IGNPC: From a design standpoint, what was the hardest element to implement in EVE?

Reynir Hardarson: The fact that this is a massively multiplayer game, makes it many times more difficult to make than a regular singleplayer game. I would say the hardest thing to implement must be the server backend. Apart from that the biggest challenges in doing EVE would be that there are so many things that we are doing in the game that have never been done before. This means that there are a lot of conceptual problems that we have had to solve without having any reference to in previous games. For instance, when we started out, the only 3rd person space game we had seen was Homeworld and that was a RTS. So that meant that we had no reference whatsoever in how to navigate spaceships from a 3rd person viewpoint. Another example are uncertainties that arise due to the technical limitation of being a massively multiplayer game: How is collision detection handled on the server, how will the physics model run, will real solarsystem sizes work in the game (yes they do to an accuracy of 30cm), million security issues etc. I think the team has done an incredible job solving these problems.