Tag: walking in stations

Blog Banter 62 – Walking in Stations

This time the discussion topic is pretty straightforward :

What is and/or should be the future for walking in stations?

A properly executed version of walking in stations would surely add to the game. Keyword here being properly. With actual things to do, even if it’s just decorating your house / home with war trophies. I don’t think CCP has the resources to do so at the moment, and probably not in the foreseeable future. Even if they did, they still have the PR nightmare that Incarna brought fresh in their collective memory.

Every thing that could go wrong went wrong with the Incarna release. Of course to start off, the version of Walking in Stations wasn’t very good. There was nothing to do except for sitting on a couch or look at your current ship in the hanger. Only one type of station room, very bad performance once inside. Character animation was horrible, you walked like a drunk and probably more issues I forgot. People were mad because it took them 3 years or so to come up with this. Lots of dev time wasted.

Then we got $1000,- designer jeans, monocles, ‘Greed is good’ and the whole thing escalated, almost resulting in the end of the game. Wilhelm over at tagn did a nice write up, no need to repeat it all again here. With this in memory most players as well would cringe at the idea of more walking in stations. Hence the current focus on space ships. And it’s probably for the best. It would take quite some work to do it well, better not do another half arsed version !

More entries over at Ninveah.

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.