Interviews// EVE Online: The Interview - Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of our exhaustive and fascinating interview with CCP’s Jon Lander (senior producer, EVE Online), Kristoffer ‘Stoffer’ Touborg (lead game designer) and Sveinn Johannesson Kjarval (lead community developer).

In Part 1 of our chat - which you can read here - we discussed the history of EVE Online. Here, we talk more about the future of MMOs and the integration between EVE and the upcoming PlayStation 3 FPS, Dust 514.

We return to our MMO heroes with lead game designer Touborg discussing the challenges in thinking of fresh new ideas for EVE Online, a game that is fast approaching its ninth year of service...


Kristoffer Touborg: I think a lot of mundane things in real life, once they’re put into a game environment, become interesting. Like... a lot of the trust-based mechanics, a lot of the social part of EVE, is basically people just doing what they do in everyday life in a different setting. That makes it fun.

Hauling minerals, for example - I once spoke to a guy who drove a truck in real life. And yet for eight hours he’d sit in his truck, get on EVE and ferry virtual minerals around in his virtual truck. That was his gameplay! All these things that seem fairly absurd, can appear awesome in a game context. Like... [to Jon Lander] did I talk to you about the ‘Marriage’ idea?

Jon Lander: ...No...

Kristoffer Touborg: Right. So...

Jon Lander: This is active game design happening, here [laughs].

Kristoffer Touborg: One of the things I really like, and it’s really mundane, is if you have a girlfriend or are married, you have a shared bank account. Now, that’s not something you might think about every day, but if in EVE Online you had some sort of advantage by entering a very intimate trust relationship with someone else...

Let’s say we gave you a bigger Captain’s Quarters. If you move in with someone else, and you share your wallet with that person, you get a massive space to live in. The act of having a shared wallet might be mundane, but the trust-based drama, intrigue and general shit that would come out of that would be awesome.

Jon Lander: I’m immediately thinking about how I can grief people with that [laughs]. That’s the most fun we have with this. So, with this idea... I could pretend to be this person’s other half, drain their bank account and leave them stranded. Wow.

Kristoffer Touborg: There would be people who would professionally just pretend to be Russian Mail Order Brides or something [laughs].


SPOnG: Does the rise of free-to-play MMOs concern you guys at all? Does that business model pose a real threat to the subscription-based model?

Jon Lander: I hear a lot of people say that the subscription business model is dead, and I just don’t believe it, frankly. I think if you have a gaming experience that makes you feel like your time invested in it is worthwhile... we have players who play EVE for many, many years. They build up this sort of history. The subscription model for us is completely valid.

If you have a good experience, subscriptions are a great thing. MMOs that have added free-to-play mechanics due to a drop in subscriptions... well, they’ve done quite well. They’ve had a big user injection from going free-to-play. Similarly, if you look at some of the game which were built from the ground up to be free-to-play - not retro-fitted - those are successful as well. League of Legends is a great example of this.

But we actually have a system that supports both in a way, so players can choose. I can spend $20 of real money to buy an EVE Pilot License Extension. I can either convert that into 30 days of game time, or sell it on the in-game market for in-game currency. So another player could essentially play for free, earn enough in-game money and purchase this game time from me.

Dust 514, the console game that we’re pushing out this year on PS3, will be free-to-play. We’re building it from the beginning to be a free-to-play game. It’ll have micro-transactions for boosts, weapons and all the usual benefits. So we’re not opposed to free-to-play and what it stands for, but why would we retrofit free-to-play onto a successful game like EVE? You do that when it’s the last choice you have. Or you build a game specifically to be free-to-play.

Kristoffer Touborg: I don’t really think that there’s that many actual free-to-play games out there. They are free to try, but they’re not actually free to play. I think something like League of Legends hit the nail on the head. That’s an actual free-to-play game. You don’t ever, at any point, have to put money into it.

For World of Tanks, for example, you will have to put money into it at some point. That is free to try, and I really hope that there are more companies that are brave enough to make a real free-to-play game. Because they are awesome.