Published , by TJ Denzer
Published , by TJ Denzer
This last week, CCP Shanghai launched EVE Galaxy Conquest on mobile devices. It’s a free-to-play multiplayer 4X strategy game in which players choose factions from the EVE universe and engage in a seasonal race to build the most powerful faction in the universe. That race has started, and it will continue on a seasonal format with CCP Shanghai creating new content, interacting with players, and building onto the game based on their feedback. In fact, we got to speak with some of the team at CCP Shanghai about the game.
EVE Galaxy Conquest Executive Producer and CCP Shanghai General Manager Bing Xi, Galaxy Conquest Product Manager Leo Cui, and Brand Director Michael Lee were kind enough to answer a number of burning questions about the progression of the game, its seasonal format, in-game currencies, future plans, and more. Read on below for the full details.
Shacknews: This is such an interesting occasion because I was actually at EVE Fanfest 2023 where EVE Galaxy Conquest was announced to everyone for the very, very first time. And my understanding is it was still in the conception stages back then or coming along in conception stages, and now we're at the release. And how does it feel to reach this point with the game?
Bing Xi: Before we announced Galaxy Conquest, we had already worked on the game for quite some time. And so, it's not been easy for us, but we're doing something we love. We love mobile, we love the EVE IP, and we wanted to do something that we double love. So it feels incredible. But because we've been doing this for quite some time, as someone who has been doing this on a daily basis, sometimes it doesn’t dawn on us. I mean in our hearts, in our heads, this was always going to happen, but it's actually happening. It might seem to be abrupt if you're not in the thing, but for us this was going to happen. It's really exciting, but we also feel like when the game is ready, then it's ready.
Leo Cui: This is like you have been going through all the years of studying in school, and finally you're going to the exam. You're going to see the result of all your efforts. So it's kind of exciting, but meanwhile also kind of nervous. But after all, I can't wait to see how players love the game, how players react to the product.
Shacknews: From the time that you introduced the game to where we are now where we're about to see the release, what has it been like getting to know the EVE community more, getting to interact with them more as you build this thing out from a franchise that is as beloved and as sacred to its fans as EVE is?
Michael Lee: I think it's a great honor, honestly for a lot of us to be working on the EVE IP. We've had an opportunity to do things for the EVE IP that haven’t necessarily been done in EVE Online. And I've said this a few times to a few other people, but EVE has a ton of lore, right? 20 years of lore. It's a facet of the game that I would say is not necessarily a big thing for many EVE players. You've got so many different types of EVE players, but there are some lore enthusiasts out there. And for the most part, a lot of these commanders have never been visualized. We've had that opportunity to do that, so that's pretty cool. As we're interacting with EVE players, it's amazing to see that some of them bring the same dedication for EVE Online to our game.
We realized this game is not necessarily for all EVE players. It's a different platform, it's a different type of game. But we've done a lot of testing in soft launch regions, and almost all the players that have played our game are aware or are currently playing EVE or have played EVE in the past. So the awareness is incredibly high. And a lot of the players in our Discord now even interact with us. The dedication is quite impressive to be honest. We had one guy who'd send us 30 bug reports every week, and he would just go ham on bugs and be very vigilant with his documentation. It was honestly very impressive and very helpful to us. So I think just to summarize, for a lot of us, it's a great honor. EVE players are very passionate, and I hope that we can just deliver the product that a lot of people will love to play.
Leo Cui: To me, the EVE Galaxy Conquest is essentially abstracting the battle strategy aspect from EVE Online. EVE Online is a very complicated game, and it's attracting players from different game genres. It's an RPG. It's a simulation game, and it's a strategy game for different player cohorts. And we're basically delivering the essence of the strategy side of EVE Online. So there are a great portion of EVE Online players who are Fleet Commanders or the CEO of corporations. They want to play the game as more like a strategy game or the resource distribution kind of game. And this is the perfect game for them from my perspective.
Shacknews: And as we close, between when you announced it and now, we've learned so much more about the game. We know what factions are going to be in there, we know what the gameplay style is going to be. How did you decide on the scope of what you wanted to do with this game when you were deciding what you would have on day one, launch day versus something you might add down the line?
Bing Xi: How we decided the scope of the game is basically through soft launch. As soon as the game was kind of playable with the core loop, we started soft launching it as of November last year. And since then, the feedback we got from the player base basically helped us shape the minimum viable product scope. And because we've done this in two big phases, divided into many small tests, we're at a place where we believe this game is going to be fun if you play this season by season. And we feel like instead of waiting a bit longer, we just wanted to have the game launched and placed in player hands and have a bigger audience play the game and tell us what do you like about the first season or the second season following that.
