Let us be part of the world : More in-game character presence

[Korben_Miyuki]

I am the kind of player who love to feel immersed into a game.

I want to feel the world, smell it, touch it.

And Eve Online is pretty beautiful. Stations are amazing. Music and sound design are awesome.

BUT…

There is one thing

One thing i miss since the very beginning.

Something that my friends misses too :

TO BE that person, that character who lives in New Eden.

I have never seen my character in the world.
Never seen my friends.
Never seen any shop, any bar, any factory, nothing.

What i would LOVE so much ?

Finding places where i can see my character, and a few others.

You know, even if there is no movement, at least a screen where you see yourself standing in a futuristic bar, sitting inside your ship, “talking” to a NPC in the factory or whatever.

I don’t feel like being a person in this game.
I feel like being a form-changing ship.

And THIS, is the thing that could send this game to the next level, on the immersion point.

Just adding these few little things that makes you feel you are IN this world.

Is this something that has been discussed by the devs ?

Is this something we could see some day ?

Best regards

[Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras]

Tried it. Nobody used it, dropped it

[Korben_Miyuki]

Oh really ? When ?

And what was the feature about ?

In my mind, it is more about adding new stuff on - or changing - the interface.

For example :

• when you go into industry, you could see your character talking with some engineer, and do what you have to do on the interface.

• same kind of thing in the market, or when you manage you ship fitting

• in your ship, you could see the cockpit, or your character in the cockpit

I feel like some of these features could be “easy”, without too much 3D modelisation, using static environnements like these :

Just a few things that brings life into the game, to make you feel you are not just a ship, and give opportunities to just enjoy being there, in this world.

[Korben_Miyuki]

Or like in the old Blade Runner

[Sara_Seraph]

It was called ‘Walking in Stations’.

Maybe with Vanguard, it might return one day.

[Lugh_Crow-Slave]

@Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras

Tried it.

Well, no, not really. The introduction of micro transactions for avatar cosmetics that cost more than the real world clothing equivalent avaliable in the merch store caused a backlash so bad the company nearly had to shut down while they were still working on wis.

Wis then got put on an indefinite hold while the entire game entered several years of life support. All we had was the captains quarters with nothing to do in it so no one used it after the novelty wore off.

Ontop of this ccp desperately tried to use wis as the scapegoat as to why players were so upset to pull heat off the micro transactions they desperately wanted to keep in the game.

[Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras]

@Korben_Miyuki

you could see the cockpit, or your character in the cockpit

Never happen as your character sits in a pod of goo controlling the ship from there

[Anthony_FatTony_Amico]

Another WIS thread?

@Sara_Seraph

Maybe with Vanguard, it might return one day.

It might ngl CCP dipping their toes back into that area.

All about execution of the plan but… 'looks at history.

[Korben_Miyuki]

@Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras

Never happen as your character sits in a pod of goo controlling the ship from there

I didn’t know

[Hatch_Nasty]

Keep in mind, as capsuleers, EVE player characters are transhumans (nearly posthuman). To become a capsuleer, you had to die. Our clone bodies are literally disposable. The only thing persistent is our consciousness. This is why character attributes are only mental. There is no “strength” or “agility” attribute, because your body is a hard drive. Nothing more. That avatar that you put clothes on? It’s not real. It’s a virtual representation of your former (human) self, designed to tether you to your former existence, probably so you don’t go insane. Inside your pod, you’re nearly naked in the goo.

As capsuleers, we spend most of our existence suspended in a fluid-filled egg, experiencing reality through a neural interface. The only reason we need a body at all is to host our consciousness and to interact with the world on the rare occasions we’re out of our pods. If the technology was sufficient, there’d be no need of a human body at all. We could just exist directly within a data storage medium, and inhabit machine bodies in whatever form needed.

So when I go to the Industry window or the market, I’m not going there physically and interacting with other people. As a capsuleer, I’m flipping virtual switches with my mind, instructing automated factories and fulfillment systems to perform services and deliver goods to my hangar.

In short, EVE is not cyberpunk, set 200 years in the future. EVE is transhumanist, set 25,000 years in the future.

[Korben_Miyuki]

I understand your point. I have been thinking about it too.

But i thought about the fact that capsuleers are clones, not AIs.

Which means they are humans in a way, they have a body, they have sensations and emotions, they can talk, joke, get angry, like we do, as players in the skin of capsulers.

Well, at least, that’s what i thought. But i don’t know a lot about the lore…

And if capsuleers spend their whole life in a pod, this is a convenient reason to not develop any social feature like i suggested.

But it makes things a looot colder

[Hatch_Nasty]

All capsuleers were once human. To become a capsuleer, your mind is digitized. The digitization destroys the brain, and so your original body (the one your were born into) is effectively killed. All bodies you inhabit after that are clones, and they are mainly just life-support systems for your consciousness. When you are jacked in to the neural interface of your pod, you become your ship. Your ship is more your “body” than is your clone body.

None of this precludes social interaction. Of course capsuleers talk, joke, feel, etc. Their consciousness is a human consciousness. That consciousness exists regardless of the body it inhabits, and that consciousness can interface with other consciousnesses (that’s why we form corps and alliances). But from a capsuleer perspective, when I can instantly teleport my consciousness into a clone light years away, physicality becomes a rather obsolete concept.

[Korben_Miyuki]

I understand.

So they don’t have any physical contacts or interactions anymore ?

[Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras]

No. How we see our ship in space, since we are in pods, are tiny drones. We dont really have any interaction with other pilots

[Hatch_Nasty]

@Korben_Miyuki

So they don’t have any physical contacts or interactions anymore ?

