For those who might just be catching up here, EVE Online is a game of Internet Spaceships. It has a sandbox style of gameplay that brings in a lot of thinker types and super nerds that get frustrated with grinding games like WoW and their ilk as well as brings in those who like a social game experience without wizards and trolls and elves. I’ve played this game on and off since 2005.
Since 2003 the game has been about flying around in spaceships and docking in space stations with activities taking place in space. To clarify, there was no person that you walked around as, no avatar. Just your spaceship and you. Well, that was the case until about a week ago when they released the Incarna patch, which lets you walk around in space stations.
There have been many, many criticisms about this software release that have been mostly micro-scale complaints regarding game mechanics. Those familiar with the arguments will say “MICRO SCALE! THAT WOULD BE GAME CHANGING!!!”, but you’ll understand why I say that as you read along with my arguments about why Incarna is really a bad idea, or at least poorly implemented. From my perspective, the things I will discuss are the actual reasons people are complaining that they just may not be thinking about or vocalizing.
Why Incarna?
The argument for the Incarna experience is that the environment that new players are immersed in wasn’t immersing enough. You basically start the game staring at this terrible noobship and go about some training missions.
Ibis - Terrible Noobship
The myriad of in-game activities, while presented to you in basic form during the tutorials, are then hidden in tiny icons in your neocom (the EVE Online UI) from then on out. Incarna puts these things front and center, quite literally through the use some rendered displays in your quarters.
Everyman's CQ Courtesy of street_ronin from reddit
On the left is information on your corporation (corporations are the in-game user groups), the center is a TV with some in-game information, sort of like a CNN with EVE info, and on the right is some science and industry information for various tasks regarding that aspect of the game. The coffee table between you and the TV has a hologram of your current ship and some other tasks you can attend to. It’s not too terribly important for the sake of argument here, there’s other aspects to Incarna and the Captain’s Quarters you can walk around in, but I did want to present this so there was some sort of idea as to what the heck this is.
Why Incarna Fails at the Mission of Immersion
All arguments that follow are based on the following statement. You can actually stop reading after this and understand what I’m talking about completely:
In order to provide the most immersive experience into an environment, layers of abstraction between the end user and said environment need to be removed. The environment needs to be brought into people’s lives instead of bringing the person into the environment. Immersion is a first person point of view experience, not one of the third person.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, here’s some examples. They will build on each other.
Incarnafail #1: This is not your world, it is the world of this avatar
People who have been playing this game for a long time are having a hard time switching from a first person to a third person point of view — the game has always been that of the first person.
You have to pretend to be your avatar. My argument is that one should use their imaginations here to “be” the avatar. This switch from the old system to Incarna fundamentally changes the way the user “pretends”. You used to be the pilot, now the pilot is someone you have to pretend to be.
An easy enough sort of fix would be to change the perspective of the avatar to a first-person view. Instead of commanding a cartoon character to pick something up and interact with it, YOU pick something up and interact with it. There is a powerful psychological difference in you doing something yourself and commanding some stupid cartoon character to do it. Essentially something has been put in between the game and the user.
Incarnafail #2: Broken in-game elements now cascade failures with immersive experience, the avatar experience moves forward.
CCP, the company behind EVE Online, has put forward some interesting, if half-baked, features to bring the world of EVE into your every day life. Take for instance EVE Voice. The game features voice communications features powered by Vivox. They’ve taken steps to extend this to their out of game, Facebook-like portal called EVE Gate.
The problems? Well, first off EVE voice has never been able to scale in-game to deal with the massive fleets that form up (think 300-1000 people in the same place at the same time). Every time I’ve tried to use it I experience random disconnects and other problems as well. The EVE Gate integration with voice also is still very beta and you have to join it in game first, etc etc. This is a real shame because there are some features of EVE Voice, like the voice fonts which could be crucial for in game fun. Instead of using EVE Voice, you find that most corporations have setup Teamspeak and Mumble servers in combination with Jabber.
Sidebar: EVE Gate needs real-time text chat from the game in it. It’s pretty useless otherwise.
The Vivox corporate vision is that of enabling seamless voice communication across platforms, regardless of the source of origin of the communicators. Now, how cool would that be in EVE?
Voice Possibilities:
- Call me in game, leave a message
- Call me in game, have it routed to my cell phone
- Call me in game, have it routed to my EVE gate page where I can pick up a ringing “phone”.
- Call me in game, have it routed to my assistant/corp mates
- I hit your Facebook/EVE Gate, and I’m able to contact you whether you’re in-game or not.
Those ideas may sound a little too immersive for some, it would be optional and controllable. If you’re not logged into whatever, whatever doesn’t ring. The point is that the voice component of the game is something with the extreme potential to have zero barriers between users and the game but it’s broken and no one uses it.
Now here’s some cascadefail: I’m pretty sure EVE voice is going to be how EVE players talk to users of the upcoming Dust514 FPS on PS3. Because the in-game voice is so broken, different alliances working together will sometimes have to use two different external voice solutions at the same time. Since we’ll be working with the Dustbunnies now too, I can’t imagine how terrible it will be to manage three at the same time. Operations of any scale or size will require people to basically sit docked in a station and doing nothing but handling communications between teams of players who are all on the same side.
Incarnafail #3: Minimal effort to bring the experience into the lives of the user was instead focused on cartoon character environments.
This constantly drives me crazy. You see, EVE is a great game for casual game players. The reason here is because unlike games where you have to login and kill a million small creatures before you can level up to actually do anything interesting, all of the “leveling up” in EVE is done by throwing skills in a queue and watching time pass. Many of the other game mechanics, like market transactions and planetary interaction, can be done by logging in for a few hours once a week. I’m a father of two and a sysadmin, I absolutely cannot be bothered to login more than that quite often and that makes EVE “my game”.
CCP has relied on third party developers to bring the EVE experience into the every day lives of those who may not be able to login every day. Through their API’s, there are mobile apps for checking your character’s progress, wallet, and other key metrics. There are other third party apps (a few of which I’ve contributed to or written) that will remind you of things coming up, check (but not send/reply) your in-game messages, search market information, and a wealth of other cool things.
My suggestion/observation here is that if CCP wanted a more immersive experience, the couch view of the screens in your Captains’ Quarters should have actually been a mobile, tablet, or separate application. Let me watch the TV feed in my actual quarters!
Many in-game activities, particularly planetary interaction are DYING to be made into a touch enabled application. They’re already designed to have simple touchable elements, and they’re things you can do in-game while not being tied to a particular point in space — you could feasibly dock, log out, and continue on via your phone or tablet.
If the secondary goal of Incarna was the Micro transaction system, CCP missed out on a gigantic opportunity here. Can you imagine how many people would have paid $10, $15, or $20 for touch screen planetary interaction app? I doubt anyone would complain it’d be an “unfair advantage” as they are with the recent gold ammo debate.
The biggest point of contention here is just like all the others, is that there’s a cartoon in the way of bringing the game to me as a user.
Anyway, that’s my Incarna rant. What’s yours?