Published , by TJ Denzer
Published , by TJ Denzer
With the spring season in full swing, much of CCP Games’s early plans for 2024 have been coming to fruition. EVE Online is readying for its next major update to continue the Havoc expansion and the fight for piracy vs order. Meanwhile, EVE Vanguard recently had its own first major update, which saw mining brought into the game, beginning the fulfillment of a promise made at EVE FanFest 2023 to make the varied jobs of EVE Online available in the game. It also marks the beginning of Vanguard’s victories and defeats affecting the realms of piracy and order as players have chances to make their actions felt across the EVE universe.
With so much going on, we caught up to EVE Online creative director Bergur Finnbogason and EVE Online community developer Peter Farrell about how the next big chapters of EVE are coming together.
Shacknews: So right out of the gate, let's just jump into what's been going on because the last time we talked, y’all were still prepping custom liveries and the ability to make your own ship paints and emblems and all that stuff. And I'm curious to know right out of the gate, how has the audience responded so far and how's it going with that and what are you seeing out of the feedback?
Finnbogason: Yeah, so at Fanfest 2023 we announced that we were going into ship skins and things like that. We had done emblems earlier and we're planning for the ships skins coming out in June where we will allow players to paint their own ships and make them amazing. We kind of touched on that in the director’s letter earlier this year. And yeah, people are just really pumped. We always strive to give players more control of the universe and this has definitely been one of the things that we've been wanting to open up our hood a bit more to our community. It might sound simple, but we have what close to 500 ships in the game, like 380 or so of those are player flyable ships. So, it's a pretty big task going into this, but the development of it is looking really amazing. I'm super pumped to share it with players in early summer.
Shacknews: And that's got to be really excited for a lot of players. EVE Online is a game that has a lot of player factions in it, clans and such. The ability to be able to dress their ships in their team colors and fly their flag through space. That has got to be exciting for a lot of organizations and a lot of long time groups out there in EVE Online.
Finnbogason: Yeah, absolutely. Just being able to fly your colors, be like, ‘this is my team, these are my colors, I want to be a part of that,’ it’s huge. It’s more ways to express yourself and if that's to show your allegience with others or what have you, I think it's going to be a huge unlock.
Farrell: Yeah, players don't actually know this part yet, but the way it's designed is if you're going to have a designated artist that can design the skin line for your ship, then they can just send out copies to everyone in the alliance so they don't necessarily have to try and copy it and mimic it as best they can. They can just grab a copy of what was designed by what might be the brand person or your corp artist to go ahead and download the copy to their ship. And it'll be so neat to be able to see them flying their own colors. As you said, they already have their own emblems for their corporations. For Brave, they already have the Bee, they have their nice, cool logo, and obviously they can already color their structures that they have in space already, but we feel they're going to be really taken aback by how cool the Ship Skinner is and all the things it allows them to do. I am really excited for the first week to just see people go wild trying to decide, ‘okay, who's going to be the person deciding our colors?’ and stuff like that.
Shacknews: Catching up to more recent news. It's been a wild couple of weeks for CCP. You've had a lot of announcements just between this week and last week. One of them, Project Awakening, is going to be a new single, shared experience in the EVE universe. Playtesting is coming soon. Is there anything you can share about it that players might not already know?
Finnbogason: This is a brand new game within the Eve universe. It's actually being developed by a separate team here in Reykjavík. Of course there's a lot of knowledge here between the teams, but it's not pulling any resources from EVE Online development and it's somewhat of a different beast. It's super interesting too… It's a different take on our universe and they have an opportunity to kind of try out things that we've talked about and even push further. So, it's a super cool project in its early states, but looking kick ass and I'm very excited to learn from it and just get more eyes on the Eve universe. That's always my biggest thing. And that same thing goes with Vanguard. If you look at EVE Valkyrie or Dust 514 or even Gunjack and Spark. Every time a new game in the EVE IP comes out, interest in EVE online goes up and we see a huge halo effect with these things. So yeah, the more eyes on sci-fi, the more eyes on the universe of EVE, the better for us.
