Assembly Hall

So, after Incarna, as we all know, CCP had to resort itself, and it lead to effectively the death of WiS. We had one expansion after Incarna that added to WiS, which was the additional merc quarters. Since then, nothing. Before the riots and all, CCP was gung ho on treating WiS as a whole 'nother game, indicating it would receive a LARGE portion of the development effort. I am not asking for that.

I think about 15% of every expansion should be WiS. (A good expansion balance in my book would be like 40% major feature revision for the expansion (i.e. Retribution = bounties, Odyssey = exploration), 20% quality of life enhancements, 15% balancing, 15% Walking in Stations improvements, 10% DUST/Valkyrie integration work.)

There's a lot of potential that's been abandoned. The game is in much better shape than it was during Incarna, and the reasons for doing Walking in Stations now is so much greater than it was then. I think the idea of a common area that DUST mercs and EVE capsuleers could mingle on a station would add volumes to the feel of game integration. Take that, and add in a couple years, EVE Valkyrie pilots being able to enter that common area from a first-person virtual reality perspective... and you've just changed the ball game.

Team Avatar was created, and then Team Avatar was disassembled, with no outward progress. CCP has nailed the idea of widespread iteration in the last three expansions. WiS needs to see that iteration. Many of the assets already exist. The bar from the PlayStation Home area would make for a fantastic basic common area. Three games can potentially benefit from this one project.

Reasoning has been given in the past that it was hard to find meaningful gameplay uses for WiS, but I don't think that's necessarily important. EVE has often gone from players creating their own gameplay, and then CCP later supporting it. If we open up the area, let the players come up with something to do with it.

A point has been made about the amount of effort required being too much to count as a minor step, but I feel minor steps could be taken. While I think between the existing assets/design from PS Home, we have the makings already of a good common area, a first small step, could be allowing one guest to visit your Captain's Quarters. Something as simple as a right-click option in the station occupants list to visit their quarters, along with a accept/reject dialog for the hosting player, akin to a start conversation dialog. (Of course, entering someone's quarters should create a private chat of occupants automatically anyways, so this would make sense to be a near identical dialog.)

Realistically, it should be possible to coincide these. I would doubt anyone working on Walking in Stations has expertise with regards to ship balancing and vice versa. I definitely want the graphics V3 upgrade finished, but that's almost done, art-wise. And some of the initial improvements to WiS could be done without art. (Aforementioned "visit other person's quarters button", for example.)

No.

Second Life disagrees with you.

I'd argue that I see a significant amount, in other MMOs, of players hanging around in city areas chatting, doing business, managing spreadsheets, etc. Now, you can indeed sit in your Captain's Quarters and do all that, or spin your ship, and do all that. But the feel is very different. Captain's Quarters and your ship hangar make you feel like you are in an isolated bubble, even if there's tons of other people in the station.

As others have pointed out in other discussion threads about improving EVE, seeing more ships in space has a drastic impact. You want to see "Oh, look, there are other people about." A feeling you cannot get in a station. Make it so you can see people moving about. Throw a stupid dance emote in, and you've made people ridiculously happy. Normal people, anyways.

If you want, you can even go so far as to give yourself a bit of a short-range intel, in allowing people to look out the window on the undock.

I'd spent Aurum to change the stuff in my Captain's Quarters. If it was cool stuff. Though that's a decent art workload.

Ravasta, I definitely see mini-games serving a purpose. We already know many players go play other games while in the hangar. Or ship spin, which is practically a mini-game in itself. (Imagine if EVE ever has Achievements. Congratulations! You just spun for the 100,000th time!)

I wonder what mini-games could be integrated with low development effort. Slay already exists, and would just need to be ported from PlayStation Home. The hacking mini-game is neat, and I wonder if it could be repurposed as a two-player in-station mini-game as well.

Shah, I have a couple comments:

- It's a definite thing that development effort needs to remain small. CCP went too far for Incarna. However, by taking small bits out of the EVE, DUST, and Valkyrie teams, they can create a compelling cohesive product across all three games without impacting any one game too hard.

- The next couple points can be addressed easily. As capsuleers are vulnerable when not all capsuled up, we should assume that first-person combat will not be available in a shared space between games. This means that you still have to undock to do... most of any of the games. It also means it's easy to have them in the same space despite differing engines. Port the graphics assets into each engine. Each game is just sending positional and descriptional data between so that each one can render movement properly. Also, I figure eventually, DUST will someday be using the same Carbon-based engine EVE is. It's just absolutely impossible to run that on a PS3.

You're completely safe in stations now too. I think station content should be interesting, and develop over time, but in no way a replacement for space travel. I could see missions that involved a station-side component, provided that MOST of the mission was in space.

It is that simple, if you aren't talking about combat. All you have is animations and movement. They don't even have to be perfect carbon copy in appearance, as long as the space is the same scale, and the people moving within it look roughly the same. As a game programmer, yes it's possible. It does have challenges, sure, but it's the sort of challenge CCP is good at. Insane ideas like putting two games in the same server.

And I don't expect to see DUST running on Carbon's graphics engine for at least three or four years.

Second Life already exists, and has a decade head-start on CCP in terms of avatar-based content. What you're saying here is 'CCP, please spend our subscription money on a watered-down clone of Second Life rather than spending it on developing new features for the game we actually play'.

There is zero chance that CCP will deploy this content before Star Citizen does, CCP is going to sit tight and count their initial player losses when citizen goes live next year. They will let citizen lead the way while stemming what losses they can and look for areas what fans hate and design their products around that.

Would you rather cross a mine field first or follow in some one's foot steps?

Modern graphics cards have no problem working with WiS. And I'm not asking for putting spaceship development on hold.

If by "horrible system hog" you mean "competitive with other modern games", then yes it is.