I hate fetch quests. I think many of us hate fetch quests. The bane of every major MMO's early game, acting as the game world's personal Fed Ex, typically is boring but has the added effect of teaching crucial mechanics and the lay of the land early on in an adventure.
However, fetch quests don't typically end at level 5 or 10 but can often make up a bulk of questing throughout an MMO player's journey. These quests are some of the most monotonous and meaningless in any adventure, often acting as filler for the major story beats.
CCP Games' EVE Online is no exception to this rule. Many of the missions you get early on involve warping into a combat site, taking out an enemy, collecting their cargo and returning to a station. You'll get rewarded with ISK, maybe more, but by and large they are the same old fetch quests that cause me to turn on YouTube or Netflix in the background to stay engaged.
But what if those fetch quests were not for an NPC but for your personal corporation, contributing to the overall success of your player group? What if instead of the items you've just gathered vanishing into whatever sub-space pocket, all the fetch quest items end up within, they actually make a meaningful difference in your playtime?
Well, EVE Online's trying to do just that.
Corporation Projects
Last year, as part of its Viridian expansion, EVE Online players got access to a new feature called Corporation Projects. This feature allowed Corporation leaders and managers to effectively set some tasks up using a standard toolset, whether it's mining Veldspar in high sec or killing 20 Gurista Pirates to secure part of Empire space. They're modular and allow for some flexibility, but by and large, they are effectively just goals for pilots within the corporation to contribute to for some ISK.
However, speaking with CCP Games last week, the team said they want to enhance this further, with player-made missions on their radar. According to creative director Bergur Finnbogason, the launch of Corporation Projects last year is hard to quantify regarding how it impacted EVE Online.
"This is a huge shift in EVE," Bergur tells me in an interview last week. The launch of Corporation Projects has opened the door to more meaningful content, including player-made missions, which is part of the team's plans for 2024.
"This basically opened the door for player-made content, player-made missions, player-made objectives," Bergur went on to explain. He continued, "But their objectives, they're not just like, random stuff - this is all stuff that has meaning. Like, when you collect that Veldspar for your corporation, it is going towards a specific project, a specific kind of higher purpose.
"And when you think about it, it kind of stops being about collecting Veldspar or donating Veldspar. It becomes about, 'We're conquering the space, we're building the citadel, or we're doing this thing - it's about the bigger thing."
Bergur admits that many of the top corporations and alliances within EVE Online already have these tools quasi built into their organization. They have goals set up by their leaders that work towards a common goal, but these are built on structures that exist mostly outside the framework of the actual game.
This level of coordination though typically isn't available to the mid-sized or smaller corporations trying to get by in the vast ocean of New Eden. Through player-made missions and content, supported by official features in the MMO proper, this helps those smaller corporations gain access to those types of features, while it still provides a great in-game option for the larger corporations doing this mostly outside of the confines of the EVE client.
Another reason this feels exciting is the possibility of opening this type of content up to players outside of a corporation itself, instead helping to contract content out to a third party, player, or corporation looking to contribute in their own way.
Take a highsec mining corporation, which never participates in PVP. This corporation could, in effect, directly mine ore that PanFam has contracted them to collect for them in order to build the next fleet of Titans. This already happens in EVE Online as it is, with the complicated contract system that is baked in, but also through contracts made outside of the game.
The way Bergur describes it, though, this could be a pathway not only for existing corporations to better organize what they already have but also to drum up recruitment for those pickier corps who don't just take everyone in. By outsourcing some of these projects, you could, in theory, use it as a way to trial future members for your cause.
Community developer Peter Farrell sees it as a way to make New Eden even more interconnected.
"I'm excited to see how players will react to this because my mind instantly goes to the fact that like, in Highsec, these groups might not be PvP, or they might not ever want to leave that area," Farrell explains. He describes a world where, despite players maybe sticking to their own part of space, they follow the goings-on of other EVE players, almost like a sports fan would follow their favorite team. By not just creating more diverse and robust Corporation Projects but opening them up to outside members, these fans can directly contribute to their favorite side's success.
"They kind of have almost like a sports fan [mindset], where they have a favorite team or alliance that they follow and they have some sort of shared pride with. So being able to put these guys together where you can say, 'Yea, my corporation, we build for Goons, we always fill out all the Goons corp projects.'"
Farrell describes an instance where maybe a corporation even takes notice of when another corp continually contributes, and can create a relationship between the two through this feature. It's this shared human connection that makes the mundane worth it.
The EVE Element
For my part, thinking about the types of human relationships that can be born through more robust player-made missions can have even broader ripple effects. What happens in a major war between PanFam and Goons, or example, when the opposition learns of the corporation that prolifically finishes the contracts of the other? Are we going to see homefront-style operations take place, where Goons swoop into low or highsec and disrupt the mining operations of a third party, simply because they are fulfilling the contracts of their enemy?
Could we then see those third party corporations use corporation projects of their own to outsource a protection detail to a scrappy PvP corp, flying a combat air patrol around where they mine, or flying escort when transporting? These types of things are technically already possible in EVE Online , but much of that coordination happens on Discord, the forums, Reddit, and more.
Bergur has another example, where a corporation swooping in to complete a contract someone else might have had their eye on.
"You're actually draining their wallets."
Does this create a situation where a competing corporation puts out a corporation project targeting a rival? What about those corporations that spring up and hyperfocus on one thing - they could reap the benefits of freelancing their talents out to a vast array of different player groups, becoming known in their own way within the game world itself.
Also, wouldn't it be more desirable to do a fetch quest knowing that the items you're fetching mean something? The gold sinks, resource sinks, and other elements that make up MMOs feel like they are better channeled here to contribute to the whole rather than just a way to waste time.
This philosophy of player created content isn't going to just stay in EVE Online also, but on the roadmap for their FPS module EVE Vanguard, player-created contracts are listed. While these contracts will likely start out as templated affairs, eventually we could potentially see them turn into the type of player-made missions that have the potential to extend how players contribute to the space opera of New Eden to even when they are boots on the ground.
From a new player perspective, this actually provides some direction and gives those players who maybe started their EVE journey because they read about a battle or crazy heist a way to contribute directly right out of the AIR career program.
Again, technically, this is mostly possible right now the way EVE Online is played, provided you're large enough to have your own built-out infrastructure and can inject your API into the various tools out there. By directly adding this into the MMO itself, CCP Games is leveraging the human element that has made EVE what it is 20 years later directly into the fabric of New Eden proper and making this type of gameplay a bit more egalitarian.
