Incarna - Will history repeat itself?

You WILL use Incarna... or else!

So after a lot of speculation and general emo, CCP finaly published something of a dev blog yesterday on Incarna.

[Devblog] The Road to Incarna

For those who haven't read the dev blog, it basically provides some concept art showing the new Captain's Quarters, described what would be in the initial roll out of Incarna, stated that CCP would approach Incarna in lots of iterative small steps (similar to Incursion) and included some promises, mainly that we'd see a version of the CQ on SiSi before FanFest and that more details would be provided at FanFest.

It sounds great, doesn't it? Judging from some of the rather sugary responses in the official comments thread, you'd think this is the best thing since sliced bread but I think it is worth setting aside rabid fan-gasming and taking a more analytical look at what this blog offers and promises.

First, some positives:

Incremental roll-out of this fundamental change to EVE is a good idea. Look how well that has worked for Incursions. For brand new technology unproven as yet through trial by fire, small steps are the only rational way to approach it, for both game stability and the developers' sanity! It's great to see CCP taking this approach to heart, although I admit the reference to "not rushing it" came across as heavily ironic, considering Incarna has been through so many revisions that it has taken over four years and three name changes to get to this point.

I also like the 'immersion' factor that CCP keeps going on about though.  From the blog:

"Another big change is that the current station hangar will be replaced with an enhanced balcony view where your character can gaze upwards at the majesty of your vessel as it looms above you inside the station."

Shit is getting real, apparently! How awesome is it going to be to stand on a balcony and stare out at my three-kilometer long Carrier inside a space station which must be...what? The size of Delaware?  FYI, the state of Delaware is 30 miles (48 km) wide and 96 miles (154 km) long which, according to CCP's artists, is the approximate scale of several stations in EVE. Now THAT'S immersion!

Seriously, revisiting this YouTube video from 2008, you can see just how much the vision for Incarna has changed from the initial implementation:

To be honest, four or five years ago Incarna was really nothing but a pipe dream. Now it seems, there is actual work being done, and able to be done, with Carbon in place and the depth of staff to deal with it.

A little history, if you'll indulge me. My first glimpse of what was then called, 'Walking in Stations' was back at FanFest 2006, shortly before I was hired at CCP.  It was there where we saw the beginning of what would become four very long years of development hell. There was a lot of buzz and video presentations talking all about how we would 'soon' be able to wander around the stations, take in the sights and generally look very awesome doing so.  We met Ambulation Man, a tough Caldari dude, and everyone looked at each other with a mixture of awe and ambivalence.

I am Ambulation Man. The code for me no longer exists.

What did it all mean? Could we stab each other with spoons? Stalk each other across an entire station? Conduct urban guerrila assaults?! Own dress shops? Be assured of a better selection of sunglasses?  The same questions that players are asking about Incarna today were being asked back then. They have been getting asked in all the years since. At least a couple of such questions have been answered by the dev blog.

Which leads to the negatives:

What is the game play for Incarna intended to be? There has been nothing substantial offered in answer to questions about game play. From this dev blog, it appears there will be no game play for months associated with Incarna, and what is mentioned doesn't have any detail associated with it that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling that there is a Plan. Hopefully there IS a Plan, one we might even be shown at FanFest rather than some attitude of just throwing shit against a wall to see if it sticks.

Will docking into CQ create more lag? It was alluded to in the past that Incarna would run on different servers than EVE-in-space. OK, fine. But if true, it makes me wonder how CCP is going to make docking into our quarters no slower than currently docking today. I am curious as to why they couldn't be more clear about whether there will be options to dock and NOT disembark from the ship into the CQ. Which leads to my next question:

Will CQ be required? Are we going to be forced to interact with Incarna? If so why? I predict enormous rage from players if interaction is enforced and that enforcement imposes time penalties that don't exist today.

Will there be ANY kind of PvP in stations? Will activities in stations affect what happens in space? The dev blog suggests the possibility although in very murky language. My long time friend and corp mate, Max Teranous, made a post on Scrapheap Challenge yesterday that sums up some of my feelings about this:

"Torfi's argument is that an all powerful demigod pod pilot alliance leader, in charge of thousands of pilots, trillions of ISK, shouldn't be allowed to be attacked by a bloke with a spoon. Oh, and coz of RP, as a pod pilot is actually killable outside his pod. With hindsight it also looks like CCP are wanting the DUST connection to be the avatar combat part of Eve, but i don't have a console and am not going to buy one so that's a non starter for me personally.

