Interview: Caretakers of a Universe

EVE Online Executive Producer Jon Lander talks about perfecting a galaxy-sized sandbox, maintaining that unforgiving feel, and building new windows on their sci-fi world.

Building Windows on Worlds

Besides maintaining and updating EVE Online, Icelandic developer CCP is also working on first-person shooter Dust 514, currently in beta for the PlayStation 3. Linking both games together in a single persistent universe is something that no other MMO developer has attempted, particularly at this level. How does Lander feel about leading the pack? “It’s great! It’s why I came to CCP, to really be a pioneer in the things that we’re doing. It’s very difficult, sometimes you have these visions of what you want to achieve, it sounds great and then you actually start looking at what you have to do for it, and it’s incredibly tough. And sometimes you think ‘God, is it really worth this amount of pain?’”

Preparing the EVE universe for Dust 514 has been a global effort, with developers in Shanghai working on the game itself. Alongside them is a team of engineers in Reykjavik, focusing on clustering, communications, scaling and web frameworks. “We’re at the place now where these games are talking to each other, where we can start scaling up things. But they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the fact that we are a company which challenges the natural order of things.” 

“We look on ourselves as making virtual worlds, these places where you can go and be whoever you want to be. And then we have games that are windows on to that. When you look at it from that perspective, we want as many people in our world as possible, we want it to be as vibrant and as lively a place as we can make it. And our medium is through games, so we have a game which, for a long time, has been the only window onto our world. We’re going to have another one, which is going to bring huge numbers to look at it. Some of them will just play the great first-person shooter that we’re doing – a triple-A shooter, free to play on PlayStation 3 – no-one else has done that before. People will just play the game for that, and they’ll have a great time playing it.” 

“And then some of them will scratch below the surface. If I take the districts on this planet, I can help in factional warfare. Flip the balance of that sovereignty, and now our faction is bigger. Shooter players – some of them will start going down that rabbit hole, seeing some of that complexity and persistence, and that becomes meaningful. That kind of vision, that kind of meaning in our world, from approaching it with a virtual world standpoint rather than a game first and seeing where it takes us, it gives you the opportunity to have these crazy visions about how you do things and what you bring into your world.” 

“I think a lot of it is uniquely Icelandic. You’ve got this barren rock in the middle of the North Atlantic, where these people who’ve been living for over a thousand years, and not only lived there but thrived there. They’re an incredibly proud people, of what they’ve achieved, incredibly independent, and have a very different way of looking at things. I’ve been living there for three years, and I’m beginning to understand the Icelandic psyche. You can just see how something like EVE was born out of this fantasy desire for great worlds to exist.”

Does this mean that Dust 514 is the first in a series of games in the EVE Online universe? “I would hope so. We’re fully focused on EVE and Dust 514 right now. I love going for long walks in Reykjavik and daydreaming about what we could achieve with this over the years. When EVE is twenty, and Dust is having its tenth anniversary, I wonder what other things we will have in this world. I think, now that we’ve got the scale of the backend where this world lives, the servers are in London, the EVE universe sits here in London, [we have] a platform for us to do so many great things. I would love to see more windows on it, because ultimately, more windows mean more people.” 

That Old, New Social Gaming

It’s clear that Lander is passionate about creating opportunities for players to interact. “We’re a social company. Everyone talks about social gaming as if it’s a new thing, and we’ve been doing it for ten years.” But what was Lander’s own experience of playing with others in EVE Online

“For the first six months I played it pretty much single-player. And when I’d done all the single player content, I was on the verge of cancelling my subscription. And I thought ‘I’ve got a few days left, I’ll give one of these PvP training courses a go, with Agony Unleashed’. Typical thing; people decided that they would become teachers within the world of EVE.  So you paid them some in-game money and they took you off into 0.0 and taught you how to PvP. It was the first time I’d gone on voice comms and worked with people, and we took down a battleship with ten frigates, and you get this massive buzz. And I suddenly realized, the minute you start playing EVE with another person, everything becomes more important, everything becomes more meaningful, and you suddenly see the scope of what you can achieve in the game.”  

“People often ask me ‘it’s really hard to get into EVE, it’s really difficult to learn, how would you recommend someone get into it?’ I said ‘Find somebody else to play the game with. When you get into the game, learn the basics, but you will get so much more out of it if you start interacting with real people.’” It’s an approach that seems to be working, with EVE Online continuing to attract new players. “We’ve grown every year. Our subscriber number at the end of every year is higher than the one before. We don’t shoot up to 20 million subscribers or anything, but we’ve shown steady growth right the way through.”

With EVE Online showing continual growth throughout its nine year lifespan, I asked Lander if there are any lessons he thinks that other MMO developers could learn from the game. “You’ve got to make sure that you put your players at the heart of what you do, because ultimately it’s their world. I’ve gone on record before as saying that EVE isn’t our game anymore. We’re the custodians or the janitors - EVE belongs to our players. And I think it takes a lot to be able to do that, to hand it over, to say ‘This is yours now, you go do it. Don’t mess it up! We’ll keep an eye on it, expand it, give you more toys to play with.’”

“You have to have the courage to recognize that you can either be a massively multiplayer online game, or you can be a massively single player online game, which do you want to be? And for us it was, wholeheartedly, massively multiplayer.”

“The other one, which I think has been essential for a small developer, is that we are not stuck in the content creation cycle. I do not need a hundred people turning out quests, because our content needs some there to start people off, but the content has to be created by the players otherwise you can’t do it. People will do whatever content you create in a month or two. So your strategy has to give enough content to kick-start the process, but then have faith in your players to go and create these things, and in that way you have a very scalable and sustainable business model, as opposed to ‘have to ship the next thing, and the next thing, and the next.’”

EVE Online’s eighteenth free content update, Retribution, is due out on December 4th 2012. The first-person shooter Dust 514 is currently in closed beta, with an anticipated release later this year.

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Staff Writer

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