If you watch videos from CCP, capsuleers are depicted as sometimes leaving their pods to walk around in stations. But from what recall of the lore, that also comes with some risk in that instantaneous backup and transmission of your up-to-date consciousness requires the pod infrastructure. Outside of the pod (caveat: if I recall correctly) a capsuleer who is killed loses any memories since their last mental backup.

Since that kind of gameplay loop never came into being (Captain’s Quarters was a single-player environment), I don’t think game mechanics for such thing have been considered. If WiS made a comeback, it might be the case that you can get out of your pod and go to the bar. But if you get shot and your body dies, you wake up missing skill points or something. Recall that back in the day, we used to have to pay to upgrade our clones depending on the number of character skill points. If you failed to do that and you got podded again, you lost some amount of SP.

[Sasha_Nemtsov]

The OP’s misunderstanding of what constitutes a ‘character’ in EVE did not persuade me altogether to dismiss his expressed wishes.

Yes, our characters are consciousness set in goo and enclosed in a pod, but as players we are not so confined. His desire seems to be a plea for a feature which recognises that difference and seeks to provide the means to engage with it.

I have no need of such a feature, myself, and I think it would be quite difficult convincingly and attractively to implement in EVE. But the fact that the subject of WiS repeatedly rears its weary head might indicate that there are other players who share the OP’s view.

So, not for me, then - but do keep trying!

[Hatch_Nasty]

@Sasha_Nemtsov

Yes, our characters are consciousness set in goo and enclosed in a pod, but as players we are not so confined. His desire seems to be a plea for a feature which recognises that difference and seeks to provide the means to engage with it.

I don’t see how this argument makes sense, though?

If I play WoW, I play an elf, human, orc, etc. I walk around, engage in hand-to-hand combat, ride around on mounts, and go into taverns and shops because that’s what my character can and would reasonably do within that game world.

In EVE, I play a transhuman who made the decision to abandon their human limitations to become immortal. That radical choice came with significant sacrifices, in that my immortality necessitates life in a pod.

Why does it matter that I as the player am not so confined? I’m not playing me (a typical human, living in the modern world). That’s like saying my orc warrior should be able to file income taxes and go to the dentist, because I (the player) can do that, too.

Game lore aside, my core opposition to the kind of thing the OP is suggesting is that it’s just aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics. There is no gameplay loop or reason for such a feature to exist other than to have something cool to look at (a different mode of ship spinning). WiS/Captain’s Quarters was abandoned for that reason: because in its delivered form, it was purely aesthetic. Could it have been made into some compelling aspect of gameplay? I don’t know, maybe. It might have also just added tedium a la Star Citizen (where doing anything requires navigating a 3D environment). I don’t want to play a game where it takes 20 minutes of walking around just to board my ship.

If we want physicality in EVE, I think we should look more to things like Vanguard, where we download our consciousness into a warclone. I’d rather see CCP spend dev time coming up with more things we can download our consciousness into (like giant walking robots with lasers and missiles) rather than waste those resources creating nightclubs for our avatars to stand around in because it looks cool.

EDIT TO ADD: If there’s one lesson we learned from Captain’s Quarters, it’s that “looks cool” as a feature gets old quickly.

[Korben_Miyuki]

About all of this, i am still questionning myself.

Why do we have a portrait of our character, an insight of how we look, with clothes, hairstyle, etc. ?

If we can dress ourselves, what is it for ?

Maybe is it just a “projection” of our avatar, to show others something else then a half-human in a goo, across holograms or futuristics chats ^^

But truth is that we manage to arrange our look (in an cost expensive way ). And if it’s not for ourselves, it is for others.

So, whatever is it for - meeting other clones or humans - in the real world of through some kind of metaverse, it seems there is - at least - some kind of social interactions that needs some kind of presence, and some kind of aesthetics settings.

And then, about the suggestion of this topic, it means that if we don’t meet others (clones or humans) in real life, we can meet them in digital worlds/metaverse.

BUT, as we can jump into other body clones to go at war, like Vanguards, we can jump into “social clones” to go across stations or planets, meet humans, talk business or whatever is needed.

And in that way, in this far future with huge technology, i don’t understand why interactions would limit to a very basic picture-to-picture and voice call feature.

So having places to meet, in real world or some metaverse worlds, sounds pretty accurate to me.

What do you think about these ideas ?

(hope my english was good enough to share my point ^^)

[Sara_Seraph]

Over 20 years you will accumulate a lot of things, which when added seemed like a good idea and had some potential usefulness in the future. Some of those end up on a shelf or in a closet and never get thrown out with spring cleaning.

This game has had a life filled with these ideas, most of which have left little used images in the rich tapestry that is EVE.

[Sasha_Nemtsov]

The fact seems to be that EVE is actually very finely balanced. The game’s designers have to take decisions based not just upon what they think might be good for the game, in terms of enjoyment, but also what will keep a staggering diversity of people wanting to play it.

The two don’t necessarily go hand in hand, because relaxed and comparatively undemanding players like me simply ignore what doesn’t interest them and they treat nerfs to their play style, for example, as hurdles to be surmounted, until the nerfs hound them out of the game. It’s not a catastrophe either way (for me, that is).

Proposing new features is the stock-in-trade of the visionaries among us - though, like their counterparts everywhere, they’re usually woefully short on detail. CCP’s designers will, I’m sure, sift through the contents of the ‘suggestions’ box and, from time to time, pull something out to run with. Not before subjecting the material to stringent in-house testing…probably.

The OP’s dream may yet come to pass…