Blog Banter: Overview Overload
Welcome to the ninth installment of the EVE Blog Banter and its first contest, 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!
“Last month Ga’len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith “WebMandrill” Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?”
You are about to throw away one extremely freaking important unit of “Overview”.
Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?
Now, I will preface that I feel like this answer is a bit of a cop-out, in that I’m going to suggest that a mechanic in the game be removed only to trigger thinking about what new mechanic should be added to replace it. But I think the two scenarios shouldn’t be thought of independently. To remove a mechanic in its entirety would suggest that EVE actually contains something as useless as a hairy mole (some other blog banters make just arguments for these kinds of painful removals, but my short experience in New Eden hasn’t given me such confidence, yet). I have to give CCP a bit more credit for now.
The Overview is by no means useless. In fact, it’s so incredibly not useless that we capsuleers are required to interact with it almost exclusively in combat, mining, and general spacefaring operations. It’s extremely important that we watch for the inevitable flashing red nameplate, organize our setups and tabs according to the situation at hand, and make sure we’re not control-clicking our fleet leader (sorry ‘bout that captain!). This amount of importance, however, is exactly my problem with it.
On my first combat tutorial mission I was approached by a drone. The bastard had it out for me—probably jealous about the ridiculously handsome avatar I was sporting—but I wasn’t planning on getting podded so soon. So using my naturally gifted gamer instincts, I proceeded to play “drag the mouse and right-click the extremely fast moving pixel” for a solid three minutes. JJ Abrams, watch out. This was space action.
All potential noob-mockery aside, there was a legitimate problem with this picture. I wasn’t just interacting with the interface this way out of ignorance; I was doing it out of instinct. It was how my uninformed, unbiased self wanted to attack the opposition. I wanted to shoot that drone, so I clicked that drone.
Alas, I was quickly informed about the error of my ways and learned of the famed Overview panel. And you know what? It worked much better. But part of me was saddened at this news.
Rather than looking my enemy in the eye and navigating a glorious view of space in all of CCP’s incredibly artistic glory, I was conducting all of my actions through a miniature Excel spreadsheet. It took my eye off of the beauty of the game, and to be honest, makes the battles feel a little less immediate and a little less real.
Imagine the Overview is gone.
Imagine simply rolling over enemy targets, all with a much larger hit radius, and being presented with a radial menu of actions, the one in the center being “lock target” where your cursor is already pointed. Or maybe it’s only activated when holding control and you roll over a target, giving it an easier selectable area while keeping the interface generally clean. It might even be a less extreme option where the Overview is not entirely gone, but new ways of interacting with the main view area allow it take a back seat for pilots that don’t want to rely on it so heavily, making it optional.
I’m not suggesting any of those ideas are bullet proof (considerations would need to be made for fast moving targets or precision target selection in large scale encounters), or even inherently better than the current Overview system. But what they would do is give those of us that would chose to be watching the battle, instead of the upper-right 1/8th of our screen, some hope for doing so and still successfully play the game.
What the Overview adds to game interaction in convenience, it takes away in impact. I want to click my enemy while studying the details of their ship, and see the missile that’s going to break my shield approach from 60 km away. I want to know what color it is before it hits me.
In time I’m sure all of this will be second nature as I adapt to the methods of the game—mechanics which by all respects I have no business bashing as I’m sure about two hundred and ninety nine thousand of you are perfectly capable of watching battles and conducting them with your micro-spreadsheet at the same time. But why go against player instincts? Yes, we all love the Overview, as it has saved our capsulized asses time and time again—but I can’t help but ask, if there was a better way of interacting with our beautiful and massive environment, would we miss it?
Sulu! Fire all phasers on Nero.
Yes sir! …now, lets just switch tabs here…
Sulu is there a problem?!
No, Captain, I just…need to sort by proximity…
Dammit man, fire!
…right clicking flashy red thing…
The list of participants in this special blog banter contest is getting pretty lengthy, so for both your and my convenience I’ll simply link you back to the most recent list on CrazyKinux’s original post. Thanks for reading.
