Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Lore Payoff

As excitement swirls around the ongoing story about Drifters, its worth commending CCP on the recent efforts in the past year to bring the background story to the foreground and make the universe feel more dramatic and dynamic. As I said in my post "The Lore is Important" in December:

Roleplayers or not, its easy to get excited about the background we engage each other in becoming more alive and vibrant. The game has always played second fiddle to player actions, but there is no reason for the background to be cardboard cutouts and completely hollow shells. The ride gets more exciting when there is more life to the animatronics.
And most importantly, the lore being dynamic and moving helps to bring players in and keep them engaged in those lulls when a player is between corporations or alliances. Hell, I want to go see Thera and I am fully engaged in Faction Warfare.
So good on CCP for continuing to build on the momentum with more mechanics, hooks, like Scope videos and the Drifter autopsy report, live events, and more wormhole systems being explored as I type this on Singularity.

However, I'm going take this moment to remind CCP that it can't all be Lore Hype, eventually there has to be a payoff in part or in full to justify the excitement and resolve storylines to make room for new storylines.

You see, EVE's background story is not like a movie or a series of movies; in those you are aiming for one massive final climax (the hero finally faces and defeats the villain or the group of survivors gets to permenent safety) that can leave the viewer with a sense of completion and satisfaction. EVE, however, is more like a long running TV series with several threads of storylines that wax and wane in importance and severity over time, but most importantly have a definite resolution.

Right now I would say there has not been any serious storyline resolution since Templar One in EVE's major backstory threads. Back then, we had the mystery of Sleepers, Jamyl Sarum's sudden return, what were the Templar / DUST soldiers, why did Admiral Noir crash a Nyx into the Ishukone station and the novel resolved those questions either fully or partially.

So I feel its high coming upon time for some serious storyline resolution of some or all of the ongoing threads as we approach the culmination of the Seagull Plan.

(I realize we have decent theories and pieced together stories for some of these, assembled carefully by hand by our lore enthusiasts with amazing diligence, but we need a big payoff for the larger audience.)

Specifically:

1. What's Up With Sansha's Nation? What are they doing with all the people they steal in their incursions (motto: we come for YOUR people)? How are they generating those incursion wormholes? What are they doing in the shattered wormhole? How do they relate to the other storylines?

2. What happened to the Jove? Were they all dead prior to Caroline's Star event or did that event do them in?

3. What exactly happened with Caroline's star anyways? We have some decent theories in the community but no confirmation.

4. What's going on with Jamyl Sarum? Is the presence of the Other completely in control now? Is she going to maintain control of the empire?

5. Who exactly are the Drifters? What are their goals / aims?

6. What happened in Thera and the other shattered wormholes?

7. What's going on with the Sleepers? Are they all dead too?

And that's just the major storylines!

Come on CCP, we need some resolution of some of these dangling threads!

1 comment:

  1. 1. They convert them into more slaves to crew more ships for more incursions. As for the other questions, they are unresolved but there are a few rather plausible theories out there.

    2. Good question, next question.

    3. Indeed

    4. She is still not completely possessed, but her control might be slipping. Whether she will be exposed and dethroned or remains in power and does something crazy with the empire remains to be seen.

    5. We know with pretty high certainty that the Drifters are re-animated Sleeper corpses with some capsuleer bioparts and advanced implants thrown in. Who is doing that re-animation and to which purpose is indeed still unclear.

    6. Thera got hot in part by the Seyllin incident and then even further destroyed by the Caroline's Star explosion. That also caused the Jovian stargates to go offline and opened the connections to the other Shattered Systems.

    7. It is strongly suggested that the Sleepers were imprisoned in their own virtual reality long ago. Some of them died during the destructive events which opened the wormholes and some were harvested for making the Dust merc implant technology. The rest are still technically alive.

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