I'll give my three major concerns this interview raises in brief:
Big reveals vs. progressive reveals -
I'm personally a fan of the latter, as I feal that BIG REVEALS can very, very easily come off as hamfisted and thoughtless without a very, very skilled writer at the helm. Progressive reveals, on the other hand, allow you to feal that subtly increaseing "uh-oh..." feeling you get as things just keep coming to the surface. I'd point to the Sansha revival arc here - it went from "Sansha are in wormholes? This is going to be bad..." to "Sansha can generate wormholes on their own?! Very bad!" to "Sansha are hunkered down around a Jovian station with a massive fleet they ported there through a wormhole! Oh, @I#(#*^$&!!!" If we'd started with Kuvakei doing a broadcast from the Jovian system and THEN explained how he got there, it could easily have felt like an ass-pull (for lack of another way of putting it) - "Hey guys, Kuvakei's in a Jove system! How'd he get there...? Uh, Wormholes!"c
Ancient mysteries 'n' stuff -
This is more a personal sinking feeling, given how CCP's handled this category in the past. Once again, space illuminati can very easily end up looking like (I won't comment on them actually being) an ass-pull substitute for a longer, more interesting storyline development. Walking plot devices, in short.
Disconnection with the community -
This is probably the only concern I'll voice about TonyG directly. He seems rather... out of touch with the EVE community, and especially the RP community, at times. Tony, CVA doesn't fly Amarr-only anymore. In fact, I think that policy was gone before TonyG joined CCP.
One interesting note here is that TonyG admits that character development suffered in the writing of Empyrean Age due to plot demands. Unfortunately, this is juxtaposed with "Ooooh, sleeper reveals!" and "Ooooh, suddenly new technology makes DUST soldiers, big stuff happens!" which seems to read to me as "Well, we've heard your complaints, and acknowledge they're reasonable complaints... and then do the exact same thing." It again shows me a... troubling disconnect with the thoughts of the community.
People will say I'm being hard on CCP and TonyG, and in truth I probably am. I do apologize for that, as realistically it isn't fair to base my raeg solely on the handful of articles, snippets of text from fanfest, and couple of interviews/live dev blogs we've had. Thing is, CCP and TonyG have a track record now, and for better and for worse my thoughts are biased by past performance.
Author
Topic: TenTonHammer talks with TonyG about DUST514/New Book (Read 2939 times)