Reynir Harðarson, (pronounced “Hardarson” or “Hartharson”? the jury is out) who was one of the key imaginations behind Eve Online and the original art director, is now working on the World Of Darkness MMO in Atlanta. He talks quietly and rapidly, making transcribing and interview like this one (conducted in a noisy conference hall) incredible painful. Nevertheless it’s worth doing because he is articulate and incredibly astute, and I think this brief conversation captures a fragment of that. It staggers me each day that his work, and the work of CCP as a whole, gets ignored and over-looked by the industry.
Frankly I don’t give a crap whether you liked Eve, or found it boring, or unplayable or anything else: what you need to understand are the principles that are at its foundations, because they’re principles that can be applied to stop MMOs becoming stale and inflexible in the future. The number of people I’ve encountered working on MMOs who don’t really know anything about Eve Online is shocking, and I regard that lack of knowledge of the work of people like Harðarson as one of the key reasons why MMOs are progressing so slowly, and regurgitating the same tired, tiresome ideas over and over again.
Anyway, let’s get down to the interview.
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