EVE General Discussion

Why use an existing wheel when you can reinvent a new one?

Incarna was too good to be true... sadly...

Having an avatar which walks around a room or station with other avatars adds zero gameplay to an internet spaceship game. This game is not about what happens inside stations, and never will be. It is about space and spaceships. Primarily burning down the former, and blowing up the latter.

They were developing a game called World of Darkness. The plan seems to have been to use the same engine in both Incarna and WoD.

That turned out to be more time consuming and expensive than planned or they didn't simply have the money in the first place.

What you saw of the engine in the CQ is essentially a Beta test. And in the end you need content to go with your engine. And that takes more time and more money...

Add to the fact that they are doing Dust 514 and maintaining EVE at the same time it's a doomed venture with the income from EVE being the only steady funding to pay loans and stuff.

Especially after ppl started to resent the frozen nature of content in EVE and lack of any attention beyond maintenance and a torrent of unsubbing started. Then they noticed that the finances weren't likely to add up.

In the end it's all about money.

They will add the remaining CQ's in the winter expansion.

It's rather the further development of what to do with WiS. What do you want people to do in stations and so on.

That's a rather big process and takes time. And you don't really know if it'll improve a game like EVE all that much.
They don't seem do have fully worked that issue out. And spending money on that while players complain, rightly, about stagnation in the FiS part of the game is kinda difficult as you alienate the currently paying playerbase for something that maybe later on might get you some subscriptions.

CCP needed to fix the situation now, so they axed WiS till later on when they have time and money to fully work out the concept and create the content needed to make it work.

Right now they need to finish Dust and stop people from leaving EVE.

So it would be right that WiS isn't a hurdle, just takes money and time that they simply can't afford right now due to various reasons.

You can't just stick one engine into another and expect the two to work. Integrating the Unreal engine into the existing EVE client would probably have required just as much work as developing the WoD/Incarna engine, and the results would have been much less impressive.

From what I've read, the Unreal engine, and other engines, do not offer the functionality which CCP wanted, and adding that functionality would have either been impossible or required so many resources that it would have made more sense to develop a custom engine. CCP chose to develop an in-house engine precisely because it could then make sure that engine contained all of the features it wanted, and not have to pay someone else for the privilege of using it. Keep in mind that no other game offers the level of customization found in EVE's avatars, or the detail of movement. Watch a character turn to see what I mean: most games just have the character spin around; EVE's characters actually come close to the way a real person turns in place.

The Incarna engine is actually quite nice. The problem is that it is really intended for a game that is to be released in two or three years. Consequently, it is meant to run on top of the line hardware, and is very resource intensive. In two or three years hardware will catch up with CCP's vision, and the results will probably be awesome.

The problem with Incarna is that CCP had a general vision, but no way to implement that vision in any meaningful way.

I have heard a few people claim that CCP actually had a workable engine for WiS a few years ago but scrapped it and went back to the drawing board. Does anyone have a source for this claim and/or any further info on why this decision was made?

Sorry for going slightly off-topic Elise but this seemed like a good place to ask and I thought the answers might be of interest to you re: your OP as much as they are to me.

There were a couple problems with WIS. First, CCP had no experience with this kind of technology, and are ill equipped to even attempt it. I won't call it overly ambitious, but it's like a watch maker trying to build a sailboat... there is just very little overlap. Also, they never had more content planned than /dance, and some minigames that really wouldn't do anything for EVE, so even fully developed, it was going to do absolutely nothing for EVE.

But the reason why people unsubbed over it was that people took it as a sign that CCP had given up on ever fixing the problems that are literally killing EVE.


I have not seen anything about it from the EVE devs about it, but it's obvious the CQ's we have now has absolutely nothing in common with the incarna we were shown at fanfests. Literally nothing. The old incarna took advantages of some interesting technologies, were filled with vast explorable spaces, already had multiplayer interaction, and had some playable gameplay elements. It wasn't enough for it to be a feature complete expansion, but even in it's rough state, was playable. "Play" doesn't even begin to describe the CQ we got.

All deleted beaceuse CCP

You know that message when

they GETING GANKED
We'll counter-attack as soon as
we properly outnumber them