Precipice of Change

Bold Pilot Log, Entry #29

This morning I saw something on youtube, and I got the nerdchills. For a long time, about EVE, again! The short video was showing engine trails and a new warp effect from the Singularity Test Server. With the beautyful backdrops of the new nebulae, the impression was incredible.

Many little things that make together EVE be closer to the thing it can become. The trails are a good addition to show how powerful these ships are, the warp tunnel now looks as if we were really travelling in the bubble the canon talks about, bending the very space with it. Turret flares missing the ship andds another layer of credibility, immersion. What we will look at our monitors is vey close to the great graphics that stare back at us in the sci-fi movies, except that those recordings are rendered for weeks, not fragments of seconds.

CCP was always good at capturing the subconscious of people. There are small details, hidden complexity, which you are not aware, but your brain registers them and they contribute to the overall immersion much more than the things you actually realize do. Look at the same picture with different lighting effects and you'll see what I mean. The space environment in EVE just got the most important thing it missed (and started to miss more and more when the devs were no longer concentrating on it) - scale and perspective. Only when a lumbering battleship draws engine trails longer than its own lenght, do you realize how terrifying a speed 117 m/s is. Only when you see phenomena that have their sizes measured in lightyears shrink jump by jump do you realize the distance you are taveling through in seconds. I could continue this on and on. The reason I don't do is that this isn't what I want to talk about.

EvE Online: CRUCIBLE is going to be a turning point, and we all know this. But it's going to change the game we love in some aspects not many people think about. This last two years, the relatively stagnant Flying in Space EvE is going to be gone. God willing, forever. You'll undock into a whole different universe. What we leave behind I would call the era of tears. We, the society of EVE, CCP, and the New Eden were crying a lot. Sometimes at each other, sometimes with ourselves. We have to go forward. And this means things will change. The pvp in space will evolve. CCP wants it to evolve beyond the best practices we are used to now. Some things get simpler, and we have to accept that. Some things get easier, and you have to be ready for the other people to learn the tricks only you knew...

In other words, let's be ready for what CCP throws at us. We will be heard. Yes, they are a business, and we are customers, but before everything else - let us be a game creating society. The people, they work at CCP because they love the concept and potential of EVE. The players, they should play the game because they love it. Let us stop treating CCP as a company and ourselves as customers - companies never, ever listen to their customers. They listen to their bank accounts, nothing else. The relationship is indirect, no matter how many PR they apply. But if we become a society in and of itself, we will have a direct connection to each other - gamers and developers. That is something fearless, something no profit-oriented organization have attempted before...

Sessym out.