Lander's Universe
We catch up with CCP's Jon Lander to discuss the rise of EVE: Valkyrie, the state of mobile and more.
As I sat in a meeting room at Gamescom, I remember thinking: what does Jon Lander actually do? Since handing over the reins of EVE Online to Andie Nordgren and Kristoffer Touborg, CCP’s Executive Producer was heading off to do something in mobile.
It was only when we met up that I finally discovered the truth: Lander is a champion of great ideas. Case in point was EVE: VR, a project he greenlit to bring to EVE FanFest in April and then, buoyed by success, encouraged them to take it to E3.
“E3 was a case of ‘Guys, thank you so much for the free PR that we weren’t expecting. Go to LA, have a great time and show it off.’ So when it then really took off, I circled the wagons and said ‘Ok, what do we need to do to make this a real project?’”
It was a difficult prospect for CCP. The firm’s fingers had been burned in the past with trying to do too much, and it was eager to avoid repeating the mistake. At a time when there was intense focus on Dust 514’s upcoming launch and future updates to EVE Online, Lander had a challenge on his hands. Luckily, E3 gave him a significant boost.
“It’s really interesting when you have a core mechanic, an experience, which has just been validated by the world as ‘yes, this is awesome, please go do it.’ You don’t often get that validation that early in the process. No matter what you do with this, if you can deliver that, people are going to love it.
“It was great to get that validation. It makes it a very easy case to say ‘Right, here is the game, here is the pitch, this is what we want to do with it, can we go do that now please?’ And it was an interesting confluence of events, because just that on its own probably wouldn’t have made it happen; we’d have had to think long and hard about it.
“Our Newcastle studio had just rolled off its last project and were just beginning to experiment with some things. Their mix of skills was an absolutely perfect fit for it. So suddenly we had this studio that was becoming available, and we had a game that desperately wanted to be made.”
From there, things started to snowball. With the confidence gained from E3 and EVE FanFest, those behind the early game relocated from Reykjavik to Newcastle so they could continue developing it.
“The hard bit was that the core of the guys who’d made the demo, you can’t just take that away from them. It probably sounds quite arrogant but, right now, they are proven to be the best VR game designers in the world. Right now, we have a proven virtual reality game which is better than anything else out there.
“As we were approaching Gamescom, we were thinking ‘You know what, now’s the time to own the space. Now’s the time to make this actually happen.’ So we announced it on Tuesday, did the press release on Wednesday, and people are loving it. People are going bonkers about it.”
I’m not surprised. After getting some hands-on time myself, I can’t wait to fly into EVE: Valkyrie when it launches sometime in 2014. Between now and then, Lander admits that there’s much to do, from refining that core experience, to adding some context and a full game around it. “People are just chewing their own arm off and going ‘can you just ship that bit?’ No,” he pauses, grinning. “We’re play testing it twice a day and it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a long way from being a game.”
That enigmatic release date made me wonder if EVE: Valkyrie would be dependent on an Oculus Rift consumer release, anticipated to be some time next year. Surprisingly, that’s not the case. “It is such a fast-moving area right now. Frankly, it’s completely new. Nobody knows what’s happening with it, so we’re keeping every single option open.”
Before moving on to other things, I had one last question to ask about EVE: Valkyrie. When I interviewed Lander this time last year, he explained that CCP isn’t just about making games. Instead, the firm builds universes, with each game representing a window on that universe. With Valkyrie firmly rooted in the EVE universe, I asked if he could describe what that window would look like.
Grinning, he replied. “Nope!”
“You’re absolutely right – we’re about making these virtual worlds that are more meaningful than the tedium of our real existence. One of the great things about Valkyrie is that we didn’t have to write any backstory. We didn’t have to say ‘Imagine a futuristic world, and these are spaceships,’ because that setting’s already set for us. It enables us to roll very quickly when we get things like this.”
He finished with a small teaser. “It’s absolutely set in the EVE universe. You can tell it’s the EVE fighters. How will that integrate with the universe and link in with our other games? I know, but I’m not going to tell you… yet!”
EVE’s Next Cataclysm
Moving over to EVE Online, I asked Lander where he thought the next big battle was going to come from. We’d seen CFC win the Fountain war and continue on into Delve, creating some of the largest player battles in the process. Now that a fragile calm had descended on New Eden, I was curious about what he thought would happen next.
“The great thing about our game is that I have absolutely no idea. I have a whole load of opinions and thoughts on what might happen, but this is actually the strength of EVE Online.
“Is somebody going to get pissed off at someone else? I remember listening to some of the talk around FanFest, and various people were moving into various positions in the coalitions, meeting each other and, frankly, pissing each other off. You just go ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have said that! Oh, I really wouldn’t have said that! Oh, I…’ Guess what? They went to war.”
“The key thing for me is that we’ve never gone long without something happening. I can probably count on both hands the number of really big, cataclysmic wars we’ve had in EVE Online. But there’s always a ton of other things going on. When things start to stagnate, people get bored. When people get bored, they start to do stupid things, and stupid things produce conflict.”