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Massively interviews EVE senior producer Arnar Gylfason on Incarna, PvE and more
Some fantastic news came out of this year's EVE Online Fanfest. CCP Soundwave's talk on Incursion provided some insight into past and possible future development of EVE's often-neglected group PvE activities. We also got a first look at the captain's quarters coming this summer as a first massive step toward full-blown avatar-based interaction with Incarna. Finally, CCP presented the company's vision for the future of EVE -- a video showing the potential interaction between Dust514's ground combat, Incarna's station environments and EVE Online's typical space-based PvP. In his keynote speech, EVE senior producer Arnar "CCP Zulu" Gylfason brought together all the new information that had been released at Fanfest over the last year. We caught up with Arnar at the EVE Fanfest to ask some followup questions to his speech. In an EVE Spotlight article last week, he answered questions on the role of live events in future expansions and other topics. In this second interview, we asked Arnar about incursions, the future of PvE, captain's quarters, the new player experience, Incarna gameplay, and more. Skip past the cut to read our full interview with Arnar Glyfason, a man in whose accent the word "awesome" sounds seriously awesome.
EVE Spotlight: An interview with CCP Zulu
EVE Spotlight is a new bi-weekly feature in which we interview prominent members of EVE Online's player community or development team. Twice each month, we'll be shining the spotlight on a player or developer who has a significant impact on EVE to highlight the efforts of EVE's most influential people. It's almost an unwritten rule of game development that someone from quality assurance should never be promoted into a game design role. Game testing and QA are said to be so fundamentally different to design that it's argued the roles require incompatible skillsets. Arnar "CCP Zulu" Gylfason has definitely proven that this isn't the case, successfully migrating from QA to game design and finally being promoted to senior producer on EVE Online. Taking over from CCP T0rfifrans, Arnar has become a very public figure for CCP in the EVE community. Older players will remember Arnar as CCP Zulupark, that horrible guy who nerfed their carriers back in 2007. Alternatively, you may remember a fantastic forum thread from 2008 in which he personally answered countless player questions on game design and balance issues. Since becoming senior producer on EVE, Arnar has been a strong advocate of this kind of heavy communication with players. Through devblogs, interviews and interactions with the Council of Stellar Management, he's helped to fill the information vacuum players have become accustomed to. We caught up with EVE senior producer Arnar "CCP Zulu" Gylfason several weeks ago at the EVE Fanfest. In this EVE Spotlight, I ask him about communication with players, the role of live events in future expansions, and other topics.
CCP delaying Incursion to ensure excellence
With the Sansha set to descend on EVE Online en masse, a new character creator that is the precursor to Incarna (when all will be blessed with feet), and a plethora of other goodies large and small, Incursion has been garnering a lot of attention from both active and retired capsuleers. According to a dev blog posted today by EVE's Senior Producer, CCP Zulu, the company has made a tough decision about the release date for its eagerly anticipated expansion. Rather than push it out with potential bugs and issues, CCP is opting to split up Incursion into a three-part deployment. The important part is that by doing so, CCP expects to be able to give each particular chunk of the expansion the time it needs to be "excellent." The first chunk, which will release on November 30th, offers a host of requested and needed tweaks. While CCP isn't willing to confirm the exact list of features at this time, the list of potentials is expansive, including changes to rockets, T2 ammo, 80 new storyline missions, faction ships' addition to the market, and more. From there, the second patch will be released in December and will contain wonders that "only Santa knows." January 2011 is when the company plans to release the third chunk, which should deliver Incursion's new character creation tool to the masses. If you're curious about more details on the reasons for the change in deployment dates as well as a bigger listing of all the things to come, pop on over to the EVE Online site and check out the devblog.
Upcoming EVE devblog series to show CCP's lag-busting efforts
With EVE Online's single-shard universe, the server hardware and game code have to be continually updated to cope with the game's constantly expanding playerbase. Each time the server is upgraded, node stability and lag in large fleet battles improves significantly. Unfortunately, this trend of periodic improvements took something of a wrong turn when the Dominion expansion came along. Before Dominion, fleet battles took place with over a thousand ships on each side and no crippling lag or node deaths in sight. Since the expansion's release, however, fleets of only a few hundred have regularly experienced unplayable conditions. Frustrated by CCP's lack of visible progress in tackling lag, members of the EVE community have been making their outrage known. A recent appeal to the gaming media by a few players resulted in the issue getting very high exposure, which could be bad for CCP's public image. CCP issued a response explaining that lag is a high priority, and that there is even an entire development team dedicated to tackling it. Earlier this week, CCP Zulu expanded on CCP's lag-busting efforts in the first of a new EVE devblog series dedicated entirely to lag.
New devblog reveals only 54 developers working on EVE Online
Icelandic MMO developer CCP Games has always made a point of being open and transparent with players. Through tools such as the Council of Stellar Management (CSM) and in-depth devblogs, a great deal of CCP's internal workings have been laid out in the open for all to see. In the latest CSM summit, CCP revealed that it couldn't commit any resources to CSM issues for at least the next 18 months as too many development resources were being used up by Incarna and Dust 514. EVE Online's new senior producer CCP Zulu (formerly CCP Zulupark) elaborated on the issue yesterday with a full devblog on CCP's current allocation of developer time. In the devblog, Zulu provides a complete breakdown of CCP's current development teams, what projects each developer is assigned to, and what we can expect to come over the next year and a half. The devblog confirms grim fate of issues raised by the CSM, with no teams assigned to cover player-raised game defects. Perhaps the most surprising thing to come out of the devblog, however, was that only 54 members of CCP's "200-person development team" are working on anything that directly affects the current EVE populace. Of those, only 22 are working on features for the next expansion. Skip past the cut to find out why there are only 22 developers working on features and what the reactions of the EVE player-base have been since the announcement.
CCP Games not abandoning older hardware users in EVE Online
CCP Games definitely had a few EVE Online players up in arms last week, with their announcement that they'll be dropping the Classic graphics client as of the next expansion. While Machariel battleships no longer being that gorgeous black is clearly the only serious issue with that decision (only half-kidding), the fact that they were considering dropping support for older hardware drew a substantial amount of response from the player community. CCP's proposed two part plan was to:1. Drop Classic (and ShaderModel 1) with the Apocrypha expansion launch on March 10, making ShaderModel 2 the minimum system requirement to run the game with "Premium Lite" graphics.2. As of the Winter expansion 2009, drop ShaderModel 2 support, making ShaderModel 3 the minimum spec to run EVE, with full Premium graphics. Well, the players have spoken, and based upon this response CCP is moving ahead with step one -- dropping Classic, ShaderModel 2 will be the minimum needed as of March 10th -- and NOT step two. That is to say, CCP is holding off on phasing out machines that can't handle ShaderModel 3.
EVE to drop Classic graphics support, possibly some subscribers in the process
The beauty of EVE Online is often cited as a major draw to the game. EVE's graphics presently come in two flavors: Classic graphics, which is essentially EVE as it's always looked, and Premium graphics, which came out in 2007 and is quite an improvement over Classic. Despite how good Premium graphics look now, according to EVE dev CCP Zulupark, they could look even better. In fact, CCP Games would like to push ahead with EVE's graphics, but supporting the game in Classic in tandem with improving the Premium graphics has been holding them back. Essentially, CCP has been supporting two different clients and thus a dual pipeline, where they must create two versions of each art asset introduced into the game. Zulupark says, "It complicates build and patching processes considerably and, for the most part, it simply doesn't allow us to make EVE look as beautiful as we want." The solution to this problem, he states, is for CCP to drop the Classic client altogether and focus their attention on Premium graphics as the game moves forward.
