As a gamer there’s little that makes me more frustrated than seeing my favorite MMOGs slowly fade away. These vibrant games that were once full of life simply begin to dry out and lose players after three years, and there numbers steadily decline until they are but ghosts of their formers selves. As games like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot slowly meander their way off into the horizon, there a game on the market that has outlived the common three-year life span of MMOGs and is preparing to record even more users as it continues to age. The game is EVE Online, and after four and a half years on the market place, EVE continues to grow and set new concurrent user records while also boosting their subscribed user mark.

Nathan Richardsson tells us what's next for EVE Online.

While the graphics of space may be timeless, EVE’s development company, CCP|White Wolf, is preparing to give the game a new lease on life; they’re going to thoroughly revitalize the graphics in the game with their Trinity 2 update, a monstrous 2 GB upgrade that refreshes every ship in the game. On top of that, the developers at CCP|WW are continuing to plug away on the long-term storyline behind EVE while continually adding new content. Released in conjunction with Trinity 2, the next content update – Revelations 3 – will hit PCs around November of this year.

To gain some insight into the inner workings of the company, the Ten Ton Hammer team cornered Nathan “Oveur” Richardsson, Executive Producer for EVE Online, at the Austin Game Developers Conference and asked the man about all the upcoming releases and what we should expect over the next few months from EVE Online.

Initially, Nathan’s biggest focus was on the Trinity 2 upgrade, which is one of the biggest achievements CCP has completed to date. “Over 50 man years [50 men working 8 hours days for a year] have been put into this. It’s a complete overhaul of all the graphics in the game,” Nathan said. “We have side by side comparisons, and even though we’re happy with how EVE looks today, its amazing to see where we’re going in the future. It’s probably going to be the highlight for this year. Of course we’re also spending time on improvements and enhancements, but this is the big project for this year.” Nathan’s excitement for this particular portion of the upgraded content was contagious; I couldn’t help but feel enlivened for the upcoming graphics renovation. “Our end of the year expansions typically have the most in them,” Nathan reiterated. “It’s definitely keeping us busy.”

Trinity 2 is going to completely overhaul all the graphics in EVE.

“Once Trinity 2 has been released, we can then implement our full-bodied avatars,” Nathan said. For clarification sake, I asked Nathan whether this was the ambulation project so many of us are excited for, and he said that it was. “Trinity 2 must be released for ambulation to work,” Nathan continued.

Although Nathan’s excitement was centered around the Trinity 2 upgrade, we wanted to direct the conversation more towards Revelations 3, which we hadn’t heard much about. Most of the Trinity 2 information has already been covered in our article from the Leipzig Games Convention, so Nathan moved on to the updates in Revelations 3. “The focus is really going to be improving what we already have,” he said. “We’re really looking at enhancing current features rather than adding new content, which is partially due to our focus on bringing Trinity 2 to the gamers as quickly as possible. However, we also want to keep improving the performance in the client to make sure the larger fleet battles will run well.” In EVE, large fleet battles are fairly common, especially for characters that become involved in the competitive alliances. While numbers can be sketchy, there was a battle in March 2007 where the number of people in an area hovered around a thousand. Without optimization, the client would not have been able to handle the load.

Improved performance isn’t the only thing on Nathan’s plate, however. “We’re also taking some of the combat mechanics and taking them further in the next upgrade,” Nathan said. “There are some new modules, about twenty new ships, and around 400 new agent missions. Our focus right now is on Heat, which we introduced in Revelations 2. We’re doing another iteration of that and adding more strategic options to that component.” Heat is an issue that has been discussed thoroughly by EVE Online developers, but they’re hoping to bring even more players to use the strategic system by improving its functionality even more.

Improving performance in EVE is always one of the top priorities.

“Hacking is also being improved to be more interactive, rather than the static nature it’s in right now,” he continued. “We’re also looking at overhauling the new player experience again, and that’s something we’re constantly working on. There are usually about 10 people working on that all year long. On top of that, we want to bring the EVE experience out of game as well and provide tools for the corporations to give them a larger public face and allowing them better communication with their members.”

When Nathan brought up the outside game experience of EVE, what instantly jumped to my mind was a social “Web 2.0” type experience for the players; a kind of pseudo-social networking. I voiced my thoughts to Nathan, and he responded in kind. “That’s kind of the way we’re approaching things,” he said. “Our social ‘network’ is already there, it’s just providing more tools out-of-game. They’re already sharing all of their information with their confidants; we just want to provide them with a platform on which they can reach more people. Right now its only the big corps that have forums and that sort of thing, and we just want to help provide that to the smaller organizations.”

Of course, in expanding the role of communications and providing more support in the out-of-game experience, it’s a simple conclusion to determine that CCP|WW is going this direction because of the eventual expansion of alliances into the status of “empire”. According to Nathan, a lot of the improvements to communications have been made to further expand the level that people can communicate and begin to “know” each other. Hilmar Petursson, the CEO of CCP, also stepped in at this point to explain the company’s thoughts on the matter. “After 2,000 – 5,000 people have been incorporated into an alliance, it’s time to move to a larger institution of organization with different toolsets,” he said. “It has been a process of adding in the layers as the game has grown. I think we’re now almost to that point.”

Eventually the developers hope to expand player organizations into the 10s of thousands..

“An Empire is really an organization of multiple alliances,” Nathan continued. “The optimal size for an alliance seems to be around 1500 people. Corporations are at 150 people. Now we’re adding in another level to raise the number of people above 10,000. There’s a lot of space out there for people to claim.” While the thought of controlling an Empire is almost to heady to even imagine, I wondered if the developers were waiting for a certain number of players to join the game before Empires would be introduced into the game. “No, so far the alliances seem to be covering our need,” Nathan said. “If there ever was a time that an Empire could emerge, that’d be a pivotal moment in our game. Right now we have four NPC empires – if we could get a fifth player run Empire it’d certainly change the game.”

Along similar lines as the Empire is the burgeoning idea of factional warfare and how the EVE developers are going to introduce it to the players. Although Nathan couldn’t talk about everything, he could point out the difficulties in introducing factional warfare and what their goals are for the system. “We’re trying to build the framework, structure, and goals for people that don’t want to be a part of the larger alliance gameplay,” Nathan said. “It’s hard to find the right sort of balance between exerting control and using free-form, because you don’t want to hurt any of the player groups by having their members go join this factional warfare combat. We want this system to sort of introduce players to this larger PvP experience and give players that spark to go off and do their own thing with their friends. We’re moving it back simply because it’s a big risk and players want increased client performance and stability before we introduce even more hurdles for the overall performance.”






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