Shacknews: The announcement of Project Awakening came alongside another interesting announcement, which was the Carbon Development platform. From what I've read here, and correct me if I'm wrong, this is talking about making the Carbon Engine tools and much of what is used to make everything in EVE Online available to players and creators to do their own thing. Can you talk about that some more?
Finnbogason: This is very much in its heyday, this conversation. I think there's a lot of cool opportunities. It's one of those that we don't fully know what will happen, so it's better to test it rather than speculate. So right now, we've been using our internal tools since the inception of EVE Online. It's gone through few names in the past, but this current iteration that we're talking about making public and open source to a certain extent…
Yeah, this is the latest one that we've been working on for now a few years. One of the super cool thing is this is, while this has only served EVE Online up until now, we've done variations of the engines for all the prototypes we've done in the past. But the super cool thing about this thing right now is because we have Project Awakening being developed in Reykjavík as well, using the same engine. This is basically just giving EVE Online a lot of new cool tools that the guys on the other side of the building are looking at and thinking about. So actually, EVE Online is benefiting a lot from this development in Project Awakening. And part of that is also like, ‘okay, can we actually boost this even further? What happens if you get brand new eyes, brand new ears, brand new fingers onto our engine?’
Oh my God. The nonsense that Capsuleers (EVE Online players) manage to create when we give them tools is insane. So, what happens if you just give them the keys to the car and see what they come up with? That's basically the thought process. If something useful comes out of it, awesome. If not, okay. If someone builds a game way better than EVE Online, if they fix a longstanding issue that has been bothering people for years, great. The possibilities are endless.
Shacknews: One of the things I think about as I look around the game industry… we're seeing this kind of, I would say almost renaissance of tools and creativity. It's easy to look at Unreal Engine 5 and see how much that has made things easier for developers and given them new opportunities, but also we have things like Roblox is allowing creators to make games. We have Fortnite allowing users to create their own experiences. And I have to ask, was there any influence from that or was this always a plan for the long run for CCP to venture into this space of giving creativity and tools back to the players?
Finnbogason: I mean, a cornerstone of CCP Games is that we make sandboxes and our main thing is to give players more tools to play with in the sandbox. And sometimes we write canon, backstory, and lore to guide people in a certain direction in the sandbox. We sometimes need to point them in the right direction. But this goes well with this narrative of like, ‘hey, we built tools for you to create your own stories.’ And yes, this is definitely breaking the fourth wall, but we've seen this also in the past with awesome third-party tools that the community builds, like zKillboard or DOTLAN or all these fantastic tools that players built. This feels like a natural step for lack of better words in that process. We’ve also been taking these steps within the game. If you look at the structure skins or now soon to be the Ship Skinner, when you look at corporation projects where we allow corps to basically create content for their players. Even corporations and the markets themselves are tools to allow players to build their own stories and write their own epic tales.
Shacknews: With something of this magnitude and ambition, there's a sense that you want to be able to not only create these things but also share them. Is the Carbon Development Platform going to be able to going to facilitate being able to share the players' creations with the community around them in an easy and streamlined way?
Finnbogason: We're not that we haven't ironed out all the nitty-gritty details on that. And of course, there's a lot of ins and outs. We don't expect this to be an Unreal 5-type moment, just to be fully transparent and honest about that. But there are exciting things to come and we can't wait to see what Capsuleers think of them.
Shacknews: Moving on to more big news, this week we are coming up on one of the first major updates to EVE Vanguard. We're seeing new gear, new contracts, new suits… How are things moving so far with Vanguard? How have you felt about the response so far and how are players reacting to what you've given them as far as what Vanguard offers?
Finnbogason: The reception has been really great and really humbling in many ways. We started out with our first test in December. We got a huge amount of people in to test it. We’ve gated it behind Omega Access because initially we want Eve players testing this out. This is first-person shooter, but it's also within the EVE universe. So, first and foremost, it needs to make sense to Capsuleers - current EVE players. They need to feel like this is a part of EVE. And then second, it just needs to feel like a great shooter. So that's why we initially stripped everything out of the game. It's single map, single gun, single suit, and that's it.
