Eve-Online: Status Report Q&A #1
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-11-17

Now that Earth & Beyond is clearly suffering from financial problems, the uncrowned king of mmo space sims, must definately be Eve-Online. When I was at a games expo in Brussels a couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to talk to one of the game designers behind the game, and received an extensive tour in Eve's universe. For our first Status Report Q&A concerning the game, we turned to Hellmar, CCP lead programmer.

Hellmar: The low-profile launch was very much intentional. Having watched previous MMO launches and this being our first game, we wanted to take it as slow in the beginning as possible. With EVE we are also keeping everyone together in one universe (no sharding), so all possible imbalances in the beginning can have more of an impact to the over all experience.

We are now getting to the point where we are quite happy with server performance and universe economy. Our upcoming Techlevel II patch brings more content into play so we'll be ramping up our promotion of the game, during the end of this year and the beginning of next year, which is when we release player owned structures into the world.

We are hoping to break our current record of 6.300 players playing EVE at the same time, in the same world, early next year and hopefully claim the world record when we pass 10k simultaneous players in one, unsharded world.

Hellmar: Currently we are just over 30.000 subscribers, we have been in slow growth since launch but are now in a position to increase promotional activities. 30.000 subscribers are more than enough too keep the game running, we are a small company with considerably less overhead than many other MMO operations. We believe however that the audience for such a unique game as EVE, is much larger and will soon increase our efforts to reach them.

Hellmar: Given than EVE has many unique aspects that people are maybe not used to from other games, we have been pleasantly surprised how quick people are at adopting them. This can for the biggest part been attributed to players helping each other.

EVE has built in features to that allow players to operate considerably complex player corporations. Player corporations are constantly on the look out for new employees to add to their rank. This creates a dynamic were older players have a good incentive to communicate and help newer players.

As long as new players accept one of the numerous corporation invites they usually get the first week, they'll get a personal guided tour form the recruitment division of their new player corp., showing them the best patch to take in the game.

Some players don't want to affiliate them selves with player corporations in the beginning and stay with their NPC corporation, there they can chat with players in a similar position and we also operate a volunteer program to help there. We are increasing our efforts in having NPC corporation Agents help new players to familiarize them selves with the game, similar to what happens in player corporations. The re-enforcement to the NPC Agents also plays a major role in our increased focus in PvE activities in general.

Hellmar: The history of the game has been well introduced through our website (http://www.eve-online.com/background/ - http://www.eve-online.com/races/amarr.asp ) to give the players a feeling of what kind of atmosphere they are about to join. The storyline of the game since release has taken a strong turn in the last two months where players have been able to affect the outcome, such as the championship for a new Amarrian Emperor which was was a combat tournament between the heirs to the crown where players fought for the houses. The battles were all recorded, I advise you to take a look at one of the fights: http://eve.skjalfti.is/championshipVids/2045.wmv

Hellmar: Improvements to EVE up until this point have mainly been bugfixes, performance enhancements, balance and tuning. We have patched in features to existing areas, such as player corporation management, to help players organize themselves better. We are now nearing the first techlevel upgrade where we release a new manufacturing process and a lot of new items, modules, ships and skills. This is our biggest content addition to the game since launch.

We have also been working on player owned structures in space for quite some time now and will release them into the game early next year. The structures allow players to build small towns in space, comprised of control towers, sentry guns, power generators, mobile refineries, field assembly arrays, ship hangars, and more.

After that we will allow players to build stations similar to the current NPC stations. The player owned structures and stations will give locations a more strategic element and make larger corporations more vulnerable to gorilla tactics, creating even more excitement in the game and a way for smaller corps to tackle the larger corporations and alliances.

Hellmar: Our most unique feature is that everyone plays in the same world. This creates player dynamics that are not seen in other games. Everything that you do in the game potentially affects 30.000 other players, not a limited shard of the player base. This will be even more interesting to watch as more players join EVE.

EVE also has in our opinion a very good implementation of a global market, were players can, for example, buy minerals from other players to create items to sell to other players. You can even enter buy and sell orders onto the market that match when you are offline.

EVE's skill system also sets it apart from other games. In EVE you can train skills while you sleep. With a careful setup to your skill training, each day in EVE brings something different to your character each time you log in; new ships to fly, more drones to control, faster ship and increased weapon range are among the things you'll experience.


Graphics is another one of the unique aspects of EVE, we have heard many opinions about the various features of EVE but EVE's graphical excellence is undisputed.