Dot to dot

A few more snippets from PI.  The overview has some items listed for example: planetary cargo links, planetary links, and spaceports.

Im not sure if this is a bug, or how we can expect to see resources but by turning the satellite scan on and off i was able to get this screen shot of ‘hot zones’ on the planet. Quite cool.

It’s early days for the UI here and there’s clearly a whole of of work to do by CCP on this.  PINS are just nondescript icons so you cant tell at a glance which extractor type one is for example.  Equally there is no way to see at a glance what planets you have colonized and which you haven’t without physically going to them.  Some sort of overview on the Universe Map and Solar System map is fairly obviously needed.  Tonight I did manage to launch a rocket (with a cheesy count down 😦 ) but nothing actually appeared in space.

What could be interesting on a wider scale is how PI impacts onto the overall interactions in EVE Online.  Say for example you have a factory (faktory sorry!) on a planet, but the only other player who has a given resource you need is a hostile one? Or just neutral? Blow them up in space and they might choose not to trade with you (perhaps – this rather depends on how the trading element works).  Oddly there’s no indication of ‘real estate’ in the system as is: there’s absolutely nothing stopping another player plonking down an extractor right next to mine, which makes me wonder quite how this will be managed.  Will the overall availability of a resource just drop? Will we be able to see there infrastructure?

Perhaps its because of the embryonic nature of the PI system itself but it does feel quite abstract.  Dots joined by lines sums up the ‘look’ of it so far and at the moment at any rate I’m not getting that feeling of immersion.

Quite a few posts on the EVE-O forums have commented about the ‘PVP’ opportunities afforded by PI. I think we ‘could’ conceivably see blockades of planets and almost certainly some opportunistic acts of piracy.  Some players may choose of course to askew shipping materials off world and simply manufacture and trade their goods on the surface.  Its worth pointing out that all resources clearly have a life span, which seems to range over 1 to 4 days or so, after which the resource (I assume) is depleted.  Some resources can be extracted faster but for yes ‘yield’, with others being high yield  but slower extraction times.

This gives Planetary governors a fair degree of latitude as to how often they would want to directly interact with ‘their’ planet – which also means a player can pick and choose his moment to collect on his investment.  Equally I can’t see (currently) how any pressure might be leveraged against another player on a planet: it doesn’t seem to have a competitive element at all. I assume DUST will cover at least some of that for habitable worlds, although the jury is out on every other planet type.

Speaking of planet types there is also no distinction for the types of infrastructure relative to the planet type.  There is no ‘gas giant vapour harvester’ for example – one vapour extractor fits all.  That’s a bit of a shame as I would have loved to have looked down at industrial gas complexes skimming through the atmosphere whilst vapours swirl about them.  Instead we have some dots….

On a more optimistic note CCP’s art department is one of its greatest strengths and Im keeping my fingers crossed that they will pull something out of the bag before release.

C.