Everything about the Empyrean Age - novel, supporting fiction, game expansion - felt
wrong. Like it was written totally backwards. So many opportunities for good, involving stories were utterly ruined by it, in fact, that I see it almost as the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy of EVE. Almost everything felt like it was asspulled.
You take a look at the Gallente-Caldari conflict, and this is an example of what I mean when I say EA is "written backwards". For the five or so years before EA, it looked like elements within the Federation were building up a repertoire of pretexts to invade the State - protein delicacies, border disputes, the Kassigainen incident, etc. - and we were given a distinct impression from prime fiction that the State, given that it's a gestalt entity, was far from monolithic, with its various corps and megacorps quietly squabbling among themselves.
State Factionalism implied that the mere existence of factions showed how the State was fraying a little at the edges.
It should have been built up far more slowly, possibly over the course of a year or two, with Foiritan slowly losing his political duel with Blaque, who, as head of the senate, still wields a great deal of clout. Blaque would exaggerate issues with the State or outright invent them and use Foiritan's inability (real or imagined) to deal with them to portray him as weak. He keeps playing this - slowly, carefully - until he's built up enough of a position to call a vote of no confidence and force a new presidential election, which he, of course, wins. He then agitates at the border, carefully and patiently baiting the Caldari Navy into a series of ever more serious indescretions to justify his ever-increasing defence budget. This would also have been an excellent opportunity to increase military presence in the Intaki and Mannar systems (i.e. change them to hi-sec security status) and thus his control over the Federation's member states under the pretext of protecting them from the ever-increasing Caldari threat.
Black Rise appearing out of nowhere was an utter wallbanger as well. The notion that the State would, just after the outbreak of war, having in utter secrecy just colonised a region almost everyone else believed was unreachable, suddenly not only reveal to the world that they've done it, but connect it to the territories of their greatest adversary with high-throughput stargates is utterly preposterous.
Heth... just shouldn't exist. At all. He's a singular unifying force that should not exist within an entity such as the State. He ruins the whole idea of the Caldari State for me.
Gigantic asspull superweapon aside, Jamyl Sarum arriving and taking power uncontested was dreadful. It just did not fit with the picture CCP had painted of the Amarr Empire, in which the Great Houses (besides Sarum, of course) would all have their own very specific reasons not to just let her walk in and take what they all saw as rightfully theirs.
The Elder Fleet appearing out of nowhere was atrocious. At the very least it should have been hinted at beforehand. Fundamentally their attack did nothing measureable besides actually starting the Empyrean wars and provide a suitable exclamation mark for the entire problem with Empyrean Age:
The concept itself.
Empyrean Age as its own entity - expansion, novel, fiction - is so shackled to the concept of implementing something - factional warfare - that it in some cases leaves itself unable to avoid making mistakes. Looking back, we had to ask ourselves - what has factional warfare added to the game, and have those additions been positive or negative? In reality, all it's really done is add a (very, very, very, very, very buggy) mechanic that changes a couple of variables in a system if you orbit something for roughly 6 hours and a free wardec. The changes it's made to PF are overwhelmingly negative, and have destroyed many much better routes the story could have taken. I'll elaborate on those later, but I want to keep mainly on topic here.
In essence, yes, TonyG's writing is subpar, but TonyG's writing is only part of the problem. In the grand scheme of things EVE didn't
need factional warfare. We
know the empires distrust and hate each other. We
know they're working to undermine each other's power. We
know that they all have agendas and ulterior motives, even for co-operating with their allies. We don't
need either ourselves or the story to be shackled to an endless, unwinnable war to know all of this.
The war is three years old this June and it's destroyed friendships, ruined lives, uprooted perfectly good RP corporations and it's not even any more
entertaining or
meaningful than the Red vs Blue war.
To me, Incursion, despite having better mechanics, is an example of CCP just making the same mistakes over again.
