This interview with Eve Online’s senior technical producer, Torfi Frans Olafsson, focuses on his work on the “walk-in stations” concept for Eve Online. This initiative is the thing that will finally give the disembodied character portraits of Eve some substance. We’ll be able to hang out on stations, interact, and participate in station activities with embodied avatars. As always, the theme is human interaction, only this time there’s not going to be any combat.
What’s the plan with the walk-in stations then?
Well, the plan is to do with Eve growing and growing and growing. When we launched in 2003 the universe was pretty much an empty shell, we didn’t have missions or any of the detail we have today. And when we did add to the game we didn’t want to just widen it by adding a new solar system or a new gun, we wanted to deepen the experience. That’s been the policy for all the expansions: how do we add detail? How do we deepen the experience for the players? We’re now at a point where we have the technology, the knowledge and the manpower to take our little characters and turn them into “living” avatars on board the stations. Still, it’s a really challenging task.
I used to be involved with CCP’s sponsored events early on in the game, and we wanted to be able to create a venue for role-players to act out their stuff. This allows them to do that. The Amarr Emperor championship and stuff like that, I used to run these, and I miss that role-playing element. Today you basically are a spaceship. People create and build a character, spend all this time, then you don’t see much of him – a portrait. So we’re giving them bodies. But it’s not enough to give them bodies, we have to give them something to do. We’re building the interiors of the space stations, but not as tactical zones or combat zones.
The competition and combat within Eve Online is so complex today that it would not make any sense to come up with a hand-to-hand combat system on top of that. There’s also the “teaspoon principle”: the CEO of a large corporation is an untouchable character in the game world. And yet if you’re standing in a station you could kill him with a teaspoon – stab him with a shiv, you know? That would really fuck up the balance we’ve created for the whole game. We want to do these things incrementally, we can’t do some huge expansion in one step. Step small, get feedback, see what people like, take another step.
But there’s some stuff we have already developed for in stations, such as changing how your character appears. You can eat and drink and get fat, and then you can go to Gallente plastic surgeon and have your appearance changed, or an Amarr cleansing room and lose weight. I like this because it’s kind of a pure role-playing aspect. It means you’re no longer stuck with simply a player portrait.
There’s also a new interface for corp recruitment. Players are going to be able to rent NPC bots as staff within their offices, which we eventually intend to be programmable. Players will be able to set up dialogue trees, and give and receive items. We’ll be able to have players setting up their own missions using these dialogue tree systems. These bots can also be representative for the players, recruiters or a bar-tender bot. These station services that I mention are going to be player-owned. My vision is to have as little as NPC-driven stuff in there as possible. The avatar-services, bars, and offices are all going to be built by players, and will require rent. Running in bar in Yulai will cost a little more than running a bar in some abandoned low-sec station.
If you think about how certain other world-like MMO systems work, people come in, they build stuff, then they move on. Other people come in look around, go build their own stuff, and leave. It’s all empty, dead, but still there. So you have some kind of post-apocalypse where the structures are there and there are no people. I don’t like this because it doesn’t push people together, and that’s why I want upkeep and rent in our businesses. The business that are not people will just fade away, as in real life.
So also in stations people are going to be able to meet and play mini games. They’re going to be playing gambling games… you know you don’t call up your friends in real life and say “I know this great ten metre by ten metre hall in town, with nothing in it. Let’s go and stand in there and talk…” You don’t do that. You always have a mission: drink beer, shoot some pool. We translate that directly to games. In Eve people hang out and mine, or run mission gangs. They’re not just chatting. This is why we’re including these gambling games. We’re going to implement some very familiar strategic games, such as poker, and go. These games are all visible too, so they can become spectator sports. People can gamble away their fortunes and give people something to talk about.
