GIbiz got a monstrously huge interview with CCP Games’ Hilmar Petursson thanks to the EVE Online company’s presence at Reboot Develop this month – so far, we’ve covered how the studio says it’s regrouping after all its post-EVE failures and how EVE Online is destined to be huge in the East. The latest piece out on Petursson’s comments, however, focuses on EVE’s tech and community.
Specifically, he tells GIbiz, running the game is like running a city, such that CCP creates the map and lets the players create the drama, but the “mayor” knows only that “the traffic light patterns need changing when there are one hundred citizens stuck in an unmoving line of cars.”
The problem, as he puts it, is that EVE Online’s underlying technology is old, such that when thousands of people – of its 300K active userbase, 10K new people per week – throw themselves into pitched battle, “the technology absolutely is at its breaking edge […] absolutely at its brink.” It wasn’t even what the game was originally built to do: “The technical feat it takes to make [a huge battle] run on computers is way less than the social engineering feat on behalf of the EVE players that even makes this a problem to begin with.”
Of course, as we’ve covered, CCP Games has been working with other tech companies to boost the number of people who can participate in these types of dramatic battles, as seen in the company’s GDC stunt earlier this year in partnership with Hadean. But really, every older MMO can relate, and every old MMO is fighting the perception that its tech is decrepit and its playerbase is dwindling. Here’s Petursson with my favorite quote:
“It has existed for 16 years and people think it’s in stagnation. But that’s the story with a lot of these long running franchises; it’s like a river that flows through, and there’s a bottom layer of people that stick, and over time there are layers of generations of EVE players that keep on being added every single year.”
