We catch up with CCP's Jon Lander to discuss the rise of EVE: Valkyrie, the state of mobile and more.

One of EVE’s famous player gatherings was due to happen in Cologne that very evening. Did Lander think that people would get drunk, say the wrong things, and war would break out by the weekend?

“I guarantee that people get drunk and say the wrong things! I hope that coming out of this evening a load of people will make friends, and a load of people in the game will make enemies. One of the things I see at FanFest every year, and at the player gatherings – this is actually the first German player gathering that I’ve gone to – everybody gets on. I’ve yet to see any people fall out in real life.

“I still remember that moment when Mercenary Coalition and Goonswarm met face-to-face at FanFest, quite a few years ago now. You had these guys and they all looked at each other, and I was thinking ‘Mmm, this could get tasty.’ And they went ‘Beer? Yeah, beer.’ Beer, guitar, music, everyone’s having a good time. And they’re knocking chunks out of each other in game.

“It’s interesting. A lot of other people in the industry come along to see what is going on, then they always leave going ‘Oh my god, you just have the best community, you have the best fans, these guys are really committed.’ People come along and they wonder how we do it. Sometimes I wonder that myself.”

Besides the Fountain war, EVE Online also recently hosted the Alliance Tournament XI, a search to find the best team of PvP capsuleers from across the alliances of New Eden. The competition was also used as a public test for EVE’s CREST API system, allowing sites like Null-Sec to provide 3D battle renders in near real-time. I asked Lander how work on this new interface was progressing.

“We’re beginning to roll it out, pushing bits and pieces. It’s great to see the battle report being made very quickly by our third-party developer community, based on data that we were making available in a unique way. It was fantastic to see our little thoughts of what would people do with this, and they knocked up a really cool third-party tool for the community to use, and that’s very much an embodiment of what we want to continue to do now.

When asked about the next stage of rollout, Lander explained how CCP is currently looking at the data and learning from it. Although CREST has been in use for over a year to power the connection between EVE Online and DUST 514, this was the first time it had been opened to the public. “In terms of what we’d like to do, you name it. We just want people to interact with the universe and change the state of it, because that means interesting things are happening and can spark off other things.”

“There is a really important part to it though, which is that it takes effort, it takes a lot of developer time to get these things out. That takes away from other areas. We’ve got a really good roadmap which Andie [Nordgren] went through at FanFest, which was our vision of where we want to take the game.

“Frankly, we have so many cool ideas for things we would love to do, the hardest job at CCP is saying no, we’re not doing it. But it’s a lesson that we’ve learned. Yes, we’ve got a roadmap with what we want to do with CREST, what we want to push out, and it will trundle along. We will get it out there, because it makes the game better.”

Those Mobile Plans

As we drew things to a close, I went back to that moment at FanFest where Jon Lander announced he was moving from EVE Online to work on a mobile strategy. For fans that had known him as CCP Unifex those past few years, their thanks was an incredible send-off. During the Party at the Top of the World, he crowd surfed to roaring cheers.

“It was a very emotional moment actually, up on stage. You never really know with our player base, we catch a lot of flak sometimes, but to get that reception… our fans are the reason why we do this, and to get that kind of reception was actually very humbling.”

Shortly after FanFest, Lander put a call out on Twitter asking for ideas on how the firm could use mobile. Following that, he started to develop a strategy that would work for more than just one game or universe. “Part of it was to think ‘what does this actually mean? How do we do this at CCP? How do you create a companion app for a game? How do you create a new game, a new experience? Does it make sense to have a new group doing that, or should the EVE group do it?’”

That strategy, in turn, led to working through internal pieces such as organisation, and starting to put plans together. And then E3 happened, as Lander explained. “It was ‘Jon, could you please look after Valkyrie?’”

It meant putting those mobile plans on hold until after Gamescom, when Lander could hand over stewardship of Valkyrie to a successor. That hand-over is now happening, with industry veteran Owen O’Brien taking the reins as executive producer. Lander is now aiming to push those plans forward as the studio moves into 2014.

“It certainly did take a bit of a lengthy pause. The mobile opportunity for CCP is enormous, but Valkyrie is an enormous thing as well, and we only have so many people who can do these things. The good thing is that internally we’ve progressed the dialogue. We’re now quite clear on how we’re going to move forward with mobile right the way across the game groups, which was something we didn’t have before.”

Wrapping up, I couldn’t help but share my own experiences with EVE: Valkyrie. We talked for a little, and I mentioned some of the comments that my colleagues had made after playing it. We all agreed that it was huge fun to play. It was then that Lander shared some insight on their fortunate discovery.

“People say in development ‘Is it fun? Let’s make the fun.’ How do you make fun? It’s the most ludicrous thing in the world. You can’t make fun, you can’t design for fun. You just have to create these experiences and hope that they work, and many of them don’t. We’ve found one that works, and it really works.”

Yes, it definitely does. 

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor

Follow me on Twitter @Gazimoff