I’ve been actually planning this thread for a while now, but i rarely have time to commit to my EVE backlog. It’s wednesday and my trading platform is slow and rather predictable right now (standard weekly cycle, boring but nerve pleasing), so why not use the time here.
Considering recent and current changes and new features, adding dev comments i’ve seen into the mix, i can say that EVE’s future indeed looks bright!
What we will eventually see is space full of activity. We will play in a space, where the NPCs will be actual enemies and not just money farms. Where shooting an NPC has lasting negative consequences for the pilot, not much unlike ganking a fellow player. It will make the game as a whole much more believable, because there’s no sane reason for people to get away with killing literally BILLIONS of NPC humans, without them trying to fight back. From the perspective of a living, breathing universe this just doesn’t make sense.
CCP is heading towards the equivalisation of PvE and PvP. They’ve said it often enough and LifeBlood shows us a big step towards this. It’s literally the holy ■■■■■■■ grail of an open world, full loot sandbox MMO.
They are now actively attempting to shift the population towards seeing miners as important assets, who need to be defended. When you require a protecting fleet against NPCs, this same fleet will then be also there to protect against suicide gankers, or wardeccers!
Think about it! The newest NPCs fly ships with actual fittings made for the task at hand, and behave like players! They even call for reinforcements when you’re having it too easy dealing with them! They warp around and hide in open space and there are ways of finding them, too! The more CCP blurs the line between PvE and PvP, the more people will grow into a universe where danger’s simply are part of the game and where potential death is something that will indeed lurk around every damn corner!
Imagine you jump through a gate with negative standings against Angels, in a hauler, and they’ve decided to camp the ■■■■■■■ gate on the other side!
People will have to live with the consequences of the choices they make. It’s not just anymore going to be suicide gankers and lowsec pirates, who will have to suffer from standings issues. No! In the future, where PvE and PvP is equivalent, it seems that NPCs will not be treated much differently than actual players!
BUT WAIT, THERE`S MORE!
Not only will it matter who you shoot, it will also matter which empire you pick! You will, at some point, be able to even play for pirate factions, if we can extrapolate from the coming ability of supporting pirate factions in Ressource Wars! Yes, that will be a thing eventually, according to CCP Dragon, from whom I’ve taking a good part of information I’m typing down here after extrapolating it into the near future.
There will be better, new, more complex missions, too! They even hope to give us players a mission editor, so we can create our own! It might or might not be just “beta” or only available for a limited time, but tapping into the gigantic resources (time, and imagination) of the player base is the best ■■■■■■■ way of making sure that we will see high quality content coming eventually, with far more complexity than the old missions had!
But, of course, things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day either. It is important to consider that not only is it a gigantic amount of work, but also that the population might reject sudden chances to what they are used to.
It is incredibly important not to rush changes of such magnitude into the game. Instead, CCP is doing what they are doing best: slow population control, with only radually implementing changes to acclimate the current population (with those opposing dropping out slowly, instead of all-at-once) and the new generations growing into them. For them it’s new and they don’t have negative bias. They’ll be playing under a new “Norm”, and that’s a good thing.
And this leads to the best part.
When PvE and PvE are equal, suicide ganking will become mainstream. People will be accepting it as normal, because death is death, no matter who shoots you down. People will grow into fleets, war and the need for self responsibility. From the ground up will they learn that cooperation and self responsibility are important factors and that death is inevitable. It will pave the way for changes of war declaration mechanics, aggression mechanics and maybe even the end of CONCORD, simply because they’d not be needed anymore in a fully vigilante society.
And it will mark the end of the totalitarian, solo playing, toxic carebear, because this game will absolutely not be for them. We’re already seeing them complain about the implementation of co-op PvE and how, of course, nobody wants this. Of course the solo playing people too will get their content, but it will not be as easy anymore, and it certainly will be much more dangerous.
AND THEN, AFTER ALL OF THIS, there is still NewSpace™.
I’m Yellow Parasol for EVE ONLINE; thanks for reading.
Back to you, Jeff.
