Stitcher
Alexylva Paradox
3159
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Posted - 2014.02.17 16:25:00 -
[1] - Quote
There's a lot of noise about EVE being a game about spaceships, but it's not - EVE is a game about economy, politics, competition and the free market. It's less Isaac Asimov and more Ayn Rand.
See, that's the thing about science fiction - people think of the genre as being all about spaceships and robots and laser guns, but good scifi is about people: humanity. Firefly wasn't a show about being in space yaaay space: It was a show about a doctor who'd go to any lengths for his sister who winds up aboard a spaceship captained by a surprisingly principled thief and his crew of misfits, runaways, oddballs and innocents. Star Trek wasn't about wheee warp drive and torpedoes, it was an exploration of the human condition, from its best to its worst. NuBattlestar wrestled with themes of religion, survival, principle and sacrifice.
The point is that it's easy to get lost in all the laser beams and planets and think "EVE = spaceships". But really, the things that EVE is actually about - power divorced from consequence, capitalism without rules, conflict, intrigue and paranoia - could work just as well in a fantasy game about knights and wizards, a steampunk game about airships and sky pirates or a cyberpunk game about hackers and cybernetic samurai.
So there's no reason not to take EVE along the on-foot route, into New Eden's many wretched hives of scum and villainy. None whatsoever - the guiding principles of what makes EVE, EVE work just as well if you're seeing Han Solo on your screen as if you're seeing the Millennium Falcon.
The disagreement is a purely aesthetic one. Some people are purists who just want spaceships. I'm in the camp that wants to strap on a pistol and go cut some black market deal for stolen megacorporate tech that goes wrong and ends in a vicious firefight in a cargo hangar because a third group of players decided to ambush the meeting and steal everything for themselves. Emergent, player-driven gameplay, is the point.
Neither side is wrong, but both sides can get what they want if the avatar-based gameplay is purely optional and exists to enhance and feed into the spaceships side. And I think that even if the people who want EVE on Foot content is a minority, it's still a large enough minority to justify the time and resources, and the new features would attract new players.
I have a question for the "All EVE expansions should be about the spaceships" crowd- Let's suppose that the Avatar content enables my friends and I to plot and execute an Ocean's 11-style heist where we hack a Lai Dai corporation mainframe and retrieve prototype blueprints for (to grab a completely random example) some kind of tech 3 modules, which I can then build and sell to people to fit on their ship, but they need to be smuggled around, with players in space assuming the role of both smugglers and customs officers. I would argue that content like that would be, ultimately, about the spaceships, even if an important component of it is done looking at the back of my character's head rather than at the back of his spaceship. Would you disagree that it's about the spaceships if everything I do in a station is about acquiring spaceship resources?
An in-character blog and a video:
http://verinsjournal.blogspot.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu1mbsgo738
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