The following article is the conclusion to our interview with Nathan Richardsson, the executive producer of EVE Online, that was conducted at the Austin Game Developers Conference. In yesterday’s interview, we talked with Nathan about Trinity 2, parts of Revelations 3, and a bit about the concept of Empire building. You can read the entirety of that interview by clicking here.

Once you’ve finished up there, come on back and read the rest of the interview that we’ve posted for you. In today’s conclusion, Nathan and I discuss testing the 20 new ships that they’re building for Revelations 3, the upcoming democratic council that CCP|White Wolf is putting together, and we even touch on the World of Darkness MMOG. Continue reading to find out more!

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

Other than factional warfare, players on the EVE Online forums seem most interested in the twenty new ships that are coming down the pipeline. When creating those new ships, I asked Nathan what sort of testing and balancing went into implementing those new vessels and how much time that actually took. “It starts with internal design, simply looking at the roles we’d like the ships to fill and what the players are looking for,” Nathan began. “We take those thoughts into consideration when we’re building the classes that we’re looking at. After that we take the ships into small focus groups where we have a select number of people who are highly talented in certain areas of the game, and we let them test out the ship.”

“That process usually takes a couple months,” Nathan continued. “We then release the ship to public testing, which goes all the way up until release. That’s where the real polishing gets done. Obviously with 20 ships, we’re putting a lot more people onto these ships to see how they function. There’s a lot of new, shiny stuff coming for the players.”

Another new aspect that is coming just around the corner is the democracy system that the EVE developers are trying to implement. The player council is certainly something that CCP is trying to implement into the game, but from other interviews that have been published the whole process is still in a fledgling state. “We’re putting in a bigger infrastructure that will allow the EVE community to actually vote in players to this council,” Nathan said. “Those players voted in will have direct access to us and we’ll fly them out to Iceland. On top of that, we’ll have public meetings where they’ll bring up issues, and I think that will bring a lot of transparency to the whole process.”

“For instance, there’s a lot of people upset about the idea of implementing factional warfare, because it’s against our core principle of giving power to the players,” Nathan continued. “It’s kind of us putting semi-control over what the players are doing, and we want to get as far away from that as possible. We’d rather put in tools to build Empires so players have the control themselves.”

On top of the Trinity 2 graphics upgrade, the developers are also introducing 20 new ships to the game.

A this point, Valerie “Pann” Massey (EVE Online’s communication director) interjected a bit of information into the mix and tried to clarify exactly what this democratic council was all about. “We’ll be talking more about the council at FanFest,” Val said. “As Nathan mentioned, we really want to emphasize that the transparency issue is not about looking at CCP the business; this just pertains to EVE Online and what goes on inside the game. We’re not going to let players make HR decisions for us.”

Nathan laughed and added, “It’s not about auditing our books.”

“The intent is to clarify the real issues that are out there,” Nathan continued. “Forums and other venues have their own problems, so its really about getting issues addressed by allowing players to see that we’ve thought – and what we’ve thought – about particular problems. You may see and answer one forum thread on the message board, but there’s no way to guarantee that 200,000 people are going to see that thread. In fact, there’s often a post on that exact issue a few days down the road. Creating this framework for the democratic council, hopefully, is going to be a pretty awesome feat.”

Concerning the council, I wanted to make sure that the developers had explored what sort of communication that they would need to make the democratic council decisions known to the entire player database. Just like the forums, it’s hard to insure that players are going to read everything, and I asked Nathan about that issue. “We’re going to have a special section of the website devoted to the player council,” Nathan said. “It’s going to archive everything that the council does.”

“It will all be very up front,” Val added.

The elected player council will hear all of the developers thoughts on issues like the implementation of ambulation.

“We want to make it much, much more than a feedback channel,” Nathan continued. “We want it to really revolutionize some of the ways of running virtual worlds. It will be interesting to see how much this truly affects the world. Depending on the number of people involved in the project, it will influence what we fix, what we change, what we add, or even what we remove. Of course, the process will have to work for them, and that’s what we’re currently working on.”

From what I gathered in the interview, much of what the player council will engage in are listening to the developers and learning exactly what they were thinking when they addressed a certain issue, but the council will also serve as a representative discussion group for the players in EVE. “We just don’t want to find a more efficient way to answer player concerns than simply jumping on the message boards every day,” Nathan said. “Most of the time, we’d simply be saying, ‘Yes, we know.’ all day long. There isn’t enough time in the day to respond to every player issue, and that’s what the council is for.”

Even initially, the developers realize that the player council won’t be perfect, and that it will take time for the process to be absolutely finalized. “It’s an iterative process,” Nathan explained. “It will probably take a year or two to figure out the best process involved in getting this done. The process won’t be fun, but it’s going to be extremely valuable compared to the other more informal ways of communicating.”

“For example, we have a large volunteer group that we talk to quite regularly,” Nathan continued. “But that doesn’t have any way to reach all the players. There are 200,000 people in our game! We have no way of knowing that this individual will spread the word to more than his close friends, and then you get no expansion of information. There’s no trickle down effect.”

In the short term, Trinity 2 is the priority, but the Ambulation project is also high on the CCP|WW priority list.

As the conversation headed towards its conclusion, Nathan wanted to give a brief summary of exactly what CCP|WW’s focus was at this juncture. “Trinity 2 is really our big focus right now,” Nathan said. “Like I said, it took 50 man years to create this overhaul, and that was only working on the graphics and not on the engine itself.”

“On top of that, we’re still growing,” Nathan continued. “As long as the players are there, we’re going to be there. It’s as simple as that, and that’s the way it’s been for a long time. And there’s never been a time when the company has been bigger than it is today. We have over 250 people worldwide. The World of Darkness MMOG is still in pre-production, and there are a lot of long term goals associated with that game – Ambulation and Need for Speed being two of them – but we’re getting there with that technology in EVE and we’re working on it all. There’s no rush.”

At this point, I made a comment about that sort of attitude being lacking in the general MMOG development sphere, and Nathan laughed. “We’re here to make games and have fun, not kill ourselves,” he said. “We don’t like to crunch, so we don’t. There are periods when we’re busy, but we don’t do 90 hours a week for months on end. It was like that once – before we launched – but we aren’t going to do that again. It’s bad for moral and it’s bad for health. We don’t want to shorten the lifespan of our workers.”

Thanks again to Nathan Richardsson for taking the time to chat with Ten Ton Hammer about the upcoming events in EVE Online! We always look forward to any news coming from the open-ended game, and I can’t wait to hear about what’s next for EVE and its players!


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