelevant, locking it into a death spiral. If the world and its metaplot is meaningless, why should anyone care? And if no one cares, why should any effort be put into making it actually interesting and relevant?

Its true.

People will whine about anything these days.

I always find it interesting that people assume that world lore and world response can only "throttle" player content. What if it creates player content? What if it reflects the content that players create by leaving a lasting impact on the NPC world? What if it *gasp* occasionally forces players to admit that hey, there are a couple of other powers out there? Terrain and weather make for more interesting tactics, even (and especially!) when they aren't convenient; if Sansha Kuvakei ends up throwing a spanner (and a cyno jammer) in the works of some carefully planned capsuleer conflict, so much the better! It's now a more complicated and more interesting conflict.

The more EVE's NPC presence feels like wallpaper, the more EVE feels like just another game; players may be able to create content, but that content rarely has any lasting impact on the universe, because only CCP can modify the universe.

This is the one area games like WoW actually beat Eve, because WoW is much, much more PvE orientated, and thus effectively lived and died by the flavour and the story telling.