2010: The Year of the Rookie
The universe of EVE is an anomaly in the greater landscape of gaming culture. To the outsider, New Eden is a mysterious, complex, and elusive beast only truly understood by the most devout of gamers. Its mechanics can’t be grasped in one sitting. There’s no singular experience to be graded on a simple 1 to 10 scale in your favorite magazine. There are no rails, no arching narrative, and no pre-designed goals guiding your every step.
This is because EVE isn’t structured like a game. It’s structured like a universe. And for the budding pilot interested in simply being captain of their own spaceship, grasping even the greater mechanics of this universe is no small feat.
New Eden has proudly earned a reputation for being about as welcoming to the rookie pilot as oxygen is welcome in space. We must give CCP some credit, however, as their hospitality has slowly improved with the introduction of tutorials and accelerated skill queues. And with Dominion, new internal teams at CCP solely devoted to the New Player Experience (NPE) are already bringing PVP based tutorials and welcome ease to joining corporations.
But even with these granular improvements in the NPE, it’s the more sweeping changes coming in 2010 that will influence the new player’s perception of EVE on a fundamental level.
Take a second to remember the first moment you realized you would not be able to physically leave your ship in EVE. As arbitrary as it sounds, the notion of not having a living avatar is a major conceptual obstacle for most gamers. The immersion Incarna brings will do more to ground a new player’s experience than any tutorial could offer.
CCP’s coming social network, “New Eden” (formerly COSMOS), will bridge communication gaps that are vital in a pilot’s search for the right corporation. It’ll serve as the ultimate “in” to the social aspects of EVE, no longer leaving players to hunt through disparate sites scattered through the internet for all their answers.
With CCP’s newfound efforts in improving the NPE, an official social network, and light finally showing at the end of the Incarna tunnel, 2010 will finally be the year that understanding New Eden at its most basic level will no longer be a daunting obstacle to the outsider.
2010 will bring fresh interest to EVE as a game, and new intrigue for New Eden as a universe.
This is a submission to CK’s Oracle of EVE contest. More info here.
