Lore wise where are we headed? There have been a number of new factions introduced. The Deathless. The Drifters. The Triglavians.
Each one creates excitement when introduced but then…just kinda sits there. They have content associated with them, but they don’t become a core feature.
I am doing a bad job of communicating this I know. I have read lots of books, watched lots of movies, tv shows, played lots of games. And usually I can get an idea of why something exists. Oh this is the new big bad. This is a mysterious enemy that could become an ally when some unknown new bigger bad shows up.
But I don’t get that with the lore reveals in this game. Is it just rule of cool? Someone made a cool ship design at the office and they decided to make a whole faction for it?
Why were the Triglavians added to the game? Why the Drifters? Why the Deathless? What is this all leading up to? I can run missions and encounter Sansha and Blood Raiders and a bunch of other pirate factions. Or if I go pirate I can fight Amarr, Concord, and a bunch of normal factions. But the NEW factions just don’t exist in the lore. NPC agents never mention them. I never get a mission that affects my standings with them.
Is the new content the game adds all little islands that don’t exist outside themselves?
Sleepers, Drifters and Deathless all vaguely tie in to Jovian lore. Maybe the Triglavians do too, I don’t really know what their deal is. The Jovians are the mysterious fallen precursor empire that had many offshoots, including definitely the Sleepers and Drifters and possibly also the Deathless (and the Talocan and the Takmahl and several others that have not had any new story developments since 2010).
CCP uses them in a very MacGuffin-like way and it’s quite unlikely the mysteries around them will ever be properly explained. They’re often the source of some new revolutionary technology; the Jovians gave the empires the capsule, Sleepers are the source of T3 cruisers and destroyers, Drifters… ummm… have some special boosters I guess?, Triglavians have filaments and their ship line, and now the Deathless have some new ships and purely in lore are the source of a new kind of clone soldier technology. The Deathless specifically probably only exist as the central story tie-in to their upcoming FPS game, Eve Vanguard.
To put it in a very nice way, CCP doesn’t want the story to take too much of a spotlight because they want the game to be about the stories the players create. To put it in a blunt (and entirely speculative) way, the guy who wrote all the Sleeper lore in 2009 when wormholes were added probably quit the company, and then the next guy came up with the Drifter story arc ca. 2015 before also quitting the company, and then the next guy came up with the Triglavians and the entire Drifter arc was forgotten, and then the Triglavian guy quit the company and now the current guy came up with the Deathless and remembered that the Drifter plot thread is still unsolved so now they’re being killed off.
These factions do have an in-game presence that you can go fight and interact with, though. Triglavians in Pochven, obviously, and Drifters and Sleepers in wormholes. The Drifters in their special wormholes are at the center of the ongoing Drifter Crisis event, whatever that may be leading up to. The reason they don’t appear during missions is because missions are legacy content that has pretty much not changed at all since the game’s release.
I had this complaint about Equilibrium of Mankind around 20 years ago. Why introduce a faction that only ever comes up once, has no agents, no derived standings, no real connection to the rest of the game? The answer was that someone at CCP probably thought that blue Amarrian ships sounded cool.
The Eve universe is a big place and the devs apparently can’t afford to bring out Alton Haveri and update the derived standings matrix every quarter for the ten people who care about the lore.
A lot of the lore in is the New Eden News, in-game events, and happens in real time. Just like country X isn’t in the news this week in the real world, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something. Lore is mostly told to us via the news. The Drifters have been a thing for almost 10 years now and it’s reaching a climax, what comes after, well we’ll find out together, maybe even this weekend at Fanfest. There are hours of lore breakdown videos and hundreds of written news articles. https://universe.eveonline.com/
Missions have not been touched for 15 years or more. It’s very outdated.
Disclaimer: Kind of went off tracks multiple times regarding the actual missions/NPC Agents relation to the current lore there but it’s now written, so be as it is. As someone stated already, missions need a massive update. As PVE in general should have. But that’s a discussion for another topic.
To understand the story & lore one needs to read a lot about it to catch up. Eve is an old game and the story sort of has evolved within the past 20 years. The game also tends to be one of those ‘played in the long run’ deals. Take the current story arc for example, it has been going on for half a year now - you could also argue that the current story arc has been going on for 15 years when the Drifters were first introduced.
Don’t get me wrong - i’m not saying this in a accusing bad manner - but for me this seems like you haven’t educated yourself with the backstory of New-Eden and latest news. The game actually has a very vivid and story rich world when you take the initial deep dive to it. Getting to know the backstory is very essential to understanding the relationship between Triglavians, Deathless and Drifters.
I would start from the beginning of the story of New Eden and pay special attention to Jove Empire. Jove, Deathless, Drifters, Sleepers, Zarzakh, The Fulcrum, The Warden, Wormholes, Upwell Consortium are all tied together and connect. Additionally i would read about clones and cloning technology because it’s sort of on the surface currently with Vanguard and e.g. Breacher Pods and Upwell Consortium.
For the delivery aspect of story/lore though? It can be a bit shrouded in mysteries until it all comes together. And a lot of the stuff is sort of left for the players to decide. Or just for the player to connect the dots. Often times it’s a bit spread around all over the place, which, let’s admit it, isn’t optimal at times… But it’s also something that automatically happens when the content simply becomes so huge that it’s hard to put on one place. Players occasionally try this though for e.g. regarding Triglavians: [Compilation] The Lore of the Triglavian Collective
Let’s use Deathless ship hulls as example: We know that their ships use Caldari & Minmatar technology right? So maybe it’s not more or less grandiose than that. Deathless has engineers and researchers working for them from both factions and thus they came out with the hull design and simply it’s branded as theirs.
