EVE General Discussion

#4 must be that pesky/imaginary real life thing that shows up with you press quit. Not sure why anyone would clonejump over to that, except maybe to avoid your brains getting scrambled at downtime.

Now that would be awesome. The sins of a solar empire Eve mod is rather lackluster.

I would put the RTS element into Legion with a Campaign Marshal overseeing the map and unit movements from a command center and every unit being controlled by a player. Every soldier, every tank, every Quafe Blimp is controlled by a player and the Marshal gives movement and attack orders from a streamlined interface.

This can then link into a turn based strategy/civilization game to develop and govern planets. Somewhat like Emperors of the Fading Suns, just with tens of thousands of planets.

A few thoughts crystallized today on the heels of Kirith Kodachi’s excellent tea-leaf analysis (go read it now) of everyone’s favorite new trailer, and I am ready to tell you what it all means.

I’d been looking at the trailer in the wrong light, so to speak. No doubt it is a vision of the future; how could it be anything else, with EVE, DUST and Valkyrie toons working together? That’s the usual rah-rah, as Kirith notes, and its realization is coming Real Soon Now, along with WiS.

What it isn’t is a story waiting to be told. This isn’t a picture of those new stargates everyone’s going to be constructing next year. Oh, no–commence primary illumination! This is an event which has already happened. That new space we as players know we’re going to get access to? What we see in the trailer was the first large-scale attempt to access that space, over a year ago. The action tells us that that first gate experiment was a failure. Or, as the engineering world has it, a qualified success.

The professional robe-wearer and utterer of gnomic prophecies wasn’t just repeating sonorous nonsense. Let’s posit that the prophecy is more or less on the money, in that vague way that the best foretellings have of being. What is “more primordial than the elements themselves” that could also be described as a storm? The Primordial Soup, that’s what. The ultimate chaos in which everything and nothing existed.

The Theology Council and the old Empire were manifestations of order, and this superduperprimordial chaos is exactly the sort of thing that mature, bearded and robed men who utter prophecies professionally would despise and fear. It would be the ultimate heresy, and the immortal people who tried to activate this gate were therefore the ultimate heretics. The Amarrian fleet didn’t hot-drop in to seize control of the gate, but to destroy it. A key to new worlds, and therefore riches? Power blocs everywhere would want to own it…except for those tied to dogma forbidding it.

Fast-forward one year. Records have been analyzed. Survivors of the gate fiasco, or its architects, have determined what went wrong. This new space can be accessed safely if the theories hold up, but new tech is needed to do it, tech capable of withstanding the most powerful force ever thought to exist. That means new research conducted in secret. That’s right; I’m talking about the ghost sites. Not only are they training us in how to crack relics and explore space. They are our means of getting there, or will be when those scientific and engineering projects conclude. By then, the knowledge will be too widespread for any one fleet of Amarrian fundamentalists to stop. No wonder we capsuleers were warned away.

Other capsuleers have opined or implied that the new space is a way back to Terra. I don’t know about that, but if other prophecy can be believed, the journey will be costly (“the appetite of nothing expands over the world”). Perhaps this Prophecy trailer showed us that fourth event. If Terra is in our future, we won’t like what we find (“the little brother makes the final sorrowful steps home; he is not welcome”).

The possibility of Terra interests me less, I think, than the space we would traverse to get there. I like to think that CCP will take the opportunity to introduce a multi-shard architecture that doesn’t require the Band-Aid of Tidi. A mass player emigration (or Diaspora, maybe, if the new gates are as ultimately destructive as prophesied) would be the time to rebuild the game.

The “entity” of the prophecy? I think it’s the Soup, but I also think that it’s only a barrier to our entering the space, and one which we are going to breach next year. You veterans of Odyssey who took seriously that expansion’s call to learn the art of exploration are almost ready. You will map the new space that the battle-fleets, diplomats and industrialists will tame.

http://badwrongfun.org/2014/05/21/duncan-explains-it-all-the-prophecy-trailer/

Hm, while I can't say much about the whole "Earth" thing (There's a few links here and there, I mean some of the relic site thingies are modelled after the Terran ships from the trailer...) I've decided to look into the whole "Entity" angle a bit. Do please yell if I mess up the lore somewhere.

