Expanding the Universe: CCP Games on Eve Onlines future

In a chilled out booth (dubbed 'the Zen Garden in Space' by us after multiple visits during the show) of L.A's convention centre rests CCP Games.

The company had visited this year's E3 to talk the future of the Eve Online experience. From touching on game expansions, demoing the three-minute dogfights of Eve: Valkyrie and explaining the concept behind Project: Legion, chief marketing officer David Reid walked us through what CCP had planned for the future.

The Flight of the Valkyrie

While Eve Valkyrie is slowly turning into a game proper, it wasn't always that way.

"We knew we had something cool and fun,"said Reid of the original prototype. "But we didn't really imagine it felt something like a full game."

But it was the response - not just from CCP's own fans, but the wider industry, that had them broach the idea of expanding this concept to something more, when originally they saw it as a tech demo for VR. "We were like 'okay, this feels like a real game'. This feels like a change that's happening in our industry, were the idea of virtual reality isn't just these fads that happened in the past."

While first-person shooter Dust 514 brought a new angle and experience to Eve Online, Reid acknowledges that Valkyrie's introduction is going to take some work, when we ask him about how, or if, the game will be incorporated into the Eve Online universe proper.

"These are some details we're still figuring out at a high level," he acknowledges, before going on to flesh out the idea of a united approach across all they games that'll feed directly back to player benefits. "For example, there will be a shared economy across all of these games. you'll be earning resources you play the game, and those resources will be fundable across the entire New Eden economy... there are deeper connections on things like corporations."

Part of the conversation the team are having internally is how to expand the Valkyrie experience beyond the dogfights that have headlined the demos thus far. "Eve had this engine underneath it, that was 'I'm flying this spaceship, I'm visiting planets, I'm harvesting, I'm mining, I'm fighting' and things like that, there are analogues for those things that we need to bring to Valkyrie, and we will," says Reid, though he realises it may be a headache to flesh all this out.

"There's the sense of progression I have as a player, as a character, right? In Eve and Dust both, I don't just earn currency, I earn skill points, and those skill points are used to unlock abilities and better equipment, that currencies allow me to purchase. Valyrie is going to bring a lot more of that ... between the dogfights there needs to be that idea of ‘I'm a character, I'm progressing, earning currency, unlocking new skills, I'm fitting my ship a little differently' - because this is a big part of cusomistation in the Eve universe."

Turning to Dust, and We are Legion

"Dust we had a great ambition and vision for that the community rallied around. The execution on it was a bit more challenging."

Talk's turned to Dust 514, CCP's great experiment as the company took players planet side in a death match shooter title with allowed Eve players in space overhead to launch orbital strikes to help teams out on the surface. Reid's open about the issues the game brought with it.

"We, as a company, had never made a console game before, never made a shooter before, never made a free-to-play game before," he explains when we ask whether Project: Legion was intent on bettering their first foray into the shooter space. "These all were new things for CCP, and somewhere in the path - we had a strong start with Dust. We've got the core shooter experience, put it in the Eve universe, and make that connection to Eve in a ground-breaking way that no game has ever done. We've put in the fittings, put in the skill points, the currencies and things... but there was deeper meaning to that part of the Eve universe that we hadn't quite realised."

Project: Legion is a similar idea, but a better concept, and one the team's eager to realise fully. Reid calls it "the next generation" Dust 514, the same concept and foundation, but a bigger scope to what the game could be, and with the added experience under their belt to realise the ambition properly.

"The idea that if I've been flying in New Eden for 10 years now that i want to go down onto those planets, and I don't want to just get into a shooter for five minutes and a death match," he outlines as he talks about the key concepts of Legion. "I want to walk around, I want to put my boots on the ground, see what's out there. I'm mining this asteroids and planets from space - why can't I do that on the planets themselves? This is where the philosophy of what Legion should be started.

"There is an idea of what scavenging a battlefield could look like. The idea that I go down to a battlefield where a great Dust battle has happened in some way, and the place is littered with biomass of corpses, and wreckage of machinery, and drones and vehicles - and there's money to be made there, to go there and find those components.

"What happens when I go down to that battlefield and I start scavenging and I'm with a few friends, and then there's another group there, somewhere in the distance that we can see. This is something we're not able to do yet in Dust. There are a number of reasons for that, but then we started thinking - 'this is the vision'."

Future Horizons

"We've got ahead of ourselves from time to time," Reid admits to the team's ambitions, and that's partly the reason why they're taking the next phase of their projects very slowly and why they're not thinking of any formats beyond PC for Legion yet. "We've a long way to go before we start thinking about that. Project legion is still very much a prototype - it's a very promising idea, but it's still got a lot of refinement to do, and we need to see a lot more progress there."

And with so much that CCP has created, it's the fan base that has a large say in charting their progress. "We need to hear a lot more from our gamers and make sure this is the direction they're comfortable with," Reid says. "For us, CCP has been a very ambitious company, and we've been a company that's maybe got a little ahead of ourselves at times. This is not something we want to repeat with Legion. We want to focus on this experience, make it amazing, want to get it right on the PC, and when that happens, and if that happens, then we'll take a look at what other platforms make sense."

Check out the full interview with him below.