CCP Falcon released a Dev Blog today on the future of Captain’s Quarters and Twitch Integration.
Captain’s Quarters
CCP has announced the removal of the Captain’s Quarters in the August release. You will no longer be able to walk around in your station cell and watch TV or go an look at your ship docked.
Included in the dev blog were metrics on the use of Captain’s Quarters. These showed that only around 10% of players ever used them when it was implemented. This has dwindled down to 3% today. Continuing maintenance of the Captain’s Quarters had a significant impact on the development process and was using 4-6 weeks of time annually from the art team. Originally the Captain’s Quarters was to be the first step on the journey to Walking in Stations. There are those who still indicate this should remain an end goal. Assuming Walking in Stations is in the future the technology used for Captain’s Quarters would have to be replaced to keep up with advances in the area anyway.
Twitch Integration
The EVE Online Client has long included an option to stream directly to Twitch. As of the September release, this will be discontinued. Most EVE streamers already use OBS or xSplit that offer far better customization. CCP would have a hard time keeping up with features needed to stream EVE and implementing them reasonably.
Surprise Comment on 64-bit Client
CCP Falcon indicated CCP has a desire to move to a 64-bit client. One of the blockers to this activity was some of the legacy middleware required to support the Captain’s Quarters. Removing them has a distinct benefit in moving that task forward.
Comments
Accurate metrics are critical to figuring out what is worth investing in within the structure of the game. These clearly indicate a benefit to removing little-used functionality that will allow the re-tasking of staff to more valuable projects. The Twitch change is being made in similar fashion. Why support code for feature/functionality that is better handled outside the client. We want a better game and we don’t want CCP wasting development resources on maintaining things in the game that doesn’t substantively enhance the experience.
Daito Endashi
Before clicking the article: “The Future of Captain’s Quarters[…]”
July 12, 2017 at 5:39 PM*getting my hopes up*
After reading the article:
*hopes crushed*
Libluini
As nice as the idea of having your own quarters was, the implementation was a bit silly. And if just having it takes that much time just for maintenance, good riddance. Maybe we’ll get something better in a couple years, instead of the parody we had to suffer under until now.
July 12, 2017 at 7:01 PMCK
Would happily watch a stream of CCP giving that bit of code a viking funeral in Reykjavik harbor.
July 12, 2017 at 7:43 PMpervertparade CK
Viking funerals are reserved for the *honored* dead.
This is an unfinished pile of GPU-melting nonsense. It’s a monument to silly priorities, poor planning, hubris, and disappointment. If you insist on a livestreamed ritual death, then CCP ought to dump the ambulation code onto a spare HDD and re-enact the printer scene from Office Space.
July 13, 2017 at 12:49 AMCK pervertparade
That works, too.
July 13, 2017 at 9:32 AMGee
Good riddance to the twitch integration, it was worthless to anyone with any semblance of intelligence when it came to streaming. I still don’t quite get how that was green lit for dev time. Eve is very challenging to stream anyway without the inability to hide certain screen elements which i never saw options in the game to do.
July 13, 2017 at 4:08 AMAs for captains quarters, the only bit of enjoyment i had from it was seeing people customise the movie elements showing on your big tv in game to show random stuff like my little pony and game of thrones. when they removed that i lost any reason to care about its implementation and upkeep
Alot Gee
Agree with the DUST514 comment and more relevantly, an immersive first person experience would be better served by developing a robust FPS and then having that entire game launch-able from within Eve.
if people want to wander around stations have Eve start up a slimmed down version of the FPS client. If players show interest in that sort of thing, make more definite EVE/FPS interactions and have the option to fire up the full FPS client while eve is running in the background – and let the soldier command his ship to do crazy stuff from up on high. Heck, its practically formalized multi-boxing.
July 13, 2017 at 10:54 AMCK Alot
Eve: Second Life… Is the world ready?
July 13, 2017 at 1:41 PMArrendis CK
It’s EVE. Call it ‘Second Death… and Counting’
July 13, 2017 at 3:55 PMDirk MacGirk Arrendis
EVE is Third Life. My Second Life character has been playing Eve for years.
July 13, 2017 at 7:12 PMErick Asmock Dirk MacGirk
I did that laugh from Revenge of the Nerds…That was a funny comment.
July 13, 2017 at 8:13 PMAlaric Faelen
I’m glad to hear that Space Barbie is going away. Until I read this I didn’t realize that it’s been 3 full years since I had anything but the hangar view in game. What a waste of dev time and effort.
July 13, 2017 at 12:52 PMDoes beg the question though, what is CCP going to do with all those Barbie clothes they’ve put into the game? Now that we are back to your avatar just being a portrait in the corner of the screen, all those shoes and pants are fairly useless (more than they already were). Would it be worth their time to delete all that stuff from the code?
Dirk MacGirk Alaric Faelen
they delete them and they may need to give something back. They were always just a relatively unusable vanity item yet people still bought them. It sure wasn’t because they thought ambulation was still coming.
July 13, 2017 at 7:11 PMRobert Krauszer
Was a cool idea at the time, giving the menu a bit of a new UI. Then again that’s all it was really was just a new ui, after that it was a bit hollow.
July 13, 2017 at 1:27 PM