First, let's take a look at Damella Macaper. The Chronicle places her time period to "a century ago", which - according to the "The Capsule and the Clone" chronicle is the time period around which Jove gave the technology of Capsules (but not the mind transfer) to the humans. That said, proper capsuleer technology isn't around yet - it's still yet to come about a hundred years afterwards, which would be YC105.

Since the capsule itself isn't integrated with clone/conciousness transfers yet, Macaper is Gallente and it's the Caldari who have the design (handed out by Jove) it's safe to assume she's a normal, mortal human. A nutcase prophet, but a mortal one none the less. Her prophecy would also quite likely be addressed to mortal people - and, well, how exactly do you make people try to comprehend a Capsuleer?

From a player standpoint, it's easy - it's the same mechanic that has guided us through the decades of gaming. In an FPS, you join a server, pick up a gun, frag someone and then take a railgun to the face - click a button, respawn. It's simply a nice in-lore explanation why you can keep flying when "killed" - that said, a few times CCP references the existence of immortal pilots in the world. To put it short: "Literally Cthulhu".

A fully staffed Dreadnought has about 10k-25k people onboard. It also costs "mere" 3-4bn ISK depending on fit and tends to be punted into a battle as a suicide-siege ship. "If it stays alive too long, I won't get the insurance". A Battlecruiser can carry up to a thousand and is often considered, in larger conflicts, disposable and prone to dying en masse (Ye olde Drakefleets. We welped one? Let's form another, no shortage of Drakes. We're still finding Drakes in random places after that.) - and that's not mentioning ships lost on drunken roams.

Hell, if we look from the point of view of the killers, we see people who hunt big or shiny ships for their precious killmails. Add to that those who just want to get into any fight, for the thrill of the fight no matter the outcome.

Again, since we're merely players playing pixel starships, it's perfectly understandable - a big kill prompts a round of "Holy crap!" "Niiiice..." "How did you catch him?" "Screw the loot fairy.". We want to have fun and we have it - even the non-pvping mission runner who finally blasts enough rats to bits to get a new, shiny pirate or faction boat gets his bit of satisfaction - be that spinning it in the hangar or running missions (up until TORNADOS! Happen. Bee-nados if it's Goonswarm - like Sharknado just full of bees).

However - most of those actions result in tens of thousands, if not more normal "mortals" dying to satisfy the capsuleer's need to have fun. Is it easy to comprehend an entity that pretty much cannot die, and callously toys with the lives of others for its own entertainment?

"Not an entity such as any you can conceive of, nor I;" and "yet constantly coming into existence even as it is destroyed."

So my assumption is, that bit refers to the Capsuleer - the player. Now, "Child of Chaos" angle is actually pretty easily explained - the first pilots to use the Capsule were used in the Gallente-Caldari war. They weren't yet full-fledged immortals due to the absence of cloning technology but they supposedly outperformed normal crews.

"More primordial than the elements themselves" This will be a stretch - going back to, once more, human mythos. The element of fire, for instance - stolen from the gods and given to mankind - is a symbol of civilization and progress. The technology eggers have at their disposal is impressive (I mean, look at it. Frikkin' laser beams. Wanna bet there's also sharks with laser beam attachments? There probably are. And you can probably buy them in Jita - without a permit.) but they are brutal and barbaric in nature.

Exceptions to that rule exist but let's face it - most, instead of rising up to use their immortality for some great deeds, prefer to indulge in their favourite past time of blowing **** up. Alternatively, stabbing each other in the backs and then blowing **** up. You catch my drift - New Eden is literally heaven as seen by Michael Bay - there's an explosion waiting for you around every corner.

Alright, geez, what a wall of text I committed. Summary: the "From the formless void's..." bit could refer to the players/capsuleers.

To the second one there's a funny thing: it mentions "Final steps home". That could mean someone who is already on their way. "Sorrowful" implies that he's not coming back angry, with vengeance and desire to destroy. There could be something around, it could be a dead end because CCP didn't cook up anything yet.