I’ve been running some Epic Arcs recently, and while the storylines are engaging, the experience feels a bit outdated. Reading walls of text from agents seems static and disconnected, especially in a game that has evolved so much over the years.
What if we had animated agents, similar to Aura, delivering these mission briefings? Adding animated NPC interactions could significantly improve immersion, making missions feel more alive and engaging rather than just another pop-up window to click through.
Epic Arcs could be an excellent starting point for this enhancement. They’re already unique and story-driven, so upgrading them with animated agents or even voiced dialogue would be a natural progression. From there, this system could expand further—perhaps even leading to the long-awaited return of Captain’s Quarters.
Imagine stepping into a designated mission area within a station—maybe even behind that infamous “closed door” from the old Captain’s Quarters—where we could meet and interact with agents directly. This could pave the way for more immersive station environments without requiring a full “walking in stations” overhaul.
I know these ideas have been discussed before, but with modern rendering technology and CCP’s ongoing efforts to enhance immersion (like the upcoming changes), maybe now is the time to revisit them.
What do you all think? Would you like to see more immersive agent interactions and a step toward reviving Captain’s Quarters in some form? Could this be the future upgrade to our awesome game that we’ve been hoping for?
I’m all for updating, expanding, and improving the mission system but hard pass on everything else you wrote.
I was around during Incarna (WiS/CQ), and at the time, like many, I was gee-whizzed—for about a day or so. After the novelty wore off, it was just added load time on docking (and occasional crashes). This is why most of us eventually disabled it.
As for immersion, see: Star Citizen for an example of how that quickly turns to tedium. I don’t want to have to exit my ship, go through a door, walk down a hall, take an elevator, go down another hall, go through another door, walk into a room, find the agent I want to talk to, go up to that agent, start a conversation, accept a mission, and then go all the way back to my hangar and re-board my ship—just to run a mission. (And then do it all over again to complete the mission.)
I run the SOE arc every three months to keep certain faction standings above KOS. I don’t do it because I enjoy it, but because I have to. So I don’t read the walls of text. I don’t even know what mission I’m on half the time other than it’s 27/52 or 41/52. The last thing I want is to have to wait on an animated avatar to do their yackety-yack before I can click accept and move on. All that would do for me is to turn a three-hour chore into a four-hour chore.
Yeah, I get your point. It’s true that this would be mostly aesthetic and probably not the best use of dev resources, but me thinking of IA that could make work much more easy nowadays for speach generation, animation etc). But at the same time, I think it could help some players feel more immersed when discovering the game for the first time.
Captains Quarters, for example, were mostly used by traders and industrialists who spent a lot of time in stations. It was pretty cool to see your character with all those fancy clothes, standing on the balcony with your ship in the background. Maybe it was just nostalgia, and good old times will stay good old times… but I still think there’s potential.
Not saying we should go full Star Citizen with unnecessary walking and loading screens, but a middle ground could exist—something that adds immersion without making missions feel like a chore. Maybe it could even attract a new type of player to EVE.
Anyway, I get your perspective, but I’m still standing my ground on this one.
Maybe just an animated avatar like in the character sheet—not a forced animation or long speech turning missions into a movie. I’d hate that too. But something like Aura, a simple pop-up that starts reading the text, while still letting you instantly click “Accept” and undock if you want.
It was cool. For about five minutes. And that’s the thing about pure aesthetics, they don’t add lasting value. You’ve got to also have a gameplay loop that makes sense for the WiS model. (Which is difficult in a spaceship game.)
The problem CCP ran into with WiS was that it was basically a tech preview, and making it into a compelling game component would have required massive investment of time and dev resources. At the time, they were working on the World of Darkness MMO, and so they got to leverage the work they were doing for that game and use it in EVE with very little added dev time. When WoD fell through, the requirements for further development fell back on the EVE team, and at the time, many players felt those resources would be better spent toward fixing existing problems with the game. I expect many people would feel the same today.
Granted, WiS might have been better received had it not been for the leaked memos and the Summer of Rage. But CCP added WiS to EVE, basically because they could. It didn’t add a lot of value, but it looked cool, it would draw interest in EVE, and it didn’t cost them much. However, once WoD fell through and that investment money dried up, the days were numbered for WiS.
All that said, CCP built a crypto game because someone invested $40m. Come up with $20m or so for WiS, and I’m sure they’d be willing to add it back to EVE.
That’s why they might need an update after the epic arcs. And I stand by this: epic arcs are at least more engaging than generic missions and are a great way to understand the lore behind some factions and corporations. They could become even more immersive with animated characters, adding more life to the storytelling. I just noticed that this idea has been proposed multiple times over the years, PVE Campaign - Lessons from Homeworld and other AAA titles
including back in February, Interactive - Epic Arc
which shows there’s a real demand for it.
If the code exists and the engine already supports such updates, why not implement them as a simple upgrade? If it’s not that simple, then it would still be worth investing in making PvE and character personalization a meaningful part of EVE again. Right now, those aspects feel more outdated than ever—mission design has remained stuck in the past, and character personalization has become almost useless. Other parts of the game receive regular improvements—so why not this one?
And speaking of character immersion, the removal of Captain’s Quarters is another example of a missed opportunity. Even if CCP claimed that less than 10% of players used it, that still represents a significant number of people who weren’t considered. If maintaining it didn’t require major resources, why remove it entirely instead of just leaving the option available? Maybe there were technical or legal issues behind that decision—I don’t know. But it highlights the larger problem: features related to immersion and personalization keep getting neglected or removed instead of being improved. The introduction of Skinr also received mixed reactions, showing that there is still a demand for deeper character customization.
At the very least, mission design should match the depth, complexity, and rich lore that EVE is known for. Once the foundation is improved, creating new missions would be much easier with IA tool creating random events. Making PvE more dynamic and immersive wouldn’t just enhance the experience for current players—it could also attract new ones who find the current system too static.
No thanks. I’d rather not have to guess what resists to fit and damage to deal, or what I’m going to be up against in the next mission. It would make them take ten times longer having to go back, refit, figure out the NPC waves, etc. If you are going to do that, then you’d better increase the mission payout and LP reward by a factor of 10…
Because CQ was built on middleware licensed by CCP from (IIRC) a company that later went out of business. It was also 32-bit code and was hindering the transition to a 64-bit client. So keeping it would have meant either re-writing it from scratch, or never delivering a 64-bit client.
