Spotlight On - Eve Online Progress Report, Dust 514 Discussion

Let's cut to the chase: It's GDC 2010, and game studios like Eve Online developer CCP are here showing their wares. We sat down with a few representatives from the studio to discuss Eve's present and its future, and we did our best to get some more details on its other projects. These include Dust 514, a console shooter being developed in China, and an as-yet unannounced game being developed out of Atlanta, Georgia, that may or may not have something to do with CCP's acquisition of White Wolf Games, which is the pen-and-paper game company that produces the tabletop game World of Darkness. What we came away with was a good amount of Eve, a little Dust 514, and absolutely zero on the third game.

In any case, CCP is extremely pleased with Eve's continued growth from its relatively small community of a few thousand players to its recent highs of some 330,000 paid subscribers (to say nothing of the looky-loos who are playing the game's free trial). The game has grown with CCP-developed expansions every six months and the studio is already working on the 13th expansion, Tyrannis. It will launch this summer and will add new mechanics for mining and exploiting resources.

This planetary gameplay will directly tie into Dust 514, which will be a console shooter based in the same universe as Eve. Though the CCP staffers were hesitant to divulge any details, they did again confirm that the game will work directly with Eve in that Dust 514 players will be terrestrial mercenaries who will form up in strategic groups that may report to the player-built "corporations" (Eve's version of guilds) from the original PC game.

In the meantime, CCP is also working an a separate expansion that will add an entirely new dimension--namely, one outside of your spaceship. The expansion, titled Incarna, will indeed let you finally step out of your starship and walk around on foot on space stations. This means your politically conniving pilot can finally go off the grid and engage in shady, underworld dealings. It also means that Eve will gain all-new character customization options that will require new artists and programmers to implement. In fact, the studio is looking to recruit some 150 new people to work on the three projects.

For the time being, CCP remains dedicated to continuing to develop the game and add new dimensions to it over time while remaining open to discussion with the community, but the studio is otherwise focusing on making day-to-day technical improvements to the game's graphics and, more importantly, to its network stability. Although the game's population has grown from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand, the studio refuses to split the population onto different servers in favor of keeping every single player on the same shard so that everyone can interact with everyone. CCP reaffirms that this is core to the game's philosophy and will never change.