I’m sure this question has been asked many times already, but I want answers for myself.
Why do so many Eve player raise hell over the suggestion of getting out of our pods, walking around a ship/station/planetside structure and doing stuff appropriate to such environments?
I learned of Eve Online through Dust 514, which had just recently launched at the time, so seeing the captain’s quarters was among my first experiences. I came to like the idea of having a room to myself in the station. Over time though I realized everything you could do in the CQ you could already do from the hangar screen. This combined with noticing an always-locked door off to the side had me wondering.
I did research and found that CCP had more planned but never went through with it due to player backlash. They only got so far as implementing the CQ, which itself was eventually removed to my sadness.
I always believed games like Eve would benefit from such a concept. It would add variety and immersion (for those who care about it) and, if implemented correctly, would not take away from the game’s core space-based gameplay.
But to this day I’ve seen people suggest this idea only for others to shoot it down and say the game is better off without it.
So I ask: Why? Why do people not want this to be a thing?
They implemented WIS and there was backlash, but the backlash wasn’t to WIS specifically as a concept, it was to Greed is Good, $70 microtrans, an apparent trajectory toward golden ammo, and the sheer amount of dev time that had been spent on giving us a World of Darkness hair physics tech demo.
They sell SP packs in the store, now, so you could say the concerns were essentially on point, I guess.
No, it wouldn’t take away from EVE’s core game, if the game had a world set in the stations/on planets. Which as of now, there isn’t. Just sitting in your CQ and watching a loop on a screen on the wall gets old really quick and it doesn’t go anywhere.
Fenris would need to create a whole new world that exists solely inside stations and/or planets. Something for EVE players to do that is exclusive to that world (if it’s not exclusive, why would you get out of your spaceship to do it?). That’s a huge development, probably as huge as EVE itself. The game would be richer and more varied for sure, but it would mean double the hardware/personnel/maintenance costs. It’s probably just not worth it cost-wise at this moment. At the end of the day they are a business and need to justify their investments.
PS. Most of the upset I’ve seen players have with CQ conceptually was directed against EVE being turned into some type of a dress-up game. But that’s because there was nothing else to do in CQ at the time. I think it is possible to create a whole new world that exists inside stations/on planets that would be continuous with the EVE universe, however, like I said, it’s an effort as huge as whole EVE itself likely.
The problem is that it takes dev time to build an entirely new game engine, time which isn’t spent on the spaceship part of the game and on a new separate game mode which takes people out of the spaceship part of the game and makes the universe less alive.
I walked around in the captain’s quarters and while it was nice, it also was pointless.
All our in-station activities in between spaceship action is currently done through the UI while docked, which is quick to do and often even doable while in space.
To have a loading screen to transition to a walking mode where you need to spend more time to do something which could quickly have been done through a UI window means people either have to spend more time not flying spaceships in this spaceship flying game, or they can bypass the walk-in-station mode which makes walking redundant from a spacehip flying game point of view.
Is walking in stations nice? Sure.
But I wouldn’t want significant dev time to be used on that instead of the game.
Just because CCP didn’t follow through with the initial concept of Walking In Stations doesn’t mean the overall idea of having Avatar gameplay content in Eve is bad…
In fact CCP actually tried to implement a variation of that with multiple Avatars competing against each other to collect loot from structures in Exploration sites… Unfortunately the main issue they had was the system would crash when more than two Avatars were active in the site…
And then there was Dust 514, a great idea of having a planet based Avatar game interact with the space based Capsuleer game allowing each one to affect the other… Course instead of making it a PC game, CCP foolishly implemented it on Playstation 3 which was eventually shut down…
However, fast forward to present day and we now have Vanguard, a PC based Avatar game set within the Eve Universe… Basically that’s what CCP should have done with Dust 514…
That basically brings me back to Walking In Stations and more importantly, Captains Quarters… If Dust 514 had been implemented as a PC based game, CCP could have made the infamous ‘Door’ in the CQ be the gateway into Dust 514…
Now even if the Avatar shooter players were only interested in playing Dust 514, they still would have had to create an Eve character and enter the space based Capsuleer game so they could then enter the planet based Avatar game… Who knows, maybe that little bit of exposure to the space based side of Eve could have brought in more Capsuleers…
Now if Dust 514 had been implemented like that, it would have definitely given us space based Capsuleers the option of doing planet based Avatar game play if we wanted to while still being logged into Eve… Just a thought, maybe the Captains Quarters could be reimplemented in Eve and have ‘The Door’ be the gateway access to Vanguard..