We will then decide how we're going to develop the game in the future for our player base. Launching the game is just the beginning, it's not the end. We want this game to live as long as EVE Online for many years to come. As long as players like our game and they have expectations of new gameplay features to come in the future, we'll be more than happy to deliver them. And that's what we are passionate about.
Leo Cui: Another reason is that the game Galaxy Conquest is a seasonal-based game. So players play season after season, and we try our best to make sure that players' experiences are different from season to season. That is also one reason why we will keep adding new features in the future and try to bring innovation to the game even after launch.
Shacknews: And as we come towards the launch, you have the pre-registration for the app is actually open right now as far as I've seen on Google Play and the App Store, if I'm not mistaken. And I can't help but notice that there is a currency that players can get if they take part in the pre-registration, ISK and one other one, the Nova Credits. And I was just curious, can you speak a little bit to these currencies as they play a part in the game?
Leo Cui: So basically, players are gathering different type of resources from game. And ISK is one type of resource from the game that players can get from a lot of different ways but mostly from activities. To dig deeper into this, for instance, players can upgrade their home base, and one specific structure is called the banks. And that structure provides ISK over time automatically. Also, you can capture grids on the map, and one type of the grids is called a resort. If you capture that type of grid, it also generates ISK.
So, these are all the type of activities that you can do in game just by being active, learning about the game, and powering up your fleet. Then you can essentially get that ISK. And the purpose of getting ISK is because it can help you buy extra home base upgrade slots and to upgrade your ship modules and stuff like that. So basically you gain them from in-game activities, and you spend them to boost the efficiency of your in-game activities as well.
Nova credits are a little bit unique. You also get a lot of Nova credits from in-game activities as well, but mainly from in-game events, like by being active and completing some missions. Upon login, you have a seven-day campaign called the Progression Plan. And by completing the missions in that event, you gain a lot of Nova credits and also you get a lot of Nova credits from daily login and special events, time-limited events, and a lot of battle pass rewards. A lot of those you get Nova credits, but of course you can also buy them with your real-world currency as well. The in-game activities provide loads of those for you to do a lot of things. And the purpose of getting Nova credits is that you can use them to recruit commanders and ships, and you can boost your home base upgrades and more.
Shacknews: So, with all of that considered with seasons and the currencies and the things that you can do in the game, the basis of it is 4X, where you sort of strategize through the galaxy, whether you want to go military or whether you want to go economical. But it sounds like there's also a pretty extensive live service element here as far as activities, seasons, and planned events for the future of the game.
Michael Lee: It is a live service game. It's a competitive game with potentially tens of thousands of players on a server. So it will be run in many ways like an MMORPG like EVE Online. We will have monthly, quarterly events, seasonal events to continue to keep the player base engaged. So you're absolutely right.
Shacknews: And as you approach the launch, once you start to get that feedback, what are the post-launch plans for EVE Galaxy Conquest? What can players hope to see in the seasons that come after the game?
Bing Xi: First of all, as Leo mentioned earlier, the first thing we want to bring our players in future seasons is more excitement. But I wanted to go a little bit backwards to talk about why we introduced seasons because I mean CCP has built this amazing game with EVE Online where the game doesn't have any seasonal resets. So, in EVE Online you can accumulate wealth, whatever. And if you are established alliances, and you can use time to build that forever, which is I think EVE Online has done that really well. That's why after 20 years of lifetime it's still going really strong. People love it.
So, when we thought about creating a new game, we wanted to build something that's vastly different from what we already have because if we want to build the same game, we already have EVE Online. Why would we do that? And NetEase, our partner, had already built a counterpart on mobile. When we wanted to build a new mobile game, we want them to be vastly different from an existing experience. While EVE Online has offered a persistent universe, we wanted to add something to the EVE IP in a very different way. So we wanted to build something that is as different as possible from the EVE Online experience, from a meta game level perspective.
That's why if you like long persistency, then EVE Online is definitely your choice. But if you want things to shake up very rapidly and you wanted to see an end into the three months, now we offer that with Galaxy Conquest. So as you can expect things to change, no matter how strong your guild is or your corporations as you decide to align with other corporations become stronger alliances, you will only be able to win the season in a given amount of time. And it will have a limit.