Now, all this has another aspect, which is the visual fidelity of the ships. They are astonishingly detailed now, and players will expect the same from their avatars. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. We’ve never been content with second best for visuals, we want to be out there at the edge, and there’s amazing stuff happening with character rendering. We have to investigate all these things, to implement amazing shading technologies for hair, skin and cloth on these characters, and we’re already seeing them in our prototypes. The visual fidelity of characters will be on par with that of the ships. But this alone is not enough – pretty screenshots alone are not enough – we need other things like animations. If the animation is rubbish you end up with a pretty-looking corpse, a Real Doll. That is more immersion-breaking than going for crappy graphics and comparatively crappy animations. So we’re getting the best facial animation in the industry – academics who are studying socialisation via avatars in virtual environments. Universities in Reykjavik, California and Paris are all contributing to making the avatars appear natural. We want to give them a sense of awareness. This is very important. Usually animation is canned – unless an avatar is being killed or shot at, it probably isn’t going to react to anything. We’re going to use information from inside the game system to how your avatar reacts. Standings, reactions, and so on will cause the reactions to what happens to the avatar. You’re going to have a series of moods that you can put your character in, but no silly moves or dancing. There is dry sarcastic humour in Eve, but not silliness.
How do you think people have found the Trinity upgrade? Any complaints?
Well on a new system it performs very well. It does need more memory, so older systems will suffer. But we’re supporting systems from 2003, but we have to keep our eyes on horizon, we have to move on. More and more people will enjoy the benefits as they slowly upgrade, even if they do so incrementally.
Do you feel that there needs to be a greater degree of standardisation in PC hardware?
Well it’s hard not to envy the console developers who know precisely what they are developing for. Not knowing what the player is going to have can breed apathy with developers, they can say “well they just have to buy more memory”, which is really bad, obviously. That said, the organic, component-based process of PC evolution means that the systems can grow quickly and take advantage of technologies. If people want to do that, and to play games like Eve they’re probably just going to have to learn the difference between a megahertz and a megabyte. And gamers will do that.
And this kind of victim of technology thing is something that you guys suffer more than most: the single galaxy Eve server is now ludicrously complex, isn’t it?
Yes, the cluster is very big, very powerful. We’re exploring some super-computing possibilities for the future, and I believe we’re looking at having it classified as a super-computing cluster alongside some of the top systems in the world. I don’t know exact numbers, but we have those figures somewhere.
Do you feel comfortable with where the game is going with things like Sovereignty? There’s occasionally been the feeling that CCP are “developing blind” and just patching these things up as they go along.
Well, I think all our systems need to be reviewed all of the time. We don’t need to fix what isn’t broken – which has happened several times, I will be the first to admit – but everything needs to come under scrutiny, and everything is likely to be improved by more work. We will continue that in the future. We maintain a tight review cycle, and if we have to go back and fix things again to make sure that they work, then we will.
How important is the overall fiction of Eve? We always focus on what the players get up to in their alliances, but how important is this science fiction material to you?
It will always be important. It’s what sets us apart from other virtual worlds. The setting and the context, to me, is fifty-fifty between the backstory and the player activities. There is no way that we can ignore the great sagas that are emerging from the activities of the player alliances and corporations, this stuff actually happens, but the backstory gives it a sense of depth, context and perspective that make it more immersive. Making it all fit together is important work. Tony Gonzales, in his forthcoming novella, absolutely nails it. I mean we could write something fantastic that was totally ignorant of the processes within Eve, we could fashion great ideas in some Ivory tower, without any attachment to the players, but everyone would notice that. It would be irrelevant, background noise. We can’t ignore what 20,000 people are doing in the game. It is the fiction.
Will factional warfare emphasize the backstory?
I think so. People don’t always pay attention to the backstory, and I think the factional warfare will allow people to realise that there are differences between the races, and tensions in the galaxy. We want players to make the most of all aspects of Eve, and the factional warfare is just another example of that. It’s another example of the depth we’re bringing to Eve.
I look forward to seeing it… one day. Thanks for talking to me, Torfi, and read RockPaperShotgun every day.
Thankyou!
Related Stories:
if only they would add hand to hand combat as well… now that would be sick, imagine a whole fleet docking at the other factions station running in and beatin the crap out of everyone, now thats what i’m talking about!!
I agree with previous sentiments that this will do a lot to attract new blood to the game. I’ve tried to play it twice, and both times I give up to play WoW instead.
While it’s all the same to me, the consensus among my circle of friends is that WoW’s main draw is the personalization of the character. Whether or not MMO players like it, the most important part of the game is a system of gradual, constant reward that amounts to dressing a doll in increasingly more garish costume. Almost all major MMOs are built on this idea, and EVE doesn’t make the cut as far as this is concerned. (Many Pacific MMOs, for example Ragnarok, and a lot of those other freeware anime-style MMOs, stay in business because people will dish out cash-money for fancy hats.)
