Interviews// EVE Online: The Interview - Part 1

Think of an MMO. You probably thought World of Warcraft, right? Well, while Blizzard’s massively popular fantasy title may be the first thing that comes to your mind, there’s another MMO that pre-dates it by about a year or two. Its name is EVE Online, and has been very successful in its nine-year run. Why? Because the game offers players no limits.

This is true in both a metaphorical, physical and political sense. Set in a vast galaxy, players literally have an entire universe to explore. There are no player level caps, set classes or job descriptions - players decide what they want to do for themselves. And the developers, CCP, have a policy of not getting involved when communities fight, grief, steal, scam or otherwise cause havoc on their servers.

It’s as brave a new world for gaming today as it was when it was released - and now the European studio is developing a companion First Person Shooter on PlayStation 3 called Dust 514. In my absolutely huge interview with Senior Producer Jon Lander, Lead Game Designer Kristoffer ‘Stoffer’ Touborg and Lead Community Developer Sveinn Johannesson Kjarval, I touch on Dust 514 a little later.

What I wanted to discuss first, was the history of EVE and how the premise of allowing players to do whatever they wanted came about. And whether the developers think it’s a good idea.


SPOnG: Would you say EVE was the first big MMO to hit PC?

Jon Lander: Well, I think we were out about a year before World of Warcraft... we were certainly one of the first proper ones. I mean, you look at Ultima Online and the old-school games, which have been hugely influential to us when making EVE. So I wouldn’t say we were the first, by a long shot. But in terms of the kind of incredible visuals, a real reason to team up and actually interact with other players... we’re actually quite unusual, in that you’re not going to get a huge amount out of EVE if you’re a solo player.

So, EVE is almost like the atypical MMO, in that we do a lot of things very, very differently to something like World of Warcraft. We are a niche game and quite happy to be so. It’s a difficult, tough game - loss has a real meaning in EVE. You have to work with other people to get anywhere in the game. So it really brings the ‘Massively’ part into the term MMO.

On May 6th, we’ll have been running for nine years, growing every year - which nobody else can really say. The real reason behind that is because it’s a world that people care about when they actually play it. We find that we don’t get many people who... well, we actually get a lot of people who come in and try the game for a week or two and say, ‘This isn’t for me.’ But once people get into the game, they stay with us for years. It’s not like a six-month thing. We don’t have people who stay for six months and then disappear. You’re in this for five years.

And it all comes down to the fact that you make a huge number of friends, the commitment of meeting other people and working together for a common goal - to actually achieve something. It’s something which is very strong in EVE. I guess in terms of defining the MMO space, we’ve defined part of it, where the game we create actually isn’t the important bit. It’s the story that the players create, and the content that the players actually deliver. That’s the important thing, that’s what gets reported.

We talk about an expansion a couple of times a year, but it’s actually the thing that people latch onto in EVE are the player-made stories. So a lot of what we end up doing is just giving people the tools and the framework to do whatever they want.


SPOnG: EVE has a bit of a reputation though, doesn’t it? It’s a very lawless land. People hijacking each other’s ships, stealing loot that they paid money for... it’s quite sociopathic in a way. Is that intentional?

Jon Lander: Yeah. I mean, that makes all the noise - because normally, MMOs are all about ponies and rainbows and all these happy things. EVE has that reputation because we allow an awful lot of stuff to happen in the game which we just don’t want to interfere with. A lot of that is people just letting the worst excesses of the internet prevail. I can scam you, I can grief you, I will take pleasure from doing that - I get a gaming experience from it.

But there’s also the side of things that you don’t hear so much about - users like Cribber, who is known for his reputation as the ‘guy you can trust’ to give a huge amount of money to in exchange for a really big ship.

Kristoffer Touborg: Yeah, he tends to be the middleman in all kinds of large transactions in the game.

Jon Lander: There are also people who trade on their reputation alone - because if you’ve been playing this game for nine years and have never done a bad thing in this game at all, people will trust you. Reputation is a big part of it. Some people trade on their reputation of being a dick, some people trade on being a spy, some on being a mercenary, others as the ‘whiter than white’ guy. But often, the good guys don’t make for particularly good news.

Kristoffer Touborg: One of the big alliances, I’ve just read, has formed a ‘Death Star.’ This alliance in particular is a group of players who are known for making the lives of their enemies miserable. They have a list of five names that they don’t like, along with a number of players whose sole task is to hunt those targets down, wherever they go in the game. And... I kind of like it. Of course, having a group of players to harass someone else is an awful thing, but it’s also player enforcement.

You have people who sit in a safe part of space and post bad things about this alliance. Should we, as game creators, step in and say, ‘You can’t say those things’? Or should we give the players the tools to enforce the consequences themselves?

In this case, this group has just said, ‘Well, we don’t like these people, so we’re just going to go after them.’ I like that solution much better, than having us impose some mechanical restriction on things. I think it’s interesting - things are about to kick off, and I’m curious to see what happens.