Celus Ivara
DUST University
Ivy League
435
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Posted - 2016.02.03 17:05:00 -
[1] - Quote
Before anything else, I want to say how much it means that you came here to talk directly with us about this. The temptation for the huge reveal at Fanfest is immense; that you would forgo that to speak with your existing player-base speaks volumes.
There has always been this dichotomy within Dust; the game it was meant to be vs the game we actually had.
The question has always been, how do we get to that game the players & devs both longed for?
When and where do you iterate? And when do you throw-out the old and invest in building from a blank slate?
Despite some trepidation at such an upheaval, and the years of wait that will go along with it, I'm happy to hear that CCP has decided to walk away from the broken foundation of the PS3 client.
There's a phrase in programming, "Plan to throw one away; because you will anyway."
This New Eden FPS will be the third "throwing away".
Many players will rightly wonder why they should think fourth-time's the charm. If I may illuminate the back-end of our rebirths:
- CARBON Dust was crippled by the limits of the engine.
- Dust 514 was crippled by the limits of the PS3.
- EVE Legion was crippled by the hardcoded limits of Dust.
CCP in burning the Earth and rebuilding from a blank slate, gets to take only lessons from their history and none of the burdens of legacy code.
The move to PC will understandably upset many, but as someone who understands game dev I'll vouch it's the only way to build something that requires rapid iteration.
(And though it's a bridge CCP will have to choose to cross when they come to it, I will remind people that porting from PC to PS4 is far easier than PS3 to PS4.)
Going forward, I have but two pieces of worry:
First, how will player migration be handled?
This rebirth will be fundamentally different from the game we've played these last three years, and as such our characters must be fundamentally different. But, for the promise of New Eden to hold, the actions of our time in Dust must carry heft into this new future.
I need to be very clear on this point:
CCP does not sell EVE; nor do they sell Dust.
They don't sell BPOs or SKINs; AURUM or PLEX.
They sell New Eden.
And likewise we have not been playing Dust for these last three years; we have been living in New Eden.
If CCP burns that basic covenant with the player-base, that you live in New Eden and your actions have longterm weight within this sandbox, that will be a catastrophic breach of trust.
So how are we to square this need for permanence with the necessity of change? I have faith a compelling solution exists, and that the community and devs are very capable of finding it together. :)
This leads into my second concern, CCP has long had a very mixed history with communicating with it's player-base. Sometimes they are the most communicative devs in the industry, and other times they are a stone wall.
Sometimes the stone wall is good; it's good for getting a fun, big reveal; it's good for building a bunch of Drifter lore and then slowly letting the players unwrap it.
But for critical systems? For core design and tech decisions that will be near impossible to fix years down the line when you do the big reveal? Failure to have a dialogue with the player-base about the big decisions as they are being made has been the root of (almost) every big catastrophe in CCP's history.
A massive rebuild & reimagining of the New Eden FPS is something big. It will shape the firmament of The Second Decade. The decisions made here will carry immense legacy.
A long time ago during CPM0, Nova Knife made a post about the dangers of developer silence, and made the most on point argument I've ever seen regarding the pitfalls and missed opportunities there-in:
Quote:-without enough trust that early player input is an essential part of examining a designed element for potential problems, CCP potentially risks that they'll have to revisit a system again later. We've often seen them ask for feedback much too late in the process, after a design is finished, and well past the time when a community-spotted problem could potentially be addressed and resolved before becoming an issue on the live servers.
This cycle of releasing content, receiving negative feedback, and revising in subsequent patches is both inefficient and carries a heavy cost in community goodwill. At the same time, we don't expect CCP's designers to adopt a "Customer is always right" mindset either. The proper proverb to apply here should really be "Two heads are better than one".
If CCP builds this game behind a stone wall, expect to yet again hardcode tech and design issues that will be unfixable two years out. And six years from now we'll be begging Hilmar to greenlight round five.
If we instead approach this like the hyper-successful early access games, and bring in the thousands of passionate bunnies to provide an ocean of free alpha feedback, then the planets will finally join the stars in "EVE Forever".
It has been a decade long road to New Eden on the planets.
Let us walk this last few miles together. :)
#PortDust514
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Celus Ivara
DUST University
Ivy League
447
|
Posted - 2016.02.04 07:02:00 -
[2] - Quote
CCP Rattati wrote:I am sad that you and some other feel that way. I can assure you that we worked hard on the 1.3 expansion, but for many reasons ended up not pushing it out to the players. All previous communication by Frame and myself about the feature was honest and not meant to give false hopes. Ultimately, in this industry, having a public and open dev roadmap can result in this situation, but I believe the good outweighs the bad. ^This.
Please keep the plans and the communication as open as possible. Yes, doing so will cause occasional rage and over-reaction, but it is the only way to prevent far worse issues down the road.
#PortDust514
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