Player Features and Ideas Discussion

TL:DR, make a feature where you need to know EVE lore to get in game rewards.

So EVE has some lore but very few players know it because it is tangential to gameplay, in a sense the real lore is what the players have done, that matters more than the story the devs write.

However I think it would be cool if the lore could be included in the game.

Also I think what is currently called exploration should really be renamed "gathering" because it's not really about exploring so much as just looking for trees you can pull the leaves off.

So how about this.

1) In Exploration sites one of the drops will sometimes be a manuscript fragment, which is a picture with a few words on it.

2) If you collect enough of these you can either

a) sell them to the Amarr central archives for a set price

or

b) look up in the lore where this passage comes from.

Some fragments will be so small you will need to collect more to "clip" them together before you can understand it.

3) When you have looked up the passage you have you read on in the story to the next major event. This will give you a date and a system and you put these into an in-game "computer".

When you input the fragment(s) and the date and the system you got from the lore the "computer" will spit out a bookmark and then you can fly there.

It could be really far away, sometimes it will be on the other side of the galaxy, you could trade the bookmark to someone else if you like.

4) When you get to the system you use the bookmark to fly to the place and you will find an exploration site with some cans. And in the cans will be a reward and sometimes another fragment or two.

5) Either the chain will end there or it will direct you to another place, sometimes the chains will be quite long.

A really long chain will end in a wormhole that has a massive reward inside!

However a lot of the chains converge so you are racing the other capsuleers to get there first and get the reward.

Maybe the first 3 players in get decreasing rewards.

The manuscript fragments drop a lot so if another player has already done the site it your fragment points to the "computer" will say and you can sell the fragment to the Amarr archives.

So basically it boils down to following the texts that lead you from site to site until the last one where you get a final reward.
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I think this could be really fun, it would get players to learn the lore really well, archaeologist as a profession would mean becoming a lore expert so you could quickly tell to which section a fragment referred.

It would open up cool opportunities to trade fragments and bookmarks with other players.

It would encourage group play as you would want to get in an archaology corp and share fragments and lore knowledge.

Finally it would be really fun to sell someone a bookmark pointing to deep in nullsec and then send a pirate after them to rob them when they get the loot.

I think it has the potential to generate a lot of Indiana Jones style adventure archaeology stories (blown up by pirates on the way to the bookmark but was able to limp to a nearby station and buy an old rust bucket to go the rest of the way before getting robbed on the way out etc etc)

and would incorporate the lore into the game really well.

(The best stories would be teaming up with someone to help you with the chain only to get betrayed at the last minute! Classic)


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What do you think? Thanks for reading.

I'm a fan of the lore and wish they'd put the chronicles back on the launcher like they used to be. As for your idea, it's interesting but I don't think its workable because new Eden is a tiny star cluster and every character is meant to be an inhabitant of the same world, a universe in which people talk and as such would be expected to know about the background in any case. It's also a bit to theme park for the sandbox but ultimately fails because once the mystery is solved by one player it won't be long before you can look it up online via Google search to get straight to the good stuff.