Incarna - Walking in Stations Goes Live

Incarna - Walking in Stations Goes Live

Background - the long promise

By 2011, "Walking in Stations" had been on CCP's roadmap for five years. The original reveal - under the project name Ambulation - was at GDC 2006, with concept-art teases following at Fanfest 2006 and Fanfest 2007. The first real-time public demo came at Fanfest 2008, where Senior Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson showed a multi-player shared space called the Promenade - avatars walking, customisable establishments, NPC bots, a bar setting. The Fanfest 2008 demo set the long-term vision: shared social spaces, player-run shops and bars renting "sockets" in promenade malls, corporation offices, NPC interaction. In a separate press interview at the same Fanfest, Torfi Frans Olafsson made the long-term prediction explicit: in three or four years' time, he told MMORPG.com's Jon Wood, "a new player is going to start playing EVE, and he's not even going to realize that it never had people. He's going to be like, 'I can't believe that game didn't even have people in it.'" The arc never delivered on the prediction. Three or four years on, Captain's Quarters was still the only stage shipped and the room was already being turned off by most of its users. At Fanfest 2009 the expansion got its final name - Incarna - and a target of "sometime in 2010." That target slipped. By Fanfest 2011, the keynote demo had narrowed to a single deliverable, the Captain's Quarters, with a "this ships in summer" promise. CCP framed the rollout as staged: the captain's quarters would ship first, followed by the multi-player establishments shown at Fanfest 2008, followed by deeper avatar gameplay including NPC interaction and corporation offices. Only the first stage ever shipped.

The launch - Incarna 1.0, 21 June 2011

Incarna 1.0 went live on Tuesday, 21 June 2011, three months after the Fanfest reveal. When a character docked at a station, a button on the station interface let them load into a single-room avatar environment - their pod, a viewing balcony around it, a wardrobe area, a couch, a main screen on one wall displaying sovereignty changes and Interstellar Correspondents news, ambient station lighting and machinery noise. The character could walk around the room with WASD or click-to-move, and could interact with fixed objects to bring up the existing market, inventory, fitting, agent-finder, recruitment, and planetary-interaction screens. There were no other players in the room - Captain's Quarters was single-occupancy by design. There were no NPCs, no bartenders, no agents in person. And at launch every station in the universe - Caldari, Gallente, Amarr, Minmatar alike - opened into the same rusty, damp Minmatar room. CCP had built the Minmatar version first as the development pathfinder, and the other three racial variants were not yet ready. The other three faction Captain's Quarters arrived in the October 2011 deployment, roughly four months later, alongside the Incarna 1.1 follow-on patches.

What was promised, what landed

The gap between the demoed roadmap and what shipped became the basis of every retrospective complaint about WiS for the next decade. The multi-player establishments shown at Fanfest 2008 - bars, player-run shops, promenade malls - never advanced past internal prototypes. The deeper-gameplay vision - corporation offices, NPC interaction, contraband and gambling and booster trade as gameplay loops - never started. CCP did continue mentioning avatar-related work at Fanfests in the following years, and a small "Team Avatar" remained on prototype work into 2012, but the team was restructured shortly afterward and the WiS deliverables shrank to "maintenance and the racial quarters." The feature was effectively frozen at the captain's-quarters tier within a year of launch. Players who had loaded into Captain's Quarters once or twice in 2011 typically stopped loading the room at all by 2013 - the room offered no functionality not already available in the abstracted station-hangar view, and the loading cost (CPU + GPU + a few extra seconds per dock) was real.

Reception - and the bundle that buried it

The community reception of Captain's Quarters as a feature was mixed but not catastrophic. Players who had wanted out-of-pod content for years - the Fanfest 2008 vision of bars, social spaces, in-station encounters - considered the actual deliverable a thin start, and "a room with a couch" became the common shorthand. Players who had not wanted out-of-pod content at all considered the feature unnecessary but ignorable, since the abstracted hangar view remained available alongside it. The feature was, by itself, neither a triumph nor a disaster. What turned 21 June 2011 into a flashpoint was what shipped alongside Captain's Quarters: the Noble Exchange vanity-item store, the now-infamous $70 monocle, and the internal CCP newsletter "Fearless" whose "Greed is good?" issue leaked within days of Incarna shipping and confirmed players' worst fears about CCP's microtransaction direction. The resulting controversy - multi-thousand-pilot riots in Jita, mass unsubscribes, the largest layoffs in CCP's history three months later, the emergency CSM summit, and the November 2011 Crucible patch that walked back nearly every contested decision - became known as the Summer of Rage. The bundling meant Captain's Quarters as a feature never got the focused community evaluation it might otherwise have received: by the time players sorted through the Monoclegate fallout, the broader WiS roadmap had quietly stopped advancing.

The Jita Memorial - kept as a ruin

The physical centrepiece of the monoclegate protests was the Jita Memorial, a temple-like monument floating a few kilometres from Jita IV - Moon 4 that had stood since YC108 to honour Shin Ra and Heinky of Burn Eden, winners of the Ruevo Aram Riddle Competition. Capsuleers staging the uprising in late YC113 destroyed it during the riots, and CCP chose not to repair or remove the wreckage. The tattered remains - severed statue head floating nearby, ruined torso atop the temple base - still stand at Jita 4-4 today, with an in-game Aura info panel that reads: "This was once a memorial to the winners of a riddle contest sponsored by the late entrepreneur Ruevo Aram. After standing proud for half a decade, it was destroyed in late YC 113 by capsuleers who were staging a mass uprising against an intolerable status quo of intergalactic affairs. Today, the ruins of this once-great work of art stand as a testament to the fact that change is the universe's only constant." Every returning player who docks at Jita 4-4 passes the monument on approach.