Anyways, re: Miz's rant and consequent replies, a few thoughts:
I kind of agree with Silas' approach: Storyline should primarily be driven by in-game mechanics and prod/poke/lure people into interaction. Less or non-interactive stuff like news stories / chronicles / etc are good as supplementary material, but they don't drive a lot of wide-scale engagement. So yeah, you can get 5 roleplayers in a room and create a year's worth of articles (or other "fluff" as it's called, no diss intended), but that's about as much as you can do, and it only pleases/engages a fraction of the customer base. Don't get me wrong, I still loved doing that stuff and thought it was important. Before I was in CCP, I was in ISD writing articles and running little events ingame with AURORA (back when ISD did that).
Without wider engagement though, it's hard to justify spending time on "fluff" to the project managers who determine what developers focus on, and the marketing department who want big things to advertise each expansion and drive growth. This is all doubly true when those same developers are also responsible for a range of things that players are vocal about progressing (missions, exploration sites, etc etc). Then there's the issue of how feature development worked. Content Devs were tasked with making the game appear fresh with new PvE features. Our role was never really to advance storyline, it was to bring in customers (if that makes sense - they're not incompatible things, but were often viewed as such). It's difficult to fit much storyline development into a dynamic (and managerial mindset) like that. A large chunk of storyline work was done on a volunteer basis when I was there and driven by passion, not payment.
Those traditional tasks like developing PVE / Theme Park content were to me often too heavily focused upon, to the point it wasted resources. Why? Because they didn't particularly advance the story, and they aren't really amenable to the kind of game world EVE is on a narrative/mechanical level. Take the Epic Arcs for example. That sort of stuff belongs in World of Warcraft more than it does EVE. I wasn't a real fan of them. They have some decent storyline elements in them, but like..it's entirely static. Past a certain point it becomes just a repetetive farm, and in a real sense, actively detracts from immersion and the sense of a living world when nothing ever changes.
I can appreciate that some amount of it is required, and some amount of it needs ongoing development - players need stuff to do other than PvP, it attracts a broader customer base, plays a role in developing player skills before they dive more fully into PvP sandboxes, and so on. Also, of course, CCP needs new shiny features to advertise and promote customer growth. Etc etc. The PvE has its role to play, of course.
Yet I also think there's this fallacious thinking that if we don't provide theme park content en masse in each dev cycle that it will create retention issues. I'm not so sure about that, and I wish CCP experimented (if only for a single developmental cycle) with fully allocating the same amount of resources they normally would to a feature like Epic Arcs instead to live-event-style interactive narratives like Silas describes, where factions respond dynamically to events. The Faction Warfare feature, I feel, demonstrates that you can't really create a standalone "hands off" system that is sufficiently dynamic. It needs a more committed, hands-on development team to truly be pulled off, and it that team needs to operate freely of the 6-12 month feature-release cycle. It was frustrating how CCP would praise agile / SCRUM development and yet deny us this kind of experiment using that exact model~
Of course, an approach like that requires programmers, artists, UX designers...the whole kit. These teams were busy either being committed to the PvP sandbox features (Sovereignty mechanics, for example), or PvE sandbox features, stuff like Epic Arcs (ugh). It was a difficult task trying to sell the concept of "rolling development" (sandbox PvE that is interactive, dynamic, and responsive to player inputs) to the upper management who, for all their praise of sandbox gameplay, were still quite fond of theme park approaches to developing some parts of the game. EVE is a very odd mix of the two, and that does create a bizarre roleplaying experience / world setting, where Player-to-Player interactions are dynamic and fascinating, and Player-to-Environment interactions are anything but.
Storyline in my time there was rarely valued, and when it was, its value was mostly for marketing purposes. The entire Sansha Invasion event was started and greenlight by the Marketing Dept to "generate buzz", not out of any desire to progress or otherwise enhance the storyline (that was seen as an incidental benefit, if that). The resources we were given to advance the feature were virtually non-existent (most of it was done in our free time honestly - not that I'm complaining, it was fun as fuck to work on and I volunteered that time freely). Even with just a single programmer and artist dedicated for 6 months, we could've achieved a lot more and showcased the idea of a different kind of "Sandbox PvE" to the powers that be. We couldn't get that for even a day, though, let alone months~
Maybe part of the issue was the fact the Content Team was separated from the rest of the crew (90% of CCP in Iceland, and the content team in Atlanta). Yet that didn't stop inter-office collaboration on PvE features, so I dunno about that, ultimately. Another issue for sure was that the ATL Content Team was originally a bunch of White Wolf folk, who despite being brilliant storytellers, didn't fully grasp the unique dynamics of EVE and the potential a single-server world offers for a new kind of narrative design.
Also, I can tell you that in my time there as both ISD and CCP, that approving news articles and other fluff was not as simple as push butan. If only! The politics and work processess of the storyline team were often a bit of a hindrance to this kind of streamlined process. Typically, approval was a far more arduous process that involves way too much distrust in people's ability to do a good job (I include ISD article writers here), too much oversight, and too many "little kingdoms". Of course there needs to be someone ensuring consistency and quality, but it all went too far at times, to the point that even fluff development was a lengthy and time-consuming process.
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Topic: RIP - Captain's Quarters (Read 24858 times)