If the single gun doesn't feel good, if the single suit doesn't feel good, if the map doesn't feel good, it doesn't matter what you add on top. If the fundamentals are not great, then everything else can never exceed that. So, the reception has been really good. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback. We also got a lot of constructive feedback that we've taken into account. We found a lot of bugs and issues that you can't really find until you bring it out to the masses and you put heat on it. For January and February, we haven't really been updating, we've just been doing kind of first prototype bugs fixes and adding some small features. And the goal there is also just to practice for live service on this. Like, ‘okay, how do we hot fix the server? How do we do these behind-the-scenes type things that aren't necessarily sexy or fun to talk about,’ but it's absolutely critical to be able to do when you run the live game because you don't want to take games down for multiple days or something like that. Broken servers are never fun.
So for March, we're actually doing what we call a minor update. We're introducing the first steps into industry. It's a prototype, it's very early, and this is kind of fulfilling the promise that we gave to Capsuleers at Fanfest: that we would develop it with the community. They will see stuff such as it doesn't have correct textures, it just has checkerboard textures. And that's fine because we want to get initial feedback on these features. We want to make sure that we are testing it properly with them. And then come June, we're planning a more major update to Vanguard. We’re also testing out the Drop Suit. It's more slender, it's more lean, and it's more nimble than the old suit. It's going to be easier for you to spot the difference between Vanguards and NPCs because you'll have different silhouettes. That's going to be a big one. And then the last one, which is way bigger than we anticipated when we started talking about this is that we're adding Suppression Contracts into the mix. Right now in EVE, if you want to mess with faction warfare as a pirate, you can add corruptions to systems and then the counter play for empires is to add suppressions to systems.
Up until now, the Vanguards have only been able to add corruption to systems that are being affected by invasions or insurgencies, but now we're adding in suppression contracts from the empires. So that's going to be a pretty huge thing. We actually got a lot of feedback from our players that people are not doing contract work because they despise the pirates. They only want to be with the Empire serve the righteous course. So yeah, it's, it's going to be a big one. It's a super important step on our journey towards delivering this game.
It's a huge layup for our June expansion moment. For April and May, we're not going to update. We have to test out some hotfixes on a live client and stuff like that as well because once we get to a place where we go 24/7, we want to make sure that we've ticked all the boxes of what you need to be able to do in the live-service game.
Farrel: In the lead up to these play tests as well, we have interviews with the developers for Vanguard, including Q&As and having the developers show off what projects they're working on, depending on which team they’re on. And it's been really nice to see that the community gets what we're trying to do, which is develop the game with them. They're very understanding that you're going to see a really janky looking prototype, but the idea is we don't want to put a ton of polish on it yet. We want to get the gameplay and those core loops in a great place first, and then we can kind of develop on top of that. And a lot of times when you kind of show players behind the curtain, they freak out a little bit, but they've been on the same page with us through this whole thing. And that's been such a great process to go through. I know the dev teams over in the London studio are really appreciative of that too. They're becoming kind of household names in their own where people can kind of recognize them as working on Vanguard while someone else is working on Eve and stuff like that.
Shacknews: Back at Fanfest 2023, I remember sitting in that room as it was explained, as you were going over the initial briefings of Vanguard and talking about how it's not just meant to be a shooter, it's meant to be another part of the EVE Online universe as a whole. And there was the question of, so how do we introduce a miner to Vanguard? How do we introduce an industrialist to Vanguard? And this update looks like that, a part of that promise coming to fruition.
Finnbogason: Yeah, I mean it's like small steps towards it. Absolutely. The promise is that we want to make a sandbox shooter. That’s what we know. We know how to build sandboxes. We know how to build MMORPGs. So, we know that we have to do it in increments and steps. So yeah, this update is takes important steps in trying to do that.
