Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Gussy Up The Moons

I was saving this post for a rainy day. One of those days where there just wasn't much to talk about in EVE. The War in Fountain is over. There's no real development news to talk about, that people in the know aren't already covering better (e.g., command ships.) I could not care less about the Slapfight in Providence, and that seems to have ended with a whimper.

So I was going to write about moons. And today, looking through my Old Reader RSS feeds, I notice that Mabrick has done exactly the same thing. Bastard! Stop reading my mind!

Oh well, a second article couldn't hurt. Because I do agree with him. Or he agrees with me (if he indeed has been reading my mind.)

So the two images above. On the left you have Io, a moon of Jupiter. On the right you have an EVE Online moon. Every moon in EVE looks the same. They look like our moon, the moon of Earth. Grey, lifeless and pock-marked with craters. The CCP art department did a fantastic job with those moon textures, they're gorgeous looking no doubt, but some actual variation would be nice. Our own solar system shows us variation in moons.

If you haven't read Mabrick's short article, please do so. He has a bunch of images of moons in our solar system. It's worth looking at them. Just to get an idea of the type of variation there is in reality. Check out Ganymede. Enceladus. Europa.

CCP should task their art department with designing nine new moon textures. Now, I would not start replacing every moon randomly with one of the ten available textures. I'd keep the moons orbiting temperate and barren planets as is. Those planets are small enough that they're not going to have much gravitational effect on the geology of their moons, thus them looking grey and lifeless is realistic and plausible. Now the big-ass planets, the gas giants, the storm planets (are the ocean and plasma planets large too?), I'd start replacing their moons with the new models, since we do see a lot of moon variation around our own gas giants.

(I would not relate moon textures to their mineral composition. We do want people to continue scanning and probing moons.)

I realize that adding new moon artwork adds nothing to the game, mechanics-wise. But CCP has added features that don't add anything to gameplay (e.g., routes in space), yet have been accepted with much aplomb by the playerbase. Features that simply add beauty to the game universe can never go wrong, in my opinion. I think the effort spent creating some new moon models would be time well-spent. EVE is already a beautiful game, but added beauty is not wasted effort.
Source: Gussy Up The Moons

~bottleneck art department~

Eye candy ist trotzdem immer eine gute Idee. Schöne Screenshots, schöne Videos sind halt immer auch Werbung für das Spiel.