EVE Blog Banter #1 – Going For A Stroll Through EVE

EVE Blog Banter #1

Welcome to the first installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from PsycheDiver: Ambulation: What are your hopes for your avatar and new functionality of stations?

Going for a Stroll Through EVE

Firstly, I want to put it on the record that CCP’s, admittedly working, title for the expansion which lets you get out of your ship, ‘Walking in Stations’ is awful and I will always refer to it as Ambulation. Unless they come up with something better of course, but at the moment I don’t see that happening.

Secondly, I realise that the theme of this post is supposed to focus on the new functionality of the Ambulation avatar and the stations we’ll be able to walk about in but I sincerely believe that Ambulation is so much more than a 3D body and spaces to move it around in. To that end I’ve widened the scope of this post to include some of the things which I believe Ambulation make possible and the more ephemeral ways in which EVE as a game will be changed by it.

Ambulation opens a whole new world of possibilities for player interaction in EVE, and as it is this interaction which drives the game, EVE is going to change in many unpredictable ways. Whilst CCP have ruled out (for the moment at least) any kind of combat based PvP outside of your ship, the possibility for boarding actions and station assaults with real troops instead of simply pounding it from space is worth mentioning. I go into more detail regarding this subject in a previous post. Lets just take it as read that I predict that one day (Soon™) this sort of visceral and fast paced avatar based PvP will make an appearance.

If You Build It, They Will Come.

Concept art of an Amarr station interior

First of all, architecture. We already know that each of the four races of EVE, Gallente, Caldari, Minmatar and Amarr, have their own individual aesthetics. The Amarr are all golden arches, quasi-religious iconography and ostentation. The Caldari are sleekly efficient, angular and business-like. The Gallente are more into organic curves and sweeping, almost art nouveau, lines and the Minmatar have a more ad hoc, held-together-with-string-and-chewing-gum, style. I’m hoping that the internal spaces of each race’s stations continue these distinct styles, and from what I’ve been seeing and hearing of Ambulation to date, CCP don’t plan to disappoint.

So we’re going to be able to tell which race the station we’re in owes its allegiance to from its architecture, but I’d like to go a step further. I’d like to be able to tell which station I’m in from visual cues in the environment around me and not the UI. To begin with this might not seem all that feasible, but we’re forgetting that a large part of the environment in ambulation will (I hope) be determined by the players. Corporation offices, shops, bars, and gambling dens have been mentioned, each owned and run by a player or players, who I hope will be allowed to put their own distinctive mark on their property. If all shop fronts are the same how are you going to be able to tell where you can get your ammo? So as the public, mall-like, spaces of the stations gain residents they will develop their own individual character and atmosphere. I know that this isn’t an out of the box feature and is rather something which will emerge over time, but the fact that it is able to emerge is something that should be designed into Ambulation from the get go.

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