Honestly, I find the story, lore, characters, and dialogue of most games to rarely rise above serviceable. Sure, many games will feature one or two memorable NPC’s or lines of dialogue, but they’re usually just a big pile of meh. And I don’t understand how some people have so much praise for some of these games. Recent example, I found the story, world, and characters of (edited title) The Outer Worlds to be extremely forgettable. Yet, I’ve seen a couple of video essays praising the characters. And I thought the story behind the apocalypse in horizon zero dawn was unbelievably stupid. Yet I’ve seen people praising its story.
AI designed to murder goes rogue and is killing all life on the planet. We must design another AI to terraform the earth and reseed life. But what if something goes wrong? It would definitely take too much effort to fix. Better to make yet another AI designed to kill all life so that the life AI can start fresh. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?
Oh I almost forgot, I play games for the game play, and not the story. Don’t get me wrong, I like those things, but it’s kind of like asking for good acting in your porn. Unless you’re playing a game specifically for the story, it’s mostly window dressing.
P.s. disco elysium is a newish game that is worth playing for the story and characters.
Do you think maybe the activity tracker should afford some minor buffs related to their niche? Like you’ve spent 500 hours mining, maybe you get to choose a permanent related buff (obviously not something extremely broken, but 1-3% on something or “Your time in the asteroid fields has taught you the value of logistics - you have gained a 3% increase to all ORE mineral holds as a result”)
CCP focuses on paying customers & caters to them. If developing role play & universe flavour brought in the $ like botting & multiboxing quality of life changes did then CCP would develop the RP & the same goes with any flagging content ie, new player experience or say alliance tournament.
It however does not so there. Move on & be happy or stay & accept this fact, feel free to make your own rp, newcomer help & tournament as part of the community, many do.
Future development will cater to the content that raises the next 1/4 subscription income. Any content that diminishes 1/4 income will be reverted immediately. Content that fails to raise 1/4 income will not recieve further development, ie, siphon units, alliance tourny, walking in stations & soon to be twitch partners.
Poverty patch will remain despite 1/4 drops owing to the terminal effect easy wealth has on long term subscription sales, ie if you are poor buy plex & raise this 1/4’s which is slowly happening. If 1/4 subs rise due to tollerance of community to sub then expect even more poverty.
Personally I 100% ignore the activity tracker. Ding ding ding you made 100 jumps. Uhmmm thanks K guess.
What would be attractive to the activity tracker is skins and appereal to show your current rank.
Like idk… a hardshell helmet to wear as a rookie miner for example or a dirt cosmetic giving you a dirty face so you lool like you just spend your workday in a coal mine. Something that signals what you do and for how long u been doing it.
Progress rewards like in project discovery but for the tracker.
I have to agree with the OP here that the underlying story of EVE has been woefully abandoned. I was just digging through old (like over a decade old) news archives and I found it astonishing that at one point we had news posts almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day, with lore-driven updates about the goings-on in the game.
When I first started playing I printed out a volume of the scientific articles and lore and found them to be honestly a cut above not just most video game lore but even above most of the mediocre sci-fi stories churned out in books and TV in the past decade.
Of course the focus is on the players, and Andrew Groen’s Empires of EVE is certainly proof that storytelling can be derived solely from real players’ activities, but at the same time those stories would not be possible without the strong foundation built by the original developers. Lore exists not as a sidebar or a piece of trivia but a backdrop and an inciting inspiration for players to craft their own stories.
CCP is constantly trying to figure out why new players have a hard time jumping in and how to fix it, when clearly a huge component is context. If EVE is presented as just a spreadsheet simulator with a bunch of extremely esoteric jargon to learn, most people will be immediately turned off. When people talk about the “learning curve,” I think it’s not even so much about the interface and the systems as it is the fact that people have to really work and spend a lot of time in the game before the game has any meaning.
Who the hell cares about names like TEST or BoB or World War Bee? Those words mean nothing to the uninitiated, and they provide little context for new players outside of Kotaku articles telling them they could lose $300,000 in a single fight. Even if you learn about them in detail, they still mean just about nothing if you aren’t already involved in those alliances.
Accessible, engaging storytelling, both in the form of lore and in PvP-based narratives like Empires of EVE, are essential. They allow players old and new to feel that they are a part of a living universe, as CCP is so desperate to advertise, and without them we are seen increasingly as people who click on rocks for ISK and that’s about it.
Well, everyone has their own tastes and opinions, but it certainly seems that for the past several years CCP has opted for your approach and has all but entirely abandoned the lore. I wasn’t around for the early days of EVE, but if most people truly believe that the past 5 years have been the best EVE has ever seen, then I guess I’m just in the minority opinion.
Huh Empires still seems to be around, and gibberish lore is what passes for these events, so no I dont think they have.
Whats your evidence for that? The lore is the same as it was 5 years before that, and five years before that. Almost nothing has changed, and anything added is always added in such a way as existing lore doesnt even interact with it EG Sanshas Incursions and the gibberish surrounding Triglavians and why they are allowed to be here.
I can accept that Lore comes second and content first, it’s a game after all. But if the lore is lacking, doesn’t make sense or has serious holes in continuity it then hurts the RP and that’s part of the game and the game hurts from it.
Also, no one forbids anyone to create and/or add to the lore. There are some big gaps in the lore for the earliest events in New Eden and the events from before the EVE Gate wormhole collapsed conveniently explained away as “no one knows/remembers”. A lot of the lore is incomplete.
So, no big deal. We just have to fill the gaps with our own imagination and that’s what I’ve been doing. I may post it all in the Lore section of the forum or merely link to a blog. It won’t be the “official” lore but it will be something people can base in-game RP on. And if not, it will satisfy my own Role-playing needs.
There is an entire subforum called Intergalactic Summit where you can make up weird Eve lore and argue about Eve news items. Be forewarned - it is a strange place.
I checked it out. That’s not what I have in mind for completing/creating lore for EVE, that’s just forum participation and discussion.
I’m talking something more in depth that, ties in with existing lore, completes the gaps and give a general sense of continuity.
The devs do what they do best, good or bad is only players’ opinions and at the end of day each one has a supervisor to answer to.
That’s better than a game that tells me what to do next.
And since it’s “player driven” then the Lore can also be player driven. We don’t need to stand around and wait for devs to give us lore and they have better things to do, like, make the gaming experience better.
I like what they did on the last patch and I hope the next one will be just as good.
