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Special Sections: Gen Con '02 While at the GenCon GameFair in Milwaukee Wisconsin, we were able to corner Mike "Campion" Wallis from Simon and Schuster the publisher's for Eve: The Second Genesis and get the 411 on the game today. His voice never gave out on him and he didnt crack under the pressure!
Div: Who are you and what is your specific role with Eve Online? Campion: I'm the senior producer with Eve, negotiated the contract with CCP and doing product management for the developer. Div: You would oversee customer relations? Campion: I oversee the community relations, we have a community relation's person who you would see online and on the boards, you would know her name as Pam. Peter handles the PR relations, we have 13 people that are all very close. We all do a number of cross over items; unlike some larger companies who do not involve the producers directly but have the massive PR departments do it all. We wear many hats. Div: Eve is being compared against some games such as JumpGate, Earth and Beyond, and the powerhouse StarWars: Galaxies. What is going to set Eve apart from the other games? Campion: Eve will of course certainly have the PvP element to it; players will be able to PvP outside the secure zones to their hearts content. Outside of PvP it's so much more, there is an incredible economic model built into Eve. Everything is entirely player based. From the ships to you fly, the modules you use to customize your ship with, weapons your ship fires, to the ammunition your ship fires. Everything needs to be manufactured by players. There is a constant influx or a constant demand for the resources in the form of minerals. Players go out and mine asteroids and get ore, then they refine those asteroids to create minerals, then miners will take those minerals and put them up on the stock market which will then be purchased by the manufacturers. There is a constant cycle. The cycle is they mine, they sell the minerals, players buy the manufactured items whether it be ship, weapon etc., and then the ships get destroyed in combat, missiles are expended, ammunition is expended and then go back to asteroids which can be mined for minerals all over again. Div: So there is a full economy with money sinks so that players need to depend upon others, with one group working with others? Campion: Exactly. It's not like our trade skill system is not a second hand thing, for example like EverQuest. The trade skills in EQ are basically worthless. Who wants to make or buy player made armor when you can get better from killing a god. It's definitely a complete player based economy, probably the first true one ever. Div: Corporations. These are basically your player guilds; will they have anything to do with the economy? Campion: Absolutely. Corporations can actually sell their stock on the stock market if they want to raise capital, to manufacture more items, or build a space station they can sell stock in their company. However, if they choose to go public and sell stock, players that buy that stock can vote for the CEO. That's one way to do a hostile takeover of a rival corporation. Div: Varying or different types of corporations? Yes, right now we have about 15,000 beta testers that are signed up and on our message boards. The e-community is extremely active. We have over a hundred corporations by fans; many of them who have never seen the game before other then from screenshots or what they have read, or played the game yet from alpha, have already formed corporations with over two hundred people in them. There are these vast player corporations already that are planning big things. One thing that was interesting when we just concluded our alpha test seven at the end of July was watching the player dynamic happening without any interaction from the development team. The manufacturers said to the miners they would by tri-tanium from you for 2ISK a ton or unit. Two is nothing, the miners eventually got tired of these wages and formed a union and told the merchants they would not mine for them unless paid 20. The merchants could not afford that so they formed a mercantile guild to negotiate. Players took initiative on both sides and eventually came to a consensus of 10 or 12. Div: Can corporations become mega-corps with corps under them or sub-guilds? Alliances? Would there be any benefits to corporations for alliances? Campion: Yes, alliances like Dark Age worked out between leaders. It's definitely beneficial for trade or using space for example: using space stations. You can lock out rival corporations from using your space stations or docking in it. You can declare war on other corporations. Within safe zones you cannot engage in any PvP but as players get more bold and adventurous moving out into the fringe systems those are less and less patrolled the further out from the core systems you eventually run into NPC Pirates, Mercenaries and players out there who are preying on people or who are operating independently without any influence from the core systems. However the reward for going into those risky areas is that your going to be able to find much more rare minerals worth a lot more money and potentially