This is kind of a features and ideas post, but I thought it felt better here because the post is more about gauging the community reaction (weighing the pros and cons) and talking about the game concepts behind the idea, than an actual proposal.
EVE O already has a first person mode, so the concept in question is talking about a ship that makes use of that mode in a serious way (rather than just for memes or creating station undock bookmarks.) EVE Frontier is also doing work on the first person / third person camera and how to structure the game around that, so all that game design work could be brought to EVE Online to facilitate fighter game play.
So⌠I guess the real meat of this thread is⌠would this even be a good idea? I could see an issue with game balance, and then thereâs the issue with how to make them sufficiently different from frigates to make them interesting and worthwhile of actually including in the game.
I do think itâs technically feasible (at least in lag / tidi free environments,) but it would be a pretty big shift away from normal gameplay. That could both be good, and bad.
EVE Frontier is modifying the game engine to allow for aimed shots, but the way thatâs being done there would not be viable in EVE Online. It might still be doable with the current locking mechanics, but I could see how some people might feel that would take away from the fighter pilot aspect of this sort of game play.
I suppose one thing that could be done, would be to make use of warp mechanic math. Iirc, you have to be 5-10% alignment deviated from your target destination in order to warp. So CCP could use that same math to determine a hit. (EX: player hits fire weapon button, is player aligned toward target? if true = hit, else miss.)
EDIT: adding some random FPV footage from Youtube. Active flight starts at 1 minute.
I mean on principle: Oh hell yeah! That would be badass and as a dab hand in piloting planes, Iâd feel right at home.
Practically, there are some major, gigantic roadblocks that need to be overcome to make this happen.
The biggest roadblock to that is that the game handles interactions in one second ticks, and that will also apply to the responsiveness of the controls of your fighter plane. Every move, be it steering left or right, speeding up or slowing down, will be delayed by a second, and that is hilariously bad to control (trust me, I tried this with frigates).
Aside from that, the way that combat works in the game right now, wouldnât really reward player controlled fighting planes. The reason is that turrets and launchers can fire freely in all directions, and the orientation of the ship doesnât matter. That sucks for a really fast and agile fighter plane, because you really want to make use of dead angles, weakpoints, orientation of your target, possible obstructions in the way⌠like all this kinda doesnât matter right now, and itâs part of your core identity.
So to make that work, youâd have to fundamentally change literally everything about EVE Online as you know it. And hey, if CCP is down for it, Iâm not opposed to it. If I can play EVE Online while piloting a slick fighter plane and rip across space, dodging and weaving through bullets, Iâd throw down some extra money for it, thatâs for sure.
Iâve flown around a bit in first person with frigates too, but havenât actually tried to fight with it (I should give that a try sometime in a level 1 mission or some anoms.)
Is the tick rate really a problem? EVE Frontier went with 4 hz, so perhaps thatâs enough of an improvement to make it work, but Iâm not sure itâs enough of a difference where using EVE Oâs locking mechanics (and perhaps the line of sight targeting with the warp math) couldnât work.
Do you have video of your frigate tests?
If there was visual feedback of the âsteering left or right, speeding up or slowing downâ being delayed, would that make a difference in how you felt about it? (When driving a boat, you have to account for the lag because you will drift in the water past your steering position. It seems like if there was a client side visual indication of input - such as a throttle bar - that might make the experience feel better to the player.)
From memory, the first person piloting felt pretty responsive, but itâs been a long time since Iâve done it so maybe Iâm not remembering it well. I assume what is happening is your first person camera movement is local to your client, and then when the tick arrives, direction is adjusted based on the direction youâre looking at that time.
I could see firing your weapons potentially being a problem, but the solution there seems similar to the directional movement. Or maybe we could just forego directional weapons entirely, and stick with EVEâs Omnidirectional guns.