I personally would enjoy this new dimension to the gameplay, and I know a lot of people who feel similarly. This kind of move might make EVE more mainstream.
I think it’ll be a boost to the EVE experiance that we already have. I have made allot of friends on EVE all over the world walking around a station will be a better way in communicating with them. I think this’ll be a bid success.
Running in bar in Yulai will cost a little more than running a bar in some abandoned low-sec station.”
Why not make the cost of rent relate to the average population of the system/station over the course of a month? As notorious as Jita is, you’d think that would be the most expensive, and therefore it will encourage people to expand to other systems around it. Maybe not just the system population, but have faction standing have an effect on it as well. The higher your faction standing, the cheaper it is for you to rent in stations that are owned by that faction. That way if you’re a Matari in Amarr space, it may be too expensive at the Amarr and Caldari stations, but find a station that is owned by a Minmatar corporation, and you’ll get a discount.
I also feel like they could include useful functionality in Corp War Rooms. Like the ability to track the locations of corporation ships across several systems on an interactive map, and stuff like that.
What I can picture evolving is a class of corp stratego or coordinator who helps keep people apprised of what’s going on out in the void, where enemy ships are being spotted, if one of a corp’s gangs is in a prime position to cut off fleeing enemies, etc. It’s clearly no substitute for a commander in the field, but being able to give someone a bird’s-eye view of the constellation and have them help manage the strategic aspect of things might be interesting.
It’s all stuff that CAN be done from the pilot’s seat itself . . . but could be done easier and more interestingly in a war room.
“There is dry sarcastic humour in Eve, but not silliness”
That is a lie there is much silliness!!!!
Wow.. Sounds like they are incorporating the Earth & Beyond type of thing into Eve. I’ve been looking forward to an upgrade like this since I started Eve in 2003…
Nice, I can’t wait to get eve online, just waiting for my wow sub to run out.
I am using the new Bracket system in EvE now.
It is great, has reduced my lag a whole lot in medium battles.
It lets you remove all the icons if you wish, from your screen, from what i understand it, information going back and forth is a lot less, as the system does not have to calculate relative distances and whatnot to put that tiny little icon on the screen for you.
When fighting you just use your overview anyway.
And walk in stations should not create lag in the zone
This is exciting. Why tho is everything so DARK? Like in so many solar systems and the pics above of the stations …why do we have to “live” in Half-Light??
Doesnt make sense in a station.
*_*
I can’t wait this to hit EVE. I can imagine, as my corp’s veterans sit around a table, and drink Quafe or beer. While at home we open and drink a mouthful of real beer, and talk about the last battle.
There are plenty of wasted time spinning your ship on station, and relaxing. In the future, you won’t have to watch that boring screen eternally.
EVE’s rules are such that it promotes conflict, violence and lawlessness.
I think the combat free WiS is an ineffectual way to try and balance that.
Kommissar Nicko,
“Whether or not MMO players like it, the most important part of the game is a system of gradual, constant reward that amounts to dressing a doll in increasingly more garish costume. Almost all major MMOs are built on this idea, and EVE doesn’t make the cut as far as this is concerned.”
You say this as if its a BAD thing… wth?
I take pride in the fact I play a game that isn’t as lame as all other MMORPG’s.
Eve being different from most others is a very huge plus in my book.
for your information… take the WoW userbase’s average age… add 10 – 15 years to that, and you have the EVE player’s average age. We don’t care about gay pink hats of 5 noobage
ALSO, in a way, eve DOES have this sort of thing.. as you can add different sorts of modules on your ships. Sure you dont see your ship transforming into a pink transvestite freakish thing as you do with WoW or other games, but I think we’ll live without that…
Just my 2 cents
Ps.
WiS sucks, CCP shouldnt have spent any time and resources on that… They are trying to make it more mainstream to lure more players but all it will do is drive the original hardcore REAL eve gamers away and in a year EVE will be just like WoW… full of 12 – 16 year old kids whining and cursing and LOLOLOL’ing non-stop.
