And the sad part is, I accept that. I know that CCP isn’t capable of committing to following through with anything post-launch (and sometimes not even that far). I just hate that it has to affect the core game so badly.

Sorry to leave a comment unrelated to the particular topic. I read a bit about eve online and I was interested in starting to play with some other friends. Can you send us an invite and maybe give some general advice on the game? My email is .

Thanks, your blog is really cool!

There are thousands of stations in Eve, so for Incarna to have any social gameplay people will be forced to pick a couple of stations to become Incarna hubs (which may or may not be the current trade hubs like Jita, Rens and Amarr etc). We’ve talked about current Eve players not wanting to be forced to use Incarna, but the opposite will be true by definition. Incarna players will be forced to get into a ship and be forced to undock if they want to visit other stations.

It is a very tricky issue trying to merge two utterly separate game styles into one client. Star Trek online got away with it because the core part of Trek was the people not the ships (though the ships were a character in the series too) and there was ship combat and ground combat. I see Incarna as more akin to second life (Incarna == Station life, PI == Planetville?) with no actual gameplay, just a 3d chatroom so I apologise if I’m not enthusiastic

Incarna is basically a totally separate “thing” within the Eve universe which is being bolted into the Eve client. CCP can claim that the grand plan was always to allow walking in stations etc, but the majority of the players right now are playing because of flying in space (and Incarna doesn’t exist outside CCP). Very few current players are paying an Eve sub for the promise of walking in stations (some might but not many).

Incarna is a different game engine, UI and philosophy compared to “Flying in Space” which CCP are bolting into the Eve client to allow nothing more than minigames. It is as much a core part of Eve as Internet Explorer was a core part of windows (MS claimed IE was a core part of Windows but it turned out they just hid some of the code in a common DLL and it could always have been stand alone).

I’m not saying Eve shouldn’t expand on the core gameplay, but right now when people play Eve they are playing “Flying in space”. Incarna is nothing more than vapourware until CCP start to give actual credible examples of gameplay. We’ve already been told that there will be no combat (though obviously the spec can change before something is actually shown) and that the whole thing will be optional but it really doesn’t add anything to the Eve gameplay does it?

If it has any meaningful impact on flying in space then it is no longer an optional thing. If it doesn’t then it will always remain a bolted on minigame itself.

CCP was also quite open about revealing what dev team was working in what. So kudos to them for that! It would have been better though to give us more hints on what they plan players to be able to do in stations first. In the last Fanfest trailer they hint at something that does involve things not meant to be shared via NeoCom. So this could be some clandestine activity, underworld contacts, .. (just wild guesses by me).
CCP marketing should wet our appetite before they reveal how much they are investing dev-time wise on Incarna first.

So I guess it is more a communications problem than a technical problem.

Just my 2 cents

–Zargyl who is eagerly awaiting Incarna

If they pull it off, they’ll have revolutionized the gaming industry. If not, heads will roll in Reykjavik at the best. At worst, CCP will roll over and sink like a stone and we’ll all have to play Star Trek Online or go back to WOW.

It’s a very high-stakes gamble they’re taking and they’re pulling out all the stops to make sure it pays off.

With CCP looking at new audiences, the established audience is feeling a little jealous and neglected. I get that. It’s OK to feel bad about it.

But the whole implied “or else” component of the argument is over the top. Long term EVE supporters aren’t long term EVE-supporters because CCP massages their egos. They’re long-term EVE supporters because EVE is a damned good game.

See http://fiddlersedge.blogspot.com/2010/07/vox-populi.html

Maybe CCPs decision to concentrate on Dust and Incarna is a smart one: developing products which are not just long overdue, but could expand their playerbase beyond the PvP Internet Spacepixel crowd – and doing so _before_ EvE hits its subscriber max. We have similar situations in the company I work for: our latest internal software release broke some existing features, and while I fully agree with our user’s disappointment: unless the users can prove that a broken features costs us significant amount of operating money, it won’t get fixed this year as our budget is earmarked for new capital-gaining projects.

Regarding Incarna: I have came across a number of articles now about the FarmVille-type phenomenon; maybe Incarna is CCP’s idea of getting a foot into that market. Like it or not, the Facebook-casual gamers vastly outnumber us hardcore gamers by magnitudes, and a company would be a fool not to tap into that market.

This is not to say that I like CCPs stand on EvE development (though kudos for being that open about it), but I’ve been exposed to enough management that I can imagine where the management decisions could be coming from.

Whta I think they should have done was introduce third person, optional, avatar based branches to existing missions. and built it from there. The gameplay is already built in, and you can build economic advantages into using these optional bit with greater ease. These would get the players used to getting out of their ships and walking around and give them something to do other than admire the scenery. From there you move to POS and outpost boarding actions and bring PvP into the mix, then and only then do you open up the NPC stations and give people bars and shops to play with.

EVE is a game about conflict, it is driven by conflict. Without conflict there really is no point to EVE, and without conflict there will be not alot of point to Incarna.

My corollary: “Imagine something like Clear Skies, but _you_ are John Rourke.”