hidden technologies. Maybe you kill an NPC pirate who drops 'the phat l33t' like a blueprint that you can use to manufacture an 'Uber' missile that you can take back and be the only one who can manufacture it, you essentially have the market or a monopoly on that item. Div: With the PvP, how balanced will it be? If you are going out to the frontier will you end up in a PK Fest with campers on portals as you enter zones? Any plans in place to curb ganking? Campion: We anticipate a lot of pirates hunting at star gates. But as far as the ship-to-ship combat goes we have frigates, cruisers, battleships and titans, which are like mobile space stations. Battleships of course are big and slow, but they take a pounding before they are destroyed. They also have a vast number of weapon slots that you can configure for different types of weapons, shield systems, armor repair systems, ECM, etc. So they are going to be tough to take out. However, Frigates can equalize things because they are small and fast as most of the battleship weapons are slow at targeting; they are used mostly against capital ships and space stations. Div: So everything has checks and balances when opposed to different ships, weapons, and defense systems. It's not just A beats B, B beats C and C beats A? Campion: Yes, it's not just a game of rock, paper and scissors type of thing. Div: What about those who do not want to be involved in any part of PvP whatsoever. Is there a place for them? Will they be able to PvE or work the economy system? Campion: Absolutely. They are perfectly fine operating or safe staying inside the core systems. The core systems are huge. We plan on having ten thousand solar systems. Each solar system will have anywhere between two and twelve planets complete with moons, space stations, asteroid belts, etc. With ten thousand solar systems supporting one hundred thousand players on a server. Compared to; for example EverQuest that only supports thirty five hundred players per server. We plan theoretically to support one hundred thousand players. Div: Everyone can follow along with a continuing storyline and a back-story for those who wish and enjoy role-play that's already established? Campion: Yes. Our guys have created an elaborate back-story from the get go. They are continuing to develop it as the game is being developed. Div: What about solo play? What is someone does not want to be involved with a corporation. Are they forced to play with other players, or can they go out and just do their own thing? Campion: Certainly. They can go out and do mining, run courier missions to gain money, purchase their skills. They can do that all. As opposed to other games, we do not focus on PvE although we do have PvE it's not a main focus. Most of our focus is on Player vs. Player, or Player with Player either on a friend's side or the enemy's side. Because massive multiplayer games are so important to community orientation we built in a number of chat features and tools that enable players to meet new people and also to communicate with their friends in chat channels, private instant messengers, an in game email system, and an in game message board. Div: Players do not need to leave the game, and load web browsers or external chat systems? All of this is within game? Campion: Yes, in game. One of the items were experimenting with is that the internal message board would mirror the external message board on the official site. So, if you play four or five hours a night, then go to bed, and the next morning go to work you could log onto the message board and see what you missed. Div: How would that work in game? Would you dock into a space station, where you would be an avatar that exits your ship and performs tasks on a terminal? Campion: You dock into your station, a terminal interface would occur. You never leave your ship unlike Earth and Beyond for example. If you look at Earth and Beyond, what do you actually do? You exit your ship; you run around, you go to a bar where you do a silly dance. It's really for social reasons. We decided to focus all of our attention on the game itself and not the fluff. You can never exit your ship; your character is your primary focus, as you develop skills and not your ship. If you go out and spend a lot of money on a big expensive battleship and it gets destroyed at least your character is still alive. Div: This is the whole escape pod, death, cloning part? Campion: Right, the way death is handled is if your ship is destroyed you are ejected into space in an escape pod where you can be on your way back to a space station. However, if someone destroys your escape pod then you are resurrected in the form of a clone. Now, you lose skills depending upon the type of clone you have. Everyone has the basic government welfare clone, which you can lose up to four percent of your skill base. It doesn't sound like a lot, but if you play two hundred days and lose four percent it can be a significant amount of skill you lose. You can always spend more money and purchase great clones, very nice and more elaborate clones in which you only lose half a percent of your skills or nothing. Div: RTFM! No one ever reads the manual. The games interface, and the learning