That would make fighters less competitive against other EVE ships, but that could potentially be solved though balance, such as making player fighters really cheap (such as, you spawn in on an npc carrier and you help defend a FW poi. This would give new (or lazy) players a way to participate in FW even if they didnât have resources for ships) or you make player fighters have high alpha low fire rate weapons to encourage gun / bombing runs.
Assuming tick rate isnât an issue (maybe the EVE O server moves to 4hz, or just the people who are in fpv get 4hz⌠somehow. OR some software wizard writes some code that makes it irrelevant.) :
I guess the first hurdle would be spatial awareness.
EVEâs fpv is clearly not meant to be much more than memes, but if some 3d mapping and targeting UI were added, it might actually be usable.
I donât really know what else youâd really have to change to make the mode usable.
considering the capsuleer isnât a FPV nor on the âbridgeâ idk why people keep bringing this up.
the view of your ship, is what your capsuleer sees via all the cameras surrounding it.
Fighters are manned by humans that arent capsuleers, while the capsuleer (the player) is piloting the carrier.
First person flight would be interesting, and Iâve recently heard that some other form of eve, not the actual eve, has a system where you can hide behind âroids and pop out to scare old people that are mining, and have to actually aim or something.
I personally like that idea. I think having local telling you there are people, and overview showing where they are if they are near you, is bad. Especially when they are on the other side of some massive turd.. i mean asteroid in space. I get it that the capsuleer isnt actually seeing what the players do, and only has sensors. So that should mean, at least based on my understanding, you shouldnt need a cloaking device to be hidden.
Edit: I have absolutely no dod gamn idea why it tagged you and not the OP i clicked respond on.
It required specialized equipment to play it (VR) and then CCP didnât market it telling people they could play it without VR. Valkyrie also had no influence on the main EVE Online game / server.
All of which is irrelevant do the discussion in the OP, which is just discussing whether or not it would be a good or bad idea to make use of the FPV view (thatâs already in the client - though it would have to be altered) for a new player piloted ship (a fighter.)
sure, redesign frigates so they can dog fight and move the clone to the bridge where they can see what is going on instead of sitting in a pod of slop.
the current pace of combat is too slow for that kind of maneuvering. Even Frigs in EVE have nowhere the maneuverability in first-person view that you may remember from games like X-Wing, Tie-Fighter, Wing Commander, Privateer etc⌠But if you implement Fighters that would have such a maneuverability to feel actually agile in combat, theyâd probably almost impossible to hit for normal EVE weapons. If youâd compensate that with even less durability and firepower than curent frigates, you have the problem that they either have barely any impact on the battlefield and die almost instantly if application-support like painters and webs or just enough range come into play. Or Light Drones would just massacre themâŚ
the 1-tick-per-second mechanic would make this kind of combat feel pretty weird. Weâd need at least 10-ticks-per-second to achieve a somewhat smooth and entertaining manual gameplay. Which I cannot imagine to be achieved anytime soon, at least not outside very limited testing scenarios.
Point 1+2 together would mean youâd have to invest an incredible amount of research and development for the game to make that possible. And probably investments into hardware infrastructure. With unknown outcome. How many additional playery can you gain with that feature? Is it worth the costs?
To be constructive: What I could imagine are small steps towards such a direction that do not have huge costs attached, and then see what the feedback of the players is.
First: Create a Controller-Support and a Rubberband-Mouse Control for the first-person view. The general mechanics wonât change at first, your weapons could still fire all around, but you could begin to at least âfly manuallyâ like in a dogfight. Players will find out how to adapt to tracking/angular issues in this mode over time. Maybe it offers opportunities for pros to use that mode in very small and agile ships. We can test it and nothing changes for the rest of the game.