I don’t know what people want but if I want to play a game where I wander on foot and do stuff, there are already several good games that allow me to do that.
In No Man’s Sky I am a humanoid.
In EVE Online I am a ship.
Same difference
If I want to have a vast amount of gameplay on foot in a sci-fi universe I play Warframe.
Or if Vanguard does well Vanguard could take that role of walking on foot in a first-person shooter sci-fi universe, as this is the core gameplay there too.
A game with ‘walking on foot’ as core gameplay is always going to have far more interesting walking content than EVE could have as a side-activity of a spaceship game.
On the other hand EVE has the better spaceship combat and multiplayer aspect.
I started playing and the first expansion I saw was the walking in stations one, I thought it was kinda cool, and most of the blacklash seemed to be about the dev effort, the increased demand on GPU, and the pointlessness of it.
At the time I was a highsec pirate and during wardecs you’d often end up camping a station and people wouldn’t undock to fight you.
I thought it would be amusing if you could dock, leave your captain’s quarters and go round to theirs, knock on the door, and fight them there, or maybe in the bar or something.
But I’m not sure that really enhances the gameplay, and people would be very upset if things in their hangers weren’t safe, so there’d be no real point to the out-of-capsule gameplay.
This was the main problem with the CQ and WiS in general. It was a visually cool concept that quickly lost its appeal because it served no real purpose. CCP was working on World of Darkness at the time, so they had this “free” tech they thought would be neat feature to add to EVE. The problem is, the engine was for a completely different game where ambulation made sense. The WoD core gameplay loop was walking around and doing stuff.
When added to EVE, we only got the walking around part—there was nothing to actually do. Naturally, for many players, the coolness of the feature quickly wore off.
Could there have been cool stuff to do inside stations? Sure. But that takes time and money to develop, and once the WoD MMO got cancelled, there was no outside money for CCP to keep developing CQ/WiS.
Had it only been for lack of funds, the feature might have lingered to this day in its nascent state (the same as the character creator has). However, CQ was built on a middleware stack that eventually became a boat anchor around the devs’ collective necks. Eventually, it had to go to allow the rest of the game to keep making progress (specifically, from a 32-bit to 64-bit codebase).
Personally, I’d be okay with a return of WiS provided the development wouldn’t distract from everything else for several years or more (but it probably would). Also, Fenris would need to start, not from a tech demo, but from a well-designed gameplay loop that justifies ambulation in the first place. I’m not interested in simply revisiting CQ as it was.
A while back, I had hopes that Vanguard may be the engine that eventually gets us to meaningful WiS play, but at this point, I have serious doubts that will ever happen (and perhaps, not without some major compromise like dropping the Mac client for EVE). Who knows, though? Maybe after Vanguard flops as an FPS, Fenris will pick up the shattered pieces and turn it into another dollhouse for EVE.
Because most of the activities people propose don’t really add anything to TQ
So you can get out of your pod and walk around the station, to do what exactly?
There isn’t anything you couldn’t do with less system resources and faster just by using the existing UI and most stations will have no players in anyway so its not like you could even really have minigames to play with others, most people would get bored of it within a week and then never use it again due to it making basic tasks slower and then CCP would still be stuck having to update it and QA it even though nobody will really be using it
Personally i would rather that money and dev time be spent on actual useful features, CCP isn’t some massive company where they can really afford to have people working on random stuff that isn’t improving the game
