EVE General Discussion

The player base wanted WiS, the problem with incarna was they didn't get it, instead they got one room which players that had well above the required rigs couldent run, and the alternative was a blurred screen instead of ship spinning, the problem with incarna was the lack of promised content, greed is good and $1000 e-jeans, so before you run your mouth you might want to understand what you're actually talking about.

for referance, watch hilmar talking at fanfest about how they were t working on wis, then the reaction of the crowd and his apparent confusion, we want wis not walking in one closed off room, that's the issue.

Yes. Yes it was.

The mistake with WIS was not necessarily WIS itself but the implementation combined with the NeX debacle.

Exactly.

CCP was looking for ways to use as much as possible of their existing tools and resources to create new platforms (or streams of revenue to use biz speak).

One obvious way was to streamline their code to both be better and more up to date but also less EVE centric and more a generic game engine.

Which is what Carbon was and still is all about.

To get a better business case (or maybe because it actually sounds smart) they decided to start building the first ,or technically second, game using this new Carbon engine in parallel to recoding core elements EvE into it.

That new game (and new IP) was, and still is, World of Darkness.

And there's already been a lot of good stuff coming of Carbon even seen through the camera drones a dedicated space faring pod pilot. Because a lot of the core code in EvE was written by a very small team, on a very small budget and with a main goal to get something up and running before they lost their homes.

But to use Carbon for anything else than EvE, or rather rendering anything else than spaceships, they had to add a new rendering system that could handle avatars.

And that's when stuff went pear shaped.

There was, and is, several engines that can do that, but that would also mean buying the right to use that engine and grafting it into Carbon. So they decided to write their own.

Mainly because it was critical for WoD, but anyone could see that while not critical to EvE, it would be very very good to have.

In a perfect world it would have worked.

Take all the working stuff from EvE, add a new IP, recode stuff (that kind of worked but according to Devs having to work it makes could make "Baby Jesus Cry") and then add whatever new (and game independent from scratch) code they needed.

It would have meant that EvE would be better, more polished, less buggy and with shiny new features while at the same time adding a whole new game (and revenue stream) to CCP.

But it didn't, management felt invincible and decided to not only to do that (Carbon/WoD), but also to reuse their IP and server technology to pick up a new customer segment and add a console FPS to the mix.

And they ran out of cash and had to take some quite drastic decisions.

Why they decided to keep pushing for Dust and turn WoD down to a slow simmer is a completely different issue.

So back to WiS and Avatars.

With the Avatar part of Carbon needing lots of more development to be of any relevant use in EvE and WoD development on slow simmer with no release date there was no longer any resources available.

There was an attempt by CCP to find a good enough case for Avatars in EvE to continue pushing without being able to share the load with WoD. But such a case would have to be based on a solid addition to game play.

But that prototype was shot down by the management. Not because it was bad, but because it wasn't good enough.

Was all the resources poured into to Avatars wasted? Probably not, since it's still in development in Georgia.

Will there ever be any Avatar game play in EvE? Probably, but not until either the WoD code and tools has been developed and matured enough so that it can be integrated back into EvE or that someone comes up with a serious brainwave and presents a better idea for Avatar based game play in Eve than the one that was shot down.

I want to walk around more and punch people in a station, does that count?

I want to believe.

It'll be exactly the same with this new stargate/space idea that everyone loves (at the moment), you watch.

Youuuu just waaaatch.

"No one wanted new stargates" - GD 2015

*hold hands up like a gypsy curse*

I really hate revisionist history.

The statue shooting and unsubscribing was over the NeX, Pay-to-Win, and because Incarna didn't deliver enough avatar gameplay for the time it took to develop it.

The origin of 18 months, just as a further FYI.

For a given value of failure.

They failed to get it good enough to serve any more serious game play within the amount of time and resources they had available.

When they chose to remove a major amount of resources from WoD, there was no longer a valid case for pushing WiS.


What we got was an implementation of what they had and what they judged worth to implement.

One can also be a wee bit cynic and add that they got a serious amount crash dumps, bug reports and use cases that can be used for next iteration ;)


It's a young thread, and one that might bring up quite emotional reactions memories from CCP staff.

Remember that when we got parts of a future game removed or delayed, they had friends who lost their jobs.