Its the same thing with the events of Templar One, TEA, and so forth. Theres no way anyone could know it, really, so its entirely unusuable from an RP standpoint.. but we being RPers, we want to figure out a way to do so, because we really want to play within the limits set for us by CCP, because otherwise why arent we just running some massive PbP game?
Rant over.
Slight tangent on this.
The Eve chronicles (plus short story or two) were a great way of setting the scene when people were waiting for the game to go live, and in the first couple of years of Eve. When the chronicles simply stopped happening, like a lot of people, I wanted More of This Sort of Thing. Years went by, and from a clear blue sky came Abraxas' prolific chron generation and Tony Gonzales somehow getting to write official Eve novels (as ever, it's not what you know, it's who you know; and it's not how good a game you have, it's how good a game you talk). I rejoiced like many people: at last, we get more material! Information had always been drip-fed to us in these stories, so we naturally wanted more. At last, CCP delivered.
A novel and a few chrons in, and I realised that it was all a terrible, terrible mistake. We didn't need more stories after all: we were supposed to write those ourselves. Not just by writing stories, but by living them, by acting them out on that grand single-server stage. What we really needed was more information about the world to continue enhancing what we already had to work with.
The problem was, Abraxas and Gonzales were not writing to add background to the world. They most definitely were not writing with any consideration of how their material might be assimilated and used by the players. They were writing to tell their own stories (and I always very much got the impression that Abraxas had pre-existing stories written or in his head that he shoe-horned into Eve) or to sell an expansion and happily disregarded any inconvenient material or were blissfully unaware of it.
Somehow, they lost sight of what an MMO is and what it needs. It needs background, and the background should be available to everyone that subscribes: in the game, and on the website. Not in magazines. Not in half-assed novels. For my money, background information should rightly be in the form of things like histories (coin flip whether these are 'The Word of God' dry histories - just the facts - or more unreliable histories written IC) and hard data with clearly discernible degrees of veracity. They did an amazing job with the convoluted relationships between corps, for example: more of that stuff would have been good. What else? Encyclopaedia entries, biographies, lists of habitable planets, population data, some city names and scientific journals all come to mind. More details in the item DB and more persistent fluff in-game. They put a ridiculous amount of effort into mission crap that simply vanished when you completed the mission: laughable really. Or it would be if you don't consider that a bunch of good people put so much misplaced effort into that. :S
Today, the background material is a mess that is symptomatic of the general culture of mismanagement at CCP. I think we can probably all agree that they were definitely on to something with Eve and that they got a lot of things right, but perhaps that's exactly what makes the missteps harder to take.
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Topic: IC/OOC discussion: players, characters and roleplay approaches (Read 5160 times)