zeitgeist said:
Have they finally released any concrete details about it? I'm wondering if this will be possible in any station, or only specific hubs.
Only that they'll be dividing up the release, that is that they won't release all of it in one go. The first parts of Incarna (official term for Walking In Stations) will be released next month, when every player will be forced to remake their avatar, this time in full 3D. Some other minor addition related to Incarna will also be released then.
Then the barebones framework of Incarna will be released next summer. (Think of how Planetary Interaction was released back in May and how they'll deepen it with the upcoming Incursion expansion in November.) More content will be added to Incarna in the Winter Expansion of 2011.
What's more interesting, however, is keeping track of the development cycle of EvE Online as a whole. The lag monster, which has always been a problem in EvE, was finally vanquished in the winter of 2008, allowing for some real epic fleet battles to take place. However, in the winter of 2009 they somehow managed to re-awaken the lag monster (CCP aren't known for being very competent coders) which led to nullsec warfare becoming crippled and nigh unplayable. It has only gotten worse since then.
This, among other complaints of underdeveloped additions to the game, archaic interfaces and other similar items, were the core complaints of the CSM (A committee made up of EvE players who regularly meet up with CCP staff to discuss hot topics of the game, and try to resolve problems) meeting earlier this summer. Simply put, pre-existing content was in many places so badly broken, or lacking vital features, that they were badly in need of attention by CCP, yet CCP kept pushing out new content that would be quickly sidelined and forgotten.
CCP's response? They're aware of the problem, but have no plans to address it. What's worse, they do not have time to address it until 2012 at the earliest. Adding new content, in this case Incarna, is their top priority, everything else is next to irrelevant. Why is this?
The answer is actually quite simple: They need to release Incarna soon, and it must also be a smash hit, or CCP is dead in the water.
In 2006 CCP expanded by opening up studios in USA and China and by merging with White Wolf, thus gaining ownership of the World of Darkness IP. The US office handles the World of Darkness stuff, while the studio in China was put to work on a top secret project, which later turned out to be a console shooter titled Dust 514, which is to be connected to EvE. During this year, CCP hatched their master plan: They were going to develop a 3D engine they would use for EvE (as the walking in stations content) and then re-use that engine both for the console shooter and for the proposed World Of Darkness MMO. The China studio would be building this engine from scratch. This all, as you can guess, cost quite alot of money and sunk CCP into lots of debts.
Fast forward two years. The recession hits, and CCP takes inventory. They ask the US studio how things are doing, and the response is that they're now waiting for the engine from the China studio. They ask the China studio...but the China studio hasn't come up with anything. 2 years of development with no results. CCP shits bricks. They quickly assign both studios to work on content for the next EvE expansion, which was Apocrypha, the biggest EvE expansion since its launch. The success of Apocrypha gives CCP time to come up with a solution to save their asses. That solution is Incarna. Incarna will appeal to a far wider range of players than EvE currently does. Just like Planetary Interaction was a grab at the playerbase from Farmville, Incarna is a grab at players from places like Second Life and The Sims. To solve the "we don't have an engine" problem, they leased the Unreal 3 engine from Epic. More debt incurred, but at least they have a shot at pulling this off.
The
real problem is keeping EvE afloat long enough to get Incarna out the door. As a direct result of the last CSM meeting, the players have been furious. EvE has a huge subscriber turnover rate, but now the game is losing the veterans, the "core" players of the game. The ones that encourage others to try out the game, the ones that make all those cool stories you hear about in and out of the game. They're going away, and sadly there isn't enough time for "new" veterans to replace them. EvE is bleeding out as we speak. In all likelyhood, it will stick around until Incarna is released, but then what?
