STOP! Hammer time...
I’m reminded of something Uncle Ben (not the rice guy) once said; with great power, comes great responsibility. Invention & Reverse Engineering, Salvaging & Ship Rigging, Factional Warfare and Player Corp Securities Market all have the ability to be a lot of fun but could also screw up the subtle balance we’re always trying so hard to achieve. Oveur touched on some of these things in a previous Dev Blog but I’d like to give everyone a little more details.
Invention & Reverse Engineering – Initially for Kali1 we won’t have reverse engineering. That’s when you take an item apart and hope to be able to figure out how it was put together in hopes of making a blueprint out of it. What we do have is Invention. That’s when you take a T1 BPC, some Datacores, a Data Interface and some optional stuff like tech 1 items and Decryptors then mix it all up and hope that they output a tech 2 BPC. That’s right; you can research for a specific T2 BPC with invention. The Data Interfaces are built out of items acquired through mini-professions like hacking. The real clincher is that the Datacores are bought from your research agents in exchange for research points. My fear here is that now with some work players will be able to have all the T2 gear they want but maybe it’s time that T2 become a sort of baseline.
Salvaging & Ship Rigging – This feature has me pretty excited because it addresses one thing that’s always bugged me about EVE. When your ship blows up a pristine can floats in space with some modules inside it. This immersion breaking feature will be no more when Kali1 hits. When your ship blows up a smoldering wreck will be left behind. The wreck will have a few modules intact of course but will also have other items of value only extractable by a skilled salvager. These new items such as Fluid Chips and Diagnostics Circuits are used to build Rigs. Rigs work like implants do but for ships. Once you install a Rig in your ship you can’t remove it. Repackaging your ship destroys the Rig. Rigs give bonuses to various aspects of a ship. The Launcher Processor Rig gives a bonus to CPU need for all missile launchers while the Repair Efficacy Rig increases the repair amount of armor repairers. When Kali1 hits all T1 ships will be given 2 slots for ship modification and T2 ships get 3 slots. My main fears with the Rigs are that some combination will be found that makes some ship overpowered or that we’ll see some new cookie-cutter gank setup.
Factional Warfare – FW has been sitting simmering on the back burner lately because it’s not a feature of Kali1. It’s been sitting and simmering in the back of my mind as well because it’s such a huge change. I’ve pretty much got my head around how I want it to work but there are a few problems left. How do we reward groups of players for cooperating together at the same time we try to discourage blobbing. I have a few ideas but nothing has popped out at me as the grand unified theory of FW. The solution lies somewhere in how we distribute the rewards for completing objectives. I’m very interested in hearing ideas from players who want to play as career military personnel. How do you feel this aesthetic would best be mimicked via game mechanics?
Player Corp. Securities Market – I’ve been looking at how to improve the game play on the corporation side as well; namely through tweaks to corp. management features and eventually to the addition of a Securities Market. I’m sure a lot of players out there would love it if a corp. could have an IPO and see their stock traded on a public market. The problem is you don’t even need to use Enron’s creative accounting to come up with ways to exploit the system. We need to come up with a system that has the typical risks of a real stock exchange with the safety of a Securities and Exchange Commission. We could put restrictions on what publicly held corporations can do with their assets but these same restrictions would serve to hinder the operations of said corps.
In other news; the seamless map has been checked in on the testing server and it’s really freakin’ cool. There is a new solar system view where scanning and exploration takes place and you can scale your view from zoomed in to your ship out through the system view all the way to the F10 map. The effect is amazing and really helps to show your place in the universe and give a sense of scale. I expect a lot of pilots to get shot down as they sit in space mesmerized by zooming in and out. Seamless zoom reminds me a lot of this video:
Watching that video gets me really excited for the day when we have planetary warfare. I can just imagine zooming all the way out from a planets surface to the full view of the galaxy.
