Righto! I feel the same way. The Sisters of Eve story missions, “The Blood-Stained Stars”, are called an epic arc by CCP. But if you ask me, there is nothing epic about it. My experience with these missions was that they felt boring, tedious and taking far too long to complete. Instead of experiencing an immersive, incredible story, I got to do homework assignments.
So the question is, how could you do this better? And I’ve been having a couple of ideas.
And I mean, I can list you the obvious ones, like doing voice overs for all the dialogue, rendered cinematics, more dynamic mission progression (i.e. scrap having to dock up and talk to an agent to progress) and so on.
I think most people would tell you the same things, we’re not blind to the world around us. There are plenty of games and movies that show us how immersive storytelling is done.
Aside from that, I’ve been having one funny idea. What if epic arcs were like a public raid event? You could join up and it would take you to a completely uncharted part of space where you’d be confronted with a wild series of challenges. I’m even thinking that they’d be like a bus, only taking place on certain days and certain times, and only taking whoever is physically present at the designated area.
Of course I can understand if you are going to call this all outlandish. The whole thing would have to be fleshed out in great detail, and there are a lot of big questions that would have to be answered for this to be valid (i.e. will players be allowed to kill everyone else inside the event zone?). But if we just view at this idea from a far distance, I think it just might be what EVE could offer that would be a cool and unique experience to this game.
Try the lower level missions, some of them have pretty funny stories, though not necessarily related to the overall lore.
In one mission I remember you had to collect dolls for some guy, in another had to blow up a station because the mission giver got upset he was not invited to the science conference or something, in another the guy wanted to become a successful corp CEO so you had to hunt down the competition and acquire a handbook that explains how to succeed in this endeavor (see below). I think all of these were part of a mission chain, probably separate ones but it was a long time ago.
Even the description has a story of its own to tell.
I did not join EVE for the lore. When you can rub 3 round rocks together that were just lying on the ground and have a star drive, I don’t think there was much story to tell.
I joined to pit myself against the best players out there. I did well by using my own playstyle and making an effort. Meh…
