Sims in Space

Finally Incarna is getting real. The blog post Captain’s Quarters reveals what is coming first. And I must say it looks very pretty. The big question of course is ‘is this useful / fun in any kind of way ?’. Unless you’re forced to dock into your own private 3D space in the station, won’t this be something you look at every once in a while and forget about it ? It seems like you can’t actually do anything in your private quarters.

The second reason is that the last thing any of us want out of the introduction of Incarna is any detrimental effect to existing gameplay, server performance and other unforeseen but possible side effects in an environment as complex and interwoven as EVE is.

This quote from the devblog is a little odd. I thought that CCP had always stated that Incarna will be a side thing run on different servers and won’t effect the current game. Apparently that is no longer so ?

We haven’t worked on Incarna/WiS/Ambulation for five years. Focus has been on development of EVE. Even for this summer Captain’s Quarters are one feature among features.

From the forum thread by CCP Chiliad

This is a really weird statement. From fanfest 2006 on forward CCP has said they were working on Incarna or whatever it was called at the time. Seleene’s blog has a nice post that also refers to this. CCP Chiliad either expresses himself the wrong way or he’s just confused. Probably best not to read too much into it, but CCP employees should be a bit more careful about what they say in public.

Anyways, it’s a good thing that finally after all this time Incarna is finally getting real. Though it seems that all the worries from a lot of people, CSM 5 included, that there won’t be much substance to it, are getting real as well.

4 thoughts on “Sims in Space”

  1. Thanks for the mention. That post on the official forums caught my eye as well. I think that he probably intended to say something like, “We haven’t worked ONLY on Incarna/WiS/Ambulation for five years.” At least I hope so, because otherwise it’s just blatant trolling. 🙂

  2. My understanding is that CCP is broken up into various development teams who each work on what ever project is assigned to them at the time. So while some people may have been working on Incarna since the dawn of time, CCP Chiliad’s team has not.

  3. Nobody really knows how much they’ve worked on incarna over the years. It’s possibly they havn’t been working on it non-stop since they announced it, in fact I think it’s likely they handed much of the development over to the world of darkness team since they’re using the same tech.

    I think it’s alright, I mean, if it wasn’t because the tech is used by world of darkness it would have been a complete waste of development time in my eyes since it’ll have no gameplay features. Sure it’s neat, and if you look at the amount of people who collected all sorts of shit (spaceship models etc) for their “captains quaters” in Mass Effect 2 I’m sure it’ll please a lot of people, but personally I don’t see any reason I’d use it more than once or twice if it doesn’t actually enhance the gameplay.

    No you may argue that we don’t really know what it will do for eve and that it may yet surprise us, but considering who many times people have talked about it lacking gameplay over the past 5 years and the fact that CCP never once came with an example of anything different I just don’t see it happening.

    But who knows, maybe 4 years from now it’ll be possible to land on a planet and do a little FPSing with dust, visit your PI factories and slap a few underproductive people around or whatever without ever leaving the EVE client. So it may just be an investment into the future.

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