toward

CCP Affinity's parking spot

Over the last year, I felt many players who enjoy the lore of EVE had been getting short shrift from the development goals being pursued by a post-Incarna CCP. In my Blog Banter 38 entry, Designing the Future Experience , I expressed my disappointment at the deliberate avoidance of all lore references in the latest tutorial revisions. After reading it, CCP Affinity contacted me to provide assurances that interest in continued lore development and immersion was alive and well.Hungry for more information, in collusion with lore guru Mark726 of EVE Travel , we sent a series of questions to CCP Affinity and CCP Abraxus (head writer and author of The Burning Life EVE novel) for which they have kindly provided the following answers:CCP Affinity, you're a Content Designer, can you tell us what that involves? What's the difference between a Content Designer and a Content Writer? What is your favourite part of what you do?You've recently moved from Team Five 0 where you were working on Incursions. Does your shift mean that after a period of tweaking, Incursions are now balanced?Before we move away from the subject of Incursions, are we likely to see any more developments there? Last December, when I interviewed CCP Headfirst , he painted a tantalising picture of the potential of the TALE system which drives the Incursions, where he described "a future involving Incursions across New Eden by a variety of aggressors, with Guristas contesting Blood Raiders turf whilst Serpentis pushes on the Gallente Federation's borders and Amarr militia forces press out toward Providence." Can we hope for any such variation? I mean surely Sansha Kuvakei has figured out his current campaign isn't working out all that well.In a recent interview , Jon "CCP Unifex" Lander recently seemed quite pleased with the ratio of game designers to content developers, suggesting that having only four content developers was a good thing with the explanation that "players are the content". How does that impact your workload? Is there no benefit to having more content developers?You recently helped out the Player Experience Team with the new tutorial, released with Inferno 1.2. It has some improvements which are visually very appealing and do a great job of cutting through all the UI noise, but the decision to avoid all reference to lore seems to suggest attempts to fast-track new players into "player content" rather than having any faith in CCP's own IP. Can you tell us anything that would allay fears that the rich backstory of EVE is being abandoned to the mercy of a player culture more concerned with Kill:Death ratios and spamming local with ASCII phalluses?There is a perception that CCP is no longer interested in broadening EVE Online's appeal and is increasingly only attempting to cater to a very specific PvP-centric player demographic. Do you think at CCP there has been a cultural shift away from lore-based development in the wake of the mishandling of Walking in Stations? What consideration is being given to ensuring EVE appeals to potential new customers (and delivers on that appeal)?You've recently joined Team Game of Drones who I believe were the developers behind the revised Faction Warfare system and the Unified Inventory as well as CCP Ytterbium and his tiericide rampage. What's next on the agenda? What part will you play? How's team morale? When will you be allowed at the drone interface?I attended your Live Event roundtable at Fanfest, which was a discussion filled with possibilities and potential, but I got the impression that the Live Event initiative was being driven entirely by enthusiasm and caffeine, with yourself and CCP Goliath both having full-time duties elsewhere before being able to commit resources to Live Events. Given the success of last year's Arek'Jaalan Project (which resulted in the player investment of 30b ISK, it spawned untold player research projects , an in-character podcast news site and provided new ways for player communities to interact), what resources are CCP making available to the Live Event team? How do you envisage Live Events playing out?In 1984, Braben & Bell made a 32k game called Elite which had over 2000 star systems, each one with unique information about culture, government and society, yet in EVE the description of every solar system is simply "Solar System" and most celestials only have a generic description too. This seems like missed opportunity and an easy canvas to add some colour and even interactive storyline clues which could lead to live events and allow player actions to be recorded in history. Are there any plans to flesh out available information in game?With many canon plot-threads still to be explored or resolved, what storytelling techniques will be employed? Has any consideration been given to broadening the appeal of lore material beyond the written form and into audio drama or further animations like the cinematic trailer from Fanfest?I firmly believe that players would be more engaged if lore was delivered in a manner more sophisticated than walls of text. Is there any possibility of seeing more engaging storytelling in NPC encounters and agent conversations? Leveraging the avatar engine to animate the agent headshot would give a little life to the experience and perhaps to deliver in-mission communications (rather than the current schizophrenic system of sometimes getting a pop-up window of text which you can't read because something's shooting at you, or some coloured text in the local chat channel that you might not even notice until the mission is over). Can we hope for any advancement on PvE content from it's current decade-old design?At times, it seems like the Empires are getting somewhat stereotypical. The Amarr used to at least have some things going for it, but these days can seem little more than "generic crazy religious" people. Are there plans to reintroduce some of the shades of gray to the empires?Unlike the Amarr, the Minmatar in particular seem to have been left hanging for quite a while. There's the usual calls for access to more tribes, but the fact also remains that, technically, the Minmatar have been without any kind of functional government for years now since Shakor disbanded parliament. Are there any plans to push the Empire storylines forward like we used to see back in Empyrean Age? There seems to have been no major pushes forward since, outside of the books.Are there plans for longer story arcs for some of the minor factions. For example, will the Angels get their own long term arc like the Sansha? Will the Talocan get as well developed as the Sleepers (especially given their apparent commingling with the Sleepers)?A recurring problem found by RPers was that the amount of knowledge known out of game has become drastically more than what is known to the general public. While Arek'Jaalan and the like were attempts to narrow this gap, those kinds of projects appear to be frozen for now. Will there be any pushes to narrow the OOC-IC knowledge gap so players could start using them in their own arcs, in stead of just attempting to find out (without any acknowledgment from CCP of their efforts)?Along similar lines, when Apocrypha first came out, there were statements from the Devs that a lot of hints were hidden in sleeper sites... but after a few years, we've had little updates on if the various theories that have popped up are even going in the right direction. Can we expect either more hints or more dev/IC interaction to help the players discover these hints and figure out what's going on IC with the sleepers and talocan?Stargate lore currently says that we can only have gates in binary systems. This is perhaps just a pet peeve of mine, but it's never been clear where the binaries are or why it's still needed. Are there any plans to smooth out these kinds of lore problems? How closely does the lore team watch the fiction portals if something like this is pointed out?Is there a long term plan of how to deal with the Jove? Are they dead? Alive? Will they be playing a role in the storyline in the near future?Abraxas:Are there plans on how to further the isogen-5/terran superweapon storyline? Where did Jamyl find the caches? How did she get rogue drones in on it? Are the rogue drones in with the sleepers?Will we see the return of storyline-based expansions? There used to be significant plot points that would come up as breaking news during expansions (a la empyrean age). Will we see that again?Will that Caldari station in Luminaire ever be built? Again, a pet peeve of mine.Just to wrap up the interview, are there any other exciting revelations or clues of the future that you'd be willing to share? What about the "sniff test" cryptically mentioned in the CSM Summit minutes , anything more to divulge there?I'm grateful for CCP Affinity and CCP Abraxus taking the time to provide us with these answers. I'll leave my thoughts on these responses for another blogpost, and I'll badger Mark to give us his feedback too. In the meantime, I'd be interested to hear what you content-seekers and lore-hounds have to say.