Tyrrax Thorrk does! :D
Looks great, but I would be much more satisifed on a fix for Fleet Lag or constant database issues causing system to drop or dealyed startups.
I hope my avatar will be fully posable. Yours too.
Can we say Starwars? Next they will put Lightsabres in the game and storm tropers, what oh no Here comes a Vader!!
As long as they keep that aspect out of it, it will be interesting.
Oh hey what about bar fights!! and if you started it you go to jail for the day! lol And if you have Hacking lvl 5 you can sneek out of jail and go kick some butt at the bar again.
Wait this will be cool!! Drinking skill Rank 20, lvl 5, 6 months, 22 hrs, 56 min. 48 sec.
Wah ! Nice thing
When we can landing on planets, EVe will be the most powerfull MMO !
Enjoy
A nice improvement for sure but still hoping for land based adventure that is more immersive. Why is there fear you would be able to shiv a ceo in stations? So what? So make it difficult to do much damage unless you’re on mission specific land based adventure with proper weaponry which wouldnt be allowed in the stations. Include the planets for exploration….as Astrany says. Understand all this is difficult to incorporate given EVE’s complex combat system but would be great if there was even a very basic land based system added….just saying, already my fav game but it woudl be end-all-be-all game imho if you could add that kind of detail. (Also love the idea of bar fight offered in the earlier comment)
Now all that’s left is for someone to develop affordable, and solid, working direct neural interfacing, patch said interfacing into the client, and a pod-style chair/computer combo… Eh, I can dream.
How soon will I be able to open a Starbucks?
The information about this feature is known for longer, but now it should be more closed to the real experience….isnt it?:D
I think EVE is one of the best (may be the best) MMO on the planet. I dont know about the other planets here, as I forgot to take the keys from my Domi, before I clone-jumped here:)
I just want to say I am absolutely blown up by reading it and seeing that CCP is talking exactly what I was awaiting to get from that. Just to become natural life, absolutely excelent. To go to the bar, talk with guys, play something, drink some Quafe. To go to have a look how my Hyperion is produced (oh man!!!), with all the submoduls put together, to move freely and naturaly and not like in second life (roflmao :-D!!!), to see guys to work on invention job….I dont know, just amazing….to plan with the corp mates in the meeting room and 3D map over our heads the next movement and to have the corporate bots….man…GO OOOON!!!!! May be once we will be able to walk on planets……terraforming them….like an aliance having sovereignity at max and makes hundreds of bilions investment to terraform the planet and….hahahahaah!!!!!
Ok, may be would be cool to know when we can wait the new feature alive and have the experience MMonline. On the video, it looked really cool. GUYS GO ON!!!!!!!
http://www.crazykinux.com/2007/05/video-of-eve-online-avatars-walking.html
I have played EVE for almost two years now and have enjoyed all the additions to it–which unlike other games does not charge you for the additions–I dont know how cool it will be to be able to walk around but if it adds more fun IM for it. It would be nice for EVE to figure out how one could go after a pirate in high sec who is in a npc corp. A bit unfair not being able to pay some guys back. Just a thought. Teho Director of British Federation Corp and Director of the Sleepless Knights Alliance. :)
This whole thing reminds me of the great Earth & Beyond, where you could walk the stations, buy things, sell, take missions from terminal, etc… that was a lot more natural than the current system in EVE, so I’m looking forward to this expansion, even can’t wait for it.
Great job CCP.
I think the replies to this article alone are proof not just of CCP’s excellent dev staff but of the games maturity and depth, compare these kinds of reply to replies about WoW patches or development notes and its clear who CCP’s intended audience are. The player base of EVE reflects how the dev’s have built the game, and I have faith that CCP are building ambulation to reflect how the player base acts, obviously especially when players are station-bound or simply have nothing to do in the game. Its going to relieve tensions and boredom when you’re camped in a station, and the gambling bit sounds awesome :P
There is such a large amount of constructive feedback here its staggering, if i ran any kind of MMO myself i’d love to have such an intellectual player base, Torfi probably gets alot of information from here, might even read it himself :P The community of EVE definately fuels the developers vision, I’m looking forward to see just how deep they can make ambulation, as such an the idea would be far more aesthetic in the minds of another dev team :D
Awesome article and excellent, articulate responses! EVE is definitely a game that will be around for a long while as long as CCP continues to be proactively involved in the games development.