Shacknews: For sure. And I think I told you last time we talked, I'm playing a miner in EVE Online. I like shooting lasers at rocks, taking the stuff back, refining it. And this update appeals to me because I'm not necessarily the first person in a fight. I'm packing small weapons and just enough to defend myself and mostly just carrying cargo around. And so, the idea of having that niche to be able to fill in EVE Vanguard, that sounds awesome. And I am really interested to see how these roles expand out to more of the EVE Universe.
Finnbogason: I think this is the first step now, and it's really interesting to have conversations about what an industrialist is in a first-person shooter. We've seen all the games do various versions of it and there are some really fantastic examples out there. But what does it mean in the EVE setting? The industrial role is so well established in EVE and being a miner in EVE is not that in all the games we do. It's like, yeah, I gather some and then I get a big sword. But in Eve it's like, no, no, no. I gather. End of story. I mean it was hilarious - what was it, Fanfest 2019 or something - when Basshunter came, the Swedish techno DJ. He travels with a flight case with multiple PCs so he can mine in EVE Online wherever he's at. He has a rig of multiple mining parts and he's chewing through rocks.
Farrell: Yeah, he's a one-man army in Highsec, in the asteroid belts harvesting and you would never expect it. It's this really high-energy creative DJ. He just likes to chill and do one of the slower paced activities you can do, build the resources. And he just likes being able to say, ‘oh yeah, that ship that exploded. I built that. I facilitated that entire fight just because of what I do.’
Shacknews: And again, you mentioned with the suppression and corruption contracts, that's also sounds like steps towards the promise of EVE’s ongoing online events finding their way over to Vanguard because of Havoc. The Havoc expansion is the big thing in EVE right now, as you mentioned, order versus corruption and pirates versus government. This is going to be one of our first opportunities to see how Havoc affects the events of Vanguard.
Finnbogason: Yeah, definitely. It's going to be super interesting to see how this will actually pan out and it will just add a bit more. It's just another spanner to throw into the mix and see where it kind of ends.
Farrell: When you give players like a set of tools, you might expect them to act in a certain way or build a certain thing and they will always surprise you and catch you off guard with what they're building, what they're using these tools for, and stuff like that. So I'm really excited to see what they do now that they can increase suppression, how it dynamically will change the map in EVE Online as well, even if it's only for a 10 day period or something like that.
Shacknews: Excellent. Is there anything else you want to share that we haven't gone over today before we close it up?
Finnbogason: I’ve seen on Reddit that some interesting documents have been leaked by various NPC groups. I need to call an internal meeting to the leaders of these NPC organizations. They're not supposed to be traveling around with sensitive information, but had it anyways. We lost a few scientists today, which is not awesome. They were actually, few of them managed to be saved in a cargo container, but a vigorous player managed to blow up the container. There is a massive bounty on one scientist that was captured by a player. We're trying to negotiate that bounty down. So, let's see what they will do. Big stuff on the way. Follow this space as it plays out.
Farrell: There are some mysterious documents that have been sort of leaked into the game from the Upwell Consortium, kind of teasing at some of their research, which will lead into the narrative explanation for some of the expansion in the summer. And players have been kind of piecing these together. And as the weeks go on, there'll be more and more story developments that are dropping and players will be able to learn a little bit about the tech that's coming before we would have a more formal sit down dev blog sharing everything and the exact details. We know where the start point is, we know where the end point is, but the journey in the middle is where the players get to push and pull and have a little bit of agency over.
It's been a blast kind of seeing their response and just the number of people that are getting involved as well. Like I said, when you give EVE players a tool, you're not sure how they're going to react. In this case, we weren't sure how many people would be interested in the narrative and the world building elements. Right now, they're full tinfoil hat mode, trying to figure out and piece together what these parts mean. Designers are like, ‘Hey, tell me what their most insane ideas are. There might be some hidden gems in there that we can add at a later date or kind of play into a little bit,’ In the world of New Eden, they don't know what's coming. They just know what the players have discovered.
That covers this interview, but there’s clearly exciting things on the way in EVE Online and its extended universe. Stay tuned to the EVE Online topic for more news, updates, and features as they happen.