Day 9: Avatar and story

I don't remember where I read this, but it stood out: in Eve, your ship is your avatar. Totally makes sense: although you design a character and even pose him/her for a portrait picture, the first and sometimes only look other players get of "you"is your ship.

From Azyl Alfa

Here's me. Or, one of my twins. A Gallente Catalyst. I suppose my destroyer has different guns and other accoutrements. Bought it for 5 million ISK (the in-game currency). I have no idea how fast it can do the Kessel Run.

This is all a bit different than other Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (I think -- I've never played another MMORPG, other than a few days of The Old Republic), where the individual avatar is something human-ish, anthropomorphized, with a face, and it's you. Or game-you. Starfleet Online gives you a starship to flit about in, but you have a person-ish character steering it, you recruit individuals to crew your ship, and you even leave it from time to time to putter about worlds. Vehicles are a critical component of Battlefield and Halo, but you play as a discernible human(oid) who enters, emerges from, and/or splatters against those war machines.

So, it's different. Neat. I, for one, am glad I don't have anything distinctly me-looking as my online presence. Going all the way back to Knights of the Old Republic, I've always used character creators to try to make something vaguely me-ish, and the outcome is always way too flattering.

Does the de-emphasis on an arms-and-legs persona contribute to Eve being a distinctly "out of character" RPG? (I don't have a point of comparison for how much other MMORPG denizens chat in- or out-of-character.) Everything I read about character creation said the race, ethnic, and gender choices are purely cosmetic. And, from what I can tell, there are no barriers to changing your character's appearance -- unlike, say, recent The Elder Scrolls or Fallout games, which present a big warning about not being able to change your character's appearance after the tutorial.

I suppose it makes sense, too, that you wouldn't populate a big galaxy with up to 1.5 million (500,000 players times three characters per player) characters without providing any kind of ongoing narrative. There is lore, and it looks like expansions sometimes add depth, but there is no change. Hilmar Petursson, CEO of Eve developer CCP, told Polygon that CCP is not "telling the story of the game." Seemingly in the same breath, he said, "The game is the players" (Polygon's/Petursson's emphsis). Players. Not characters. Where there is conflict, it's based on players' decisions, not in response to a third-party story arc. Eve has some built-in missions, with names and places and a conflict, but they are bite-size, with no mass and evaporate upon completion. In fact, I've been offered a couple of identical tutorial-esque missions more than once, with only the locations changing.

And having written all that, I'm scratching my head a bit: I've always enjoyed games for their stories as much as or more so than their gameplay. I love Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for its innovative story-telling twists; Call of Duty: Ghosts, meanwhile, plays pretty much the same way, but it has a lame story and I commensurately dislike the product. Mass Effect 3's gameplay is more refined, but I prefer the first and second games' narratives (Like Garrus, at right, I miss the elevator-as-load-screen chitchat from the first Mass Effect). The best part of Mass Effect 3? The final DLC, which has no gunplay, no leveling up, and is all about a final farewell to some great characters. Knights of the Old Republic II has some wonderful tweaks to gameplay over the first game, but the first one ... well, the first one doesn't have entire storylines eviscerated and left bleeding. You can guess which one I prefer.

So, at first glance, one of the biggest draws for me in a video game isn't part of Eve. I have an inkling what's compensating for that, so far at least: a sense of growing my (non-)character. My capsuleer serves one important purpose I've figured out so far: serving as a bucket for skill points. Filling this bucket is what allows me to access new avatars, i.e. ships, and allows me to do better things with them. I'll write more about this sense of making progress later.