When I was told about this game for the first time and interesting in trying it my expectations where if it would be possible to walk around the station, so it’s cool the see it come to discussion 2 years later..
Isn’t needed. Cool great yada yada can’t you be doing something more worthwhile?
After years of staring at my ships, I really can’t wait to get out and move around, rather than just narrating my actions in “bar” channels and the like. BTW– EVE canonical note: the fact that our characters are cybernetically linked to their ships doesn’t imply that they haven’t been able to unplug themselves until now.
Maybe yours hasn’t, of course, but that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have done so if he wanted to.
Hmm my main reason to play games is to explore things unknown me to. At least its a big part of why I play. So with this new level of unknown game play factors I cant wait to play as I used to again.
arqueturus says:
“That’s odd roB, because I have a very exact picture of what mine will look like – the same as when I was originally creating my Avatar.”
Unfortunately for some, you will have to completely redefine your character’s face and outfit in the new system, in an all-new character definer. You can try to make it as similar to your old 2D portrait as you can, if you want, or you can (as I will) enjoy an opportunity to try something else.
I’m looking forward to this expansion. It’ll be interesting to see how CCP changes their screenshots of the game. Currently it’s all spacecraft & space backgrounds. Will it be men & women in bars afterwards?
As for those thinking that the entire ambulation upgrade is a waste of time… CCP has to add features in order to add customers. If they simply fix what’s there, how do they market that? “EVE Online – now with loads of bugs FIXED!!!” Doesn’t sound so snappy.
There are small bugs – for example, you say “dock” and your ship ambles up to the station and bangs into it, without actually docking. Would be great to fix those silly little ones. But – I would love it if they would fix these huge, rather fundamental things though -
1) missiles & laser weapons shoot straight through objects towards their target (space stations… asteroids… other players’ ships) changing this would allow you to hide behind an asteroid… making combat in an asteroid belt much more interesting… weapons could hit other ships by accident (right now they only hit their target)
2) collision between ships – currently they fly straight through each other, unless their centre-points happen to collide in which case they exhibit this weird avoidance manoeuvering… not very realistic looking esp. on large ships.
3) ships cast shadows on themselves in Trinity… which is cool. However they don’t cast shadows on other ships, or space stations… space stations don’t cast shadows on you either. Would make things a lot cooler looking (yeah I know, it would be darker for most people esp. if you’re in the shadow of a planet the whole time!)
idiots, fuck new content when you have a buggy product.
morons, do something about lag and bugs, fuck this shiny shit
stupid cunts
Oh man theres so manny implications here like:
-could we go shot a dude in station if he hides there (under aggro law and all that-new pvp mode, new portable weaponds, new skills for those, some auto turrets to act as concord……-I’d vote for that),
- if im in a bar and a friend is under attack out in space would I have to pay the bar-tender, run all way to ship, and then undock and go pewpew, or just “teleport” to ship’s capsule?,
-buysness: I understand that it will be possible to have markets and stuff ownd in stations. would that bring isk in? if so doesit gonna be another “rich get richer” or it wil be more based on players imagination to attract people in she/he’s bar (damn sounds like “second life”-sorry about that but as a new player I’d be bombarder by cool, expensive to build locations from older players, mackeng it impossible for me to get it started…..
It’s pretty cool and all that but there things that must be considerd. Oh love the fact that you went for realistic humanoid proportions, was scared I’ll see wow in space …. you know orcs, farry’s flying harbinger’s…. that kind of nightmare.
About time! ;p Honestly the biggest hole in Eve is the lack of depth outside of spaceship flight. It might not be much but having a character than can move around a bit and interact will add a whole new dimension to the game that it has been lacking.
Ahh srry about these second post, but had a thought. Think will allso be cool to be able to design oure corp/alliance uniforms. you know what im talking about ;)
what are you talking about all of you?????????
this will defenetly destroy the game!
its just that the need for real isk ccp has is bigger than the virtual one…
im sure it will be full of 11-16years old kids in a year
dam…thats can be called “permanent death if in station”
ill miss the comfortable belly of my pod….. :(