Ecliptic Rift

So CCP T0rfi gave an interview in which he discussed the summer 2010 expansion, Tyrannis, in somewhat greater detail. You should probably read it before pressing on with my thoughts… And note that I’ve intentionally avoided any discussion about DUST 514, mostly because the idea still frustrates me.

You can build infrastructure and interact with almost every planet in the game, regardless of whether someone has something there, already.

I sort of hope that the capital planets (Matar, Caldari Prime, etc.) remain off-limits. That just seems odd to me.

The problem is that the planets are going to have limited resources. So if too many people are harvesting a planet at the same time, there will be diminishing returns. So what you will find is that it will be much more enriching to travel to the more remote planets in the more remote systems, for planets which haven’t got infrastructure built up, yet. But of course that takes you away from the key trade hubs to which you want to deliver your manufacturables.

Now we can talk turkey… Planetary output seems to have a fixed cap, and so as the number of pilots exploiting it increases, the share of resources they get from it will decrease. I suspect they’ll use a lot system similar to the economic system in Pirates of the Burning Sea, where you have ten lots available to you and must decide how (and where) to allocate them: vertically integrate for an entire production chain? Specialize in a given resource or particular process, and thus increase your risk? Not too dissimilar from the current design allowing up to 11 research and 11 manufacturing jobs simultaneously, depending on your skill training. This implies lots of strategic choices for players, and I have every confidence that CCP can surpass the design that PotBS implemented.

And of course there are over 65,000 planets in the game. And you can interact with each and every one of them. Including those that are in wormhole space, which can actually be quite challenging.

This intrigues me to no end, both from a gameplay perspective (more profits in W-space and more activities out there for the residents) as well as from a “prime fiction” (canon lore) perspective. Do these planets have residents? If not, will we learn more about the automation and technology in EVE? This could potentially imply resources for tech III frigates as well. Back here in K-space, we should get much more information about who lives in low-sec and null-sec, and of course some areas could have potentially unique interest (e.g. COSMOS constellations or systems like Intaki).

We’re making really interesting manufacturing and resource trees here, right now. Going over ‘what materials are you extracting from gas giants, what are you getting from planets which are pretty much just molten magma. You will actually be able to put down facilities, arcologies, and cloud cities, or really tough units that you can place on very hostile worlds, to extract and manufacture from them. And then rocket the stuff off of them, or move it out with a space elevator. In general, of course, with more risk comes more reward.

This really grabs my attention, both for the gameplay as well as the fiction. What will we make? Will it be awesomely cool? And the fiction possibilities multiply exponentially here. Generally, when new resources become available, we get new end products as well, so even those folks not interested in the industrial gameplay benefit (cf. tech III strategic cruiser production).

Your ability to master a planet, to manufacture, build up, and manage it, will be bound by skills.

Guess I’ll sit on that neural remap until we know more about this. Industrial and exploration gameplay that results in passive income, with tons of fiction possibilities? I really want to immerse myself in this, and so I intend to focus largely on the new gameplay as I’ve done with other science & industry skills. But until we at least know whether they’ll largely focus on intelligence and memory (my current estimate) or even include charisma in some way, I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’ll have trouble keeping up.

One of our goals with planetary interaction is to phase out these NPC created commodities, because we want to put the power into the hands of the players and make EVE even more sandbox-y than it is.

There are elements of EVE which we feel can use some iteration based on the experiences that we have learned, running EVE for seven years. The NPC market is definitely one of them. It’s been with us for a long time. It hasn’t changed much. We want to take these commodities and move them into the hands of the players.

We are not giving out publicly yet which commodities these are. Even once we put it on the public test server, you will not be able to see what these final commodities are going to be.

I hope hope HOPE this includes implants (or meta 1-4 modules) and not just commodities like robotics and oxygen and trade goods. That said, I applaud this sort of thing, as it allows for continued emergent gameplay. The implications will have such a major impact on the economy that reserving more information on that until Tyrannis goes onto the production cluster really becomes a de rigeur decision.