Second: Create a âfaster ticksâ test area where EVE runs at 2 ticks per seconds. If that works, 4 ticks per second. If that works, 10 ticks persecond. Of course thats at the start not possible in open space. But it could work in Abyssal Deadspace where players are limited to 3 (mechanically) and the number of NPCs is also very limited. Monitor how many resources it eats up, if the sync can stay stable etc⌠If that works fine, apply the mechanic to grids with very low player presence. For example if a player runs some mission or is mining with just his 5 friends, the grid runs in âperformance modeâ, as soon as other players arrive on grid, it would switch back to âstandard modeâ. Could lead to issues with cloaky players warping to you tho⌠if the server switches, youâd know someone is around even if you canât see him. An issue that would need to be adressedâŚ
I canât see why I would do this instead of just sicking a pack of drones on the target. I donât really see the purpose adding this into EVE.
If it was its own separate game? Absolutely. But beyond just âhow would you do this with server ticksâ I donât see the value in flying an Itty bitty tiny ship with a wildly different control scheme.
There are more than enough space sims built from the ground up to give you that experience.
@Syzygium Thanks for the reply, and thoughtful input.
That is something I hadnât considered. It would be interesting to see how effective that would be.
In pvp it wouldnât mean much though since pretty much all small gang / solo pvp ships are fit with a web.
I think Iâd go the other way, by making them free / extremely cheap compared to frigate play. (minimal lp cost for spawning on an npc, or 1-2m if spawning on a player carrier, per fighter at most.)
The intended gameplay would allow players to get into combat quickly, without having to run around in space searching for a fight. So the idea is a player would kill and die many times, so it doesnât really matter too much if theyâd die quickly to larger ships. (And of course, their presence will draw new players in frigates. And those players will draw players in larger ships.)
So: spawn on a pve carrier (such as in a fw battle field or complex or a number of other locations) or allow players to spawn on player carriers for a minimal cost (aka: fighters,) but could pass on the cost to the player who spawns in the fighter.
I have yet to do my fpv testing, but Iâm meaning to do it. I intend to do it with a blaster atron, which should mimic fighter gameplay fairly decently.
I do wonder if it might be possible to give players in fpv mode a higher server tick rate than other players in the same system (when not affected by tidi.)
I imagine, if CCP wanted to play with the idea, theyâd do their testing on SIS first, but maybe theyâd need to do something similar on Tranquility to see how it plays with the live server.
That does sound interesting and would provide a good testing environment. If CCP turned it into an Event, they could have it last a limited time and not affect the main game.
As I understand it, CCP doesnât have the ability to apply backend server stuff to grids. The smallest scale they can work with is system wide. That said, it might be possible to run the server at 10hz for one group of players, and only 1 hz for another group.
That depends if their server tech can handle that though.
If the hz rate only changes for fighters, and no fighters can cloak, it wont be an issue. (Granted for testing, theyâd not be creating player fighters, just the UI for the fpv mode. So testing would mostly be done with frigates. But if itâs just testing, I donât really see the cloaking issue being much of a problem since itâs just a temporary issue.)
From what I see, most of the development would just be UI related. Iâm not entirely sold on the idea that you couldnât make fpv fighter combat work with the current 1 sec tick rate. Iâve seen some incredible frigate play by some players, and that was quite fast paced. I just think in order to make it work for fighters, players need better situational awareness that isnât the overview. (What theyâre doing in EVE Frontier I think would be a good place to start.)
I donât know how many extra players EVE could get, but I do think it would help move EVE into this next era of gaming. With games like Star Citizen becoming more fleshed out, EVE Online does risk losing population by not evolving.
Iâm always a fan of that approach when applicable. Which is actually one of the reasons why I brought this up in the first place.
Being able to do what EVE Valkyrie couldnât (yet fulfill the dream) with what amounts to merely modifying features already in the game seems promising.
Controller support isnât something I considered, but makes a lot of sense.
Do you think that would be an improvement to the current flight mechanics? I think I might prefer an independent mouse for targeting.
Perhaps a toggle, that would let you switch between what it currently there, and your mouse movement.
Yeah, Iâm starting to think this would just be preferable in general. Maybe there could be certain weapons that could be directional eventually, but itâs not something to worry about before people even decide of they like the mode of gameplay.
