The latest dev blog from CCP looks at the foundation and evolution of the company's US office in Atlanta, and the challenges of telling story in EVE.
From the beginning, Molock, Big Dumb Object and I have been looking for ways to use the mission system to tell interesting stories, and we're very excited to have a number of new tools we can now really begin to put into use. I'm very glad to have the shiny new option of having the player drop off an item in a deadspace complex (one of the many features added by Ludicrous Speed during the Apocryphic times).
It may not seem like much, but from a story perspective, it opens up a ridiculous number of options- like the ability to deliver a ransom to a dead drop, which we've made use of in mission eight of "The Blood-Stained Stars" arc. I've come up with some good workarounds in the past (I know I used at least one in my favorite mission arc, "Rancorous Researcher"), but it's great to have the chance to revisit a number of missions we'd put on hold because it didn't really make sense to have them as courier missions.
Writing stories for EVE missions is a challenge. (For one thing, I have to keep the text a lot shorter than this, which isn't always easy.) On our end of things, we try to come up with story threads that keep things interesting for you guys. The deadspace guys keep it gorgeous and try to balance the difficulty of each complex. Together, we built you a story that runs at least fifty missions while our toolset was being reworked.
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Read more here.