But there is more to the ships than just ‘cool drawing from design department’ - let’s take e.g. Breacher Pods that came with the Deathless Hulls:
Links for resources.
I know it’s a lot of reading.
But it’s a lot of lore & story too!
OH! And one thing that is often overlooked is simply right clicking → Show info → Description. There is a lot of cool stuff all over the place when you start digging. Like visit sightseeing beacons in space. There is so much story written in those places!
Might be worth adding new Epic Arcs to introduce newer players to these factions. I remember when the Triglavians first showed up. Was crazy. Was fun. How would someone joining today understand their impact while playing the game and not by watching a youtube video or reading a lore explanation on an external website?
Videogames have such a unique chance to let people experience a story through gameplay and reveals in the game itself. To rely so much on outside game sources is a sad wasted opportunity.
I think it’s a bit complicated with Eve because New Eden sort of simulates life for those interested in role-playing, story and/or lore.
What comes to e.g. missions, the NPC interactions aren’t really a linear story telling progression that has an end point nor are they exactly even related to “main story” whatever that really even is in Eve because there isn’t one - it’s a living world.
Take your local lv4 security mission agent. If you approach it from in-universe point of view, the poor Navy staff worker at the station might’ve never even heard about the stories we tell right? Hell he/she might’ve never visited other solar systems. Orders are coming from the higher-ups and there he/she is putting that work on your desk - and the work is pretty much just low-profile jobs for someone like a Capsuleer.
One thing to keep in mind too with the NPC missions ect. is that they’re old. They used to be the ‘end game’ PVE at a time when the main canon pretty much was Empires are at war with each others and pirates attack places.
I understand and mostly agree with what your saying here but i can’t come up with any… Decent? Way of implementing what your asking to the game because you can’t live (play the game) in the past right? And writing some sort tutorial that goes through all the events and explains everything would be a bit much maybe. Or rather keeping it up to date would be too much. As we seen with the missions.
So news, archived articles ect. kind of become your history books and informative media - just like in real life - if that makes sense. This is why i would recommend people who are interested in the story to get familiar with the basic history of New Eden, because then the current and also upcoming/new story arcs and events open up more easily from the get go - so even newer players can get a better understanding of the general ongoing events more easily.
New Epic Arcs would be very welcome addition for sure! But the writers would have to be very careful with it. The game already has a lot of stuff that has become a bit of entangled mess story/lore wise because the world around us constantly changes.
TL:DR could be? That the game has tried to do two opposite things at the same time. And you can’t really do the two at the same time. Those are having changing living interactive world mixed with set in stone, time and place story writing.
id be more happy with epic arcs for some of the other factions like blood raiders, so the USIA can make a killing on fixing standings for those people..
Sometimes it feels like CCP has too much on their plate and they keep on filling it with more.
It’s great to have new, but the old should not be left on shelf to gather dust this hard. Though the fact also is that New Eden ‘lives’ in same time format and speed as us. What i mean is that who knows what - yet unwritten or reported - is happening with e.g. Blood Raiders or Sansha right?
I expect Blood Raiders and Sansha will have their ship roster fleshed out more someday. Big Sansha fan myself but also left it behind now since living in pirate space without alts is a bit of a headache.
As far as EVE devs putting too much on their plate, I don’t think I buy that. The game and team are small but is it that hard to add more PVE missions? To plan out and add an unvoiced Epic Arc?
Probably more to do with metrics of what they want to invest effort into but I will avoid ranting on what the majority of players do vs what the majority of accounts do. Just leave it at probably being very different things.
They have also managed to remove things from the plate. The Jove are gone as far as lore and player interactions it seems at this point. You can have standings with them but they have no agents. A sign that even if something serves no purpose in game function if it matters to lore they will keep it around. That gives me hope for the future.
It’s still how the lore and the game is introduced to players since hour one. They’re funneled into the career agent missions, advised to do the Blood Stained Stars to be introduced to the various factions, only to then be told to forget all that, it’s no longer true, it’s legacy systems and information, now we’re in a shadow war, hacking unmoored Jovian observatories for corrupted messages from an unknown time, collecting and interpreting Drifter hallucinations, learning Triangle Slavic. Must be confusing.
That CCP Dropbear post kind of ruined lore for me, just the notion that the devs are hiding puzzle pieces all over for us to discover and piece together, but not in a way that has any in-game truth value or mechanics, if that makes sense. Fifteen years later there’s apparently still no payout. From a player’s perspective it makes the alleged deep and mysterious lore that’s there to be discovered, solved and presumably confirmed or denied by a CCP employee on some social media platform indistinguishable from just winging it to close Jira tickets.
At least missions are honest and have a show and tell component. It’s not too much to expect from an AAA priced MMO to just put a mining agent into Pochven if you’re going to have a faction with derived EDENCOM and Rogue Drones standings. At least that way we might learn something about them and their day-to-day that’s not all-tell-no-show like someone from CCP confirming some theory privately on a Discord somewhere.
In New Eden. Every Lore is an un-finished story to tickle your imagination with mystery. That is the curse of Capsuleers immortality. It’s an un-ending story of Discovery, Death and Resurrection but in the end, We are all slaves of earning isks.
Level 1-4’s and COSMOS missions are entirely from the first two years of EVE with very few changes in them since then. Burners, FW and lvl 5’s are more recent, but all of those are also pretty old by now with the Burners I think being the newest, added in like 2012 or so.
Even if they made changes to missions and Epic Arcs, that would only last for so long. Just like when they added burners. It didn’t take players very long to figure out the exact ship, fit, and tactics required. Now they are as easy as running anything else. Same for the Abyss.
Doesnt particular matter how hard or easy the missions are. Could be some new level 1 2 3s in there. Just include the new factions in it so they actually show up in more content.
