CCP Admits Failure of Incarna Expansion, Will Focus on Core Gamers

The tight knitted player community of EVE Online received the recent Incarna expansion badly and the developers acknowledge that in their quest to develop the MMO they forgot to listen closely to the needs of the base.

Arnar Hrafn Gylfason, who is a senior producer working on EVE Online at CCP, told PC Gamers that, “We didn’t really do any gameplay around it, it was just ‘here are some characters, you can walk around’ and that’s it. That’s all you can do, you can walk around inside a small room.”

He added, “Sure it’s a good step to being able to be a person and being able to see your person, but it’s a more important step for that person to be able to do something rather than just walk around. And I think that’s where we ultimately failed.”

When Incarna was originally envisioned, the developers at CCP saw it as a way to make the starting game experience more welcoming, allowing newcomers to create an avatar that could embody their character and only then introducing them to the nuances of space exploration and battle.

But the established gamers who make up most of the EVE Online subscriber base saw this move as a betrayal of their trust and reacted badly to the changes made.

CCP now says that it will not make the same mistake again and that it will always put the needs to long-term players before efforts to expand the appeal of the MMO.

EVE Online is unique among the MMO space because all the players exist in the exact same universe, on a single server shard, and because much of the gameplay actually takes place offline, with gamers and alliances scheming to compromise each other and reap rewards often without an actual battle takes place in the game.

EVE Online received the Crucible update recently, with new ships and mechanics offered to gamers to play with.