My argument has always been that you have to create a combat system within the eve technology framework anyway for WoD, and you have to have that capability built into the engine from the beginning, not create an avatar system for just wandering about then bolt on a combat system afterwards. So if you have the technology in the engine anyway, may as well make use of it in some way for Eve."

One thing that is known is that DUST and EVE will be connected through some kind of <insert smoke and mirrors here>, but it's obviously not going to have a thing to do with the avatars you are creating for Incarna.  What we are doing now with the new character creator is purely for the immersion factor. This means a lot to folks who see EVE as a glorified set of chat windows, but it doesn't mean much to people who enjoy blowing people up and stealing their stuff.

The apparent utter lack of any focus on potential PvP angles in Incarna is concerning. I doubt I'm alone in stating that if CCP had spent the last four years refining Planetary Interaction / Incarna to be more along the lines of Planetary Warfare / Mech Piloting, there might be more excitement among the current player base. Even better, a complete re-focus on nothing but the spaceship aspect of the game would most likely have made a lot (dare I say a majority, especially of longer-term) players happy...ecstatic even.  Imagine where EVE might be today had all of these Art and technical resources been put toward Sovereignty iteration, Factional Warfare expansion, a Low Sec makeover, Industrial balancing and just every day spaceship balancing and iteration.

But, water under the bridge. Incarna is here, it's coming, whether we like it or not. So...

Deal with it, amirite?

Personally, I have reluctantly accepted that Incarna will be a part of EVE because the powers that be have deemed it essential to both their marketing strategy and necessary technological milestones. That said, I am at odds with this design paradigm for the simple reason that, to me, EVE Online has always been a game about spaceships. Unfortunately, CCP is more focused on some grandiose vision of "ultimate sci fi simulator" instead of effort to improve the GAME PLAY of the best spaceship PVP game on the market. They continue to push in all directions at once, which might be worth buying into if there was some evidence of a cohesive plan that connects it all and gives each element a reason to exist in a game play context.

Let me explain, briefly. I subscribe to EVE to participate in meaningful game play, where my actions have a direct causal effect on my environment. Both by my own and other people's choices, and by consequences of my own and other people's actions. This causality perseveres in EVE, and it has done so from the start. Here's an example:

I want to dock my Zealot into a drop ship the size of a Carrier and switch over to my customized Mech, which then gets dropped screaming through the atmosphere while being supported by orbital bombardment platforms. I want to see tanks, mechs, artillery and air support scurrying around on the ground as I fire my anti-grav and come in for a landing. I want to hit the ground running while enemy defenses scramble.  I want something deep and epic the likes of which would make the creators of Planetside go, "Christ, I knew we sucked but not THAT badly!"

In a universe as big as New Eden, shouldn't there be more than just blobs of capitals pew-pewing some magical space tower or mechanisms on gates to lay claim to a system? You want to own a system? You need to capture the capital city on its home world! You airlock its President and pillage the globe like a damn space viking! If the population doesn't comply, you flatten their cities until they do!

Planetary Interaction - Seleene style!

THAT, my friends, is IMMERSION. THAT is the sandbox. But alas, after four years of meetings, development and re-development, marketing spin, and awesomeness, we have... a mandatory Captain's Quarters (CQ)?  Immersion = sitting alone in my CQ doing stuff with myself. Awesome? Hardly.

I fully realize that at some point in the future we will probably be able to own an 'establishment' of some sort where we can frolic inside of a bar and do things like play mini-games or watch pixel girls dance.

Not a mock-up. This is a real screen shot.

She has tattoos!  WTF?!

I'm still not sure what any of this has to do with the hard core PVP game I've been playing since early 2003 but it's apparently inevitable and we are going to have to find a way to deal with it. The sad part is, with a little effort, there are lots of potential ways that Incarna could integrate into the EVE-the-space-game in meaningful and substantive ways. CCP likes to hint that is coming but until they show some evidence that they have actually given it more than five minutes' worth of thought, call me a skeptic. I'll believe it when I see it.

But I'm just one person, with one opinion. It's interesting reading all the replies to in the official comments thread related to this dev blog and it occurs to me that there are some useful ways one could analyze the responses.