After that, we save a lot of things, mostly your progression. So if you actually spend real money for some of the things, don't worry, you're not going to lose them. It's mainly then you will have the opportunity to do almost the same things again but with the existing knowledge you have already gained from season one. It's basically like playing Olympics as basically like a professional. You go to competing Olympics for the first time, the most important things is not to win the gold medal, but is to basically learn it. And based on your learnings, how you can improve yourself so you will improve on the next Olympics.
So with the seasonal format, we introduce that. Even though each season will be largely the same, the meta game will be the same, but you and the players you play with, the real people, have gained what you have learned from the last season. How you play the next season will totally unfold differently.
And we think we can only offer that excitement for the first and second season. But once we hit season three, offering the same gameplay would not be enough. We'll need to basically add different strategic elements to the game so that excitement will not only come from your experience but also different game features. And honestly, we don't know what those features are today. Or we have some ideas on what we want to do to do, but we really wanted to hear from our players what they're expecting. So we will be building the game based on talking to our community learning from what they want to see in the future.
Michael Lee: I just want to quickly add. The seasonal format is already prevalent in so many things, and especially games. And in real life if you're a sports fan, that's all seasonal formats. You win the championship, and then you got to defend your belt the next season. Same in our game. You win that season, you got to defend that belt the next time. And it's harder to defend the belt than it is to win the championship. Like StarCraft 2? A match of that is like a very, very short season, potentially only 20 minutes, but you spawn really weak, you build up your forces, you mine resources, you build your base, you fight people, somebody wins, somebody loses.
Our game contains a lot of that type of stuff too. It's a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. EVE doesn't necessarily have an end, it just goes on forever. But some people want to see a conclusion. You want to be recognized for your efforts up until that point in time. You become the winner. You've got locked achievements, you're going to make friends, you're going to go into the next season super confident, and you're going to do battle potentially with other people who've also won. So the competition will ratchet up potentially. Like Bing was saying, they're going to be smarter, they're going to be stronger.
And then down the road, we will potentially shake seasons up. We could do some really interesting things. We kicked around some crazy ideas like what happens if you could play as the Pirates or the Cartels instead of the Empire factions, what would that look like?
Shacknews: It'd be awesome.
Michael Lee: Of course, that's hypothetical right now. I saw it on a whiteboard in the meeting room when I was walking to lunch. But there's a lot of potentially things you could do with seasons because it's in a constrained environment. It takes place over three months. It has an objective that you can't necessarily do in EVE. And I think that gives us a lot of avenues for creativity.
Leo Cui: Yeah, and alongside what Bing mentioned, we are talking about adding more strategic dimensions to the game to make the meta more complicated for veterans. Then we were talking about what if wormholes appears on map randomly, what does that look like to veterans? That must be interesting. But again, that's just hypothetical at this time. We have all these ideas going on, and we are trying to figure out what's the best options. And of course, we want to hear from players.
Bing Xi: On some level, we want new content to be something that players expect. I also wanted to add that we don't just build games for our veteran players because as a mobile game we wanted to have new players coming on a daily basis. So we will take some of our resources to keep improving the experience for the new players as well. So as the game evolves for the veteran players, it will also evolve in time for those with less experience. So I'll definitely say that my expectation is the game you play on month one of global launch and the game you play six months down the line will be quite different, especially for newcomers.
Shacknews: To wrap things up, where can players get involved? Where can they find out more about the game? And where can they share their opinions with the team as it rolls out and as they experience what Galaxy Conquest has to offer?
Michael Lee: Yeah, you can go to our website. We got some social links up there. Jump in our Discord. Our community manager is very active there, and right now it doesn't have tens of thousands of players so it's very easy to interact with the community and be seen and heard from us. I look at our Discord daily. We have an area for feedback where we relay information directly back to the devs. And then we also have a Twitter and Facebook. So like, subscribe, and follow. And send us your crazy ideas. We like crazy ideas.
Players have submitted some very interesting ideas that are in the spirit of EVE Online somehow being integrated into our game. And some of them are very, very grand, and some of them are unfeasible, but I think it does provide a lot of inspiration to the team. And there are some honestly good ones. It's just the team is limited in scope and size. So we have to review and look at them all, and figure out which ones are good, and which ones we think players would really like. That's honestly a tough task as well, but it's also part of what makes the future of this game exciting.
And there you have it. EVE Galaxy Conquest is available for iOS devices on the App Store and Android devices via Google Play. Stay tuned to the Galaxy Conquest topic at Shacknews for further news and updates as they drop!