I am not sure much of a forum user so I apologize if this has been posted before. o7
I’ve been enjoying the heck out of EVE and I do remember quite some time ago we had a form of FPS known as “station walking”.
Would it be worth enhance the single player / co-op experience by adding a First Person mode to our current missions? By this I mean in a combat mission you would have to clear out all enemy contacts then board the enemy ship/factory to gain access to an item/mission agent. The same could be done for hauling missions (i.e., seeing your ship get loaded/unloaded, interact with agents via FPS, etc.).
Again, I am not sure if this is something anyone would want. This might be the most awful suggestion ya’ll have read in a bit but I know it would enhance my experience and that of my friends who co-op every so often.
Share your opinions or rip it apart, would love to hear from fellow pilots. o7
So… I’m new here, but this is a topic I’ve watched over the years. I played DUST 514 in the PS3 days, and I had friends playing EVE all the way back through the game’s history, so I’ve been keeping at least somewhat of an eye on how the game works since launch, just never played myself - unless you count DUST - until a few days ago). With that limited (but better than most new players) experience and awareness of the history of New Eden in mind… there are quite a few holes in your suggestion right now.
“First person” means first person, and EVE’s “station” (more on this later) walking was third-person, not first. To understand the contrast, Destiny puts players into first person during missions, but hub areas are third-person. A third-person view is useful because it lets you actually have a more realistic sense of situational awareness in melee-range combat (note that Destiny also switches to third person with some melee weapons). But it’s also useful for non-combat gameplay where you customise your character, because it lets you actually see your personalised character model. This is one of the primary reasons anyone actually wants the ability to walk around as their character, so using first person and taking that primary aspect of the feature away would be silly.
The “S” in “FPS” stands for “shooter” and while there was a shooter set in New Eden and connected to EVE Online in the past, it wasn’t actually a part of the EVE cliient (it was the PS3-exclusive DUST 514). The “station” (dont worry, this is the next point) walking didn’t involve any shooting, and isn’t going to in your proposal either.
I hinted at this previously, but… the “station” walking belongs in quotes like that because you were never able to access the station proper. Part of what makes EVE Online what it is, is the single-shard nature of the galaxy. When you’re in a station with 1000 players, you aren’t arbitrarily split up into various 20 or 30 player “instances” of tthe game world to limit the scope of that encounter. The stations themselves were never explorable hubs, players had a couple of semi-private spaces to wander around in, with the option to invite limited numbers of other players into those spaces. It wasn’t a freely-accessible environment for everyone at a station to wander around in.
Even though the out-of-ship gameplay was introduced in an extremely limited way when it existed in the past, it cost massive amounts of development resources (include server requirements and dev time as well as more tangible costs) and would have been a far bigger strain on the game’s functionality to actually let players interact freely enough to add to the game’s sense of immersion. Have you seen any game with graphical detail even remotely comparable to EVE Online which supports over 500 unique characters in the same in-game environment and involves person-to-person interaction? Even in non-online games, it’s rare for that many character models to be loaded into the same instance of a game world, and the games which do so have far less detailed character models because of it. Add in the additional limitations of online communication to that, as well as more than doubling that playercount on a normal day in Jita, and… you can see why they never had actual station walking in the game.
Even if it was implemented only for the AIR career missions, this wouldn’t really be beneficial. It would paint an inaccurate picture of gameplay, waste many development resources to do so, and compromise the experience. The AIR career missions are inroductory content which is meant as a tutorial and introduction to the game, not a showcase for a side element of the game that isn’t really part of the primary gameplay experience. And adding this feature only in select stations wouldn’t really work, because either it would never be used because nobody’s in those stations, or it would overwork the servers because it’s been implemented in the trade hubs that already handle enough players to need specialised hardware to handle the amount of data throughput necessary in those regions.
Adding the feature you’re asking for (FPS) would be a lot more practical from a development perspective as a separate game, not as a direct in-world part of EVE Online. The devs have mentioned that they’re working on this - but it’s the third time they’re trying to bring this idea to life. DUST 514 had a lot of major issues on launch, not the least of which was a single collection of massive bad decisions that were rolled out together as part of the game’s 1.0 launch (it had a long beta which didn’t end up letting the testers experience anything like what the game was turned into on launch). Many of the changes they made for launch were directly harmful to game balance, and needed to have been tested (and recognised as bad ideas so they could be rolled back) before the 1.0 release, but were dumped live onto the server on launch day without seeing how they impacted the game. Implementing those changes caused more problems for more players than it solved, and destroyed game balance in major ways, but the imbalances it created were never addressed while the game was live. Following the shutdown, there was a long gap before the next shooter in New Eden was announced to be in development. Project Nova was scrapped during testing, with some suggestions that a well-known gaming news platform’s preview of the game was a primary reason why. I haven’t heard of there being any official statement to support this, but also haven’t heard of it being outright confirmed to be false either, so can’t say if it’s true or not - but the game’s test build was opened up to journalists and wasn’t received positively in the state it was in at the time.
Adding the feature you seem to want (neither first person nor a shooter) is something they’ve experimented with in a very limited form in the past, and it didn’t work. There’s no indication that the reasons why have changed meaningfully. It would put a lot of strain on the devs and the servers, for little to no worthwhile expansion of the player experience. It’s something that would potentially be nice to have if it was reasonable to add but all indications at present suggest that it wouldn’t be.