Ambulation and me

First, a word from our benevolent leader:

Welcome to the first installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s topic comes to us from PsycheDiver: Ambulation: What are your hopes for your avatar and new functionality of stations?

And now, back to our regular programming…

For those about to walk, we salute you

Any discussion about Ambulation, or the more furriner-friendly term “walking in stations”, has to include the excellent thread stared by Lui Kai on the eve-online forums: Answering Ambulation Questions. It doesn’t seem to have been updated since August, however, and has also lost its sticky. Oh well.

In the abovementioned thread you’ll find all, or most of, the info released and communicated about the upcoming feature Ambulation. Links to official announcements, videos, screenshots and more. It’s a must read if this feature at all interests you. I strongly suggest you check it out if you haven’t before.

As for me and Ambulation I am ambivalent (see what I did there? Pure genious. Feel free to quote me).

I think it’s going to be a great feature. I think it’s going to be filled with bugs, it’s gonna be half-done when it’s released and people will whine and complain and threaten to cancel their 15 accounts. And it’s gonna be bloody awesome. It’s gonna have lots of features and things you can do and try out, and all of them will be pointless and have absolutely nothing to do with you pwning internet spaceships with your internet spaceship.

Quite possible it’s going to be technologically on the cutting edge. Atleast from the videos I’ve seen it’s very very ambitious. Avatars will be vastly customizeable, and their movements and behaviour dictated by a number of variables, not least being the bulk and size of their bodies. Stuff like that.

Alas, it will not be for me. The reason for that it’s not that I wouldn’t want Ambulation (I do, oh how I do), it’s that my current computer rig doesn’t handle premium gfx. And word is, if you can’t play EVE with delicious delicious premium graphics, you won’t be doing any walking in stations either.

So that sucks.

What Ambulation will give other people, however, is a venue of immersion. Of actually seeing your corpmates and your enemies. Of seeing yourself. Roleplayers of EVE, unite. On some level it has always bugged me that my character is constantly locked up in his pod, unable to exit it without, well, getting it blown up, with a cold hard death quick to follow.

The game won’t change because of Ambulation. It’ll still be about internet spaceships blowing up other internet spaceships. But we (or rather they) will recieve another dimension to the game, a social one. An arena for roleplay and interaction, far more advanced and alluring than ye olde chat channel. It’s going to put the RP into the MMOG that is EVE (I could be wrong, but that’s like three rhymes there. I’m on fire. I wonder what CCP’s marketing department would pay for that line?).

And thanks to CCP’s wise wise decision not to include any f-ing /dance command, it won’t turn into this:

We’re much cooler than that. Right?

Right?

Participants:

• CrazyKinux’s Musing: Exotic Dancers, Corporate Meetings & more
• The Wandering Druid of Tranquility: Ambulation – what I hope to see
• Semper EVE: Ambulation and Me
• Roc’s Ramblings: Blog Banter #1 – Ambulation
• The Ralpha Dogs: Ambulation/Walking in Stations: A “Second Life” for EVE?
• Drunk in Space: Look at how much weight he put on…
  
• Diving into PsycheDiver’s Psyche: Ambulation and Her
• Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Eve Blog Banter – Ambulation
• I am Keith Neilson: Going For A Stroll Through EVE
• Life in Low Sec: Ambulation Fantasies
• Shahirs Journey: Hopes for Ambulation
• A Mule in EVE: Ambulation
• Protosolus: EVE: Gawking in Stations
• One Man, One Ship: Ambulation
• Achernar: Avatars in a spaceships game
• The Shard: Ambulation
• Mad Rant: Saturday Night Fever
• I May Find Peace Within The Emptiness…: Walking Around…
• Ombeve: Ambulation
• A Merry Life and a Short One: Ambulation

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Blog Banter – it’s what’s green
• EVE: Conquests should be released today
• Massive blog by Oveur
• EVE Online gets rework of ’Destiny’ simulation engine

~ by Shaun Livingstone on October 29, 2008.