curve. Would a player be able to sit down and learn the game within an hour and grasp the game fully? Campion: What we have done is, built in four or five mission types, which are tutorial missions. You go into Eve and click on missions, and you have an agency contact that's says don't mind me, he has ten tons of crytanium shows you how to do it. When you do that, he gives you a warrant that shows you how everything works. When that's done he comes back and says “How about doing this courier mission for me.” It's a great introduction to the system. There are mission players will want to do because they will get nice rewards, especially for newbies. Div: Jumping back to the ships for a moment, they are fully customizable for hull points (weapons mounts, defenses), how about for ship names, guild emblems or logos displayed? Campion: We are still experimenting with allowing ship names to be displayed, but we do have a full decal system that players can go in and customize decals so that corporations can give their unique identities to their ships that are visible for other players to see. Div: With those who are already with established corporations, will they be able to upload their own logos? Campion: That is something we have talked about, but not at this time. Not in the beta, it is a possibility for later. It's something we are still considering and talked about. Div: The killer question that will place me on your black list. PvP games that are built with that in mind from the ground up take a lot longer to build today then normal PvE games. Eve has been in development for a long time. It's been pushed back year-to-year with a lot of issues. What's the status today? Campion: We came into the picture in April and signed the agreement with CCP to be their publisher, what that did was we gave them a strong influx of capital which they needed in order to complete the game, it also allowed us to set up and get the ball rolling and enable us to use our strength for server hosting, additional agreements like customer service reps., etc. So we were able to lend a lot on our side, also with me being the producer my job is to come in and basically crack the whip on people. They have had a strong project management group there, I think I can lend my experience and as well as the other folks at Simon and Schuster can lend their experience in helping push this game out the door. The problem at this stage right now is feature creep. Everyone has great ideas, because we can see it going. We have an alpha test, the alpha testers are like, “Wouldn't it be cool if.” The designers are “yeah, that's awesome!” My job as producer is to say, “Well we can't do that.” We have to weigh the time that it would take to implement a feature like that against the remaining development schedule. It's really a balance affair that we have to balance and take into account. Div: Now, on Customer Service that's always the last thing with any MMO game, will Simon and Schuster handle that, will it be in house or outsource it? Campion: Simon and Schuster will handle all warranty issues, missing CD's in the retail boxes and stuff like that. CCP will handle all in game customer service. They, CCP are actually talking with their hosting company in Iceland who is already very experienced with customer service Internet issues. We are working with them now to set up the in game level one, two and three tier support. If there were problems that the basic CSR's can't handle then they would escalate it up the ladder eventually to the live team if it were something no one else can handle. We are doing that right now, and training the staff now. We plan to have 24x7 support because this will be a world wide game. Div: Anything else you would like to add? When will the next wave of beta testers come in? Campion: Well, we are two to three weeks out of beta, were planning a big PR party in San Francisco at the end of August where we say, here it is here is Eve Online. Were going to launch in two to three weeks where we allow ten thousand beta testers in. They probably won't all come in at once as we test new features as well as really stress the system. Div: Will there be an open beta? Campion: Not right now, we don't have a plan to do an open beta. If the need arises later we will definitely do that. We don't want to release before the game is ready. We've seen the problems with Anarchy Online and World War Two. World War Two Online is gone. They are off the radar now. We don't want that to happen with Eve. Div: We know you can never plan for everything, but you can take those precautions from others? Campion: Exactly. We don't want to release the beta before it's ready. We want to make sure everything is in place. For example some games released before they were ready. Features not in place, the laggy servers, people complaining, and all kinds of problems. We want to take into consideration and the experience we have, and the experiences from everyone else going down the check list and hope for the best that nothing sneaks past us. Div: Thanks for the time and thanks for talking with us. We wish you luck and look forward to playing Eve soon! Campion: Sure, Thank you. Noise is as Noise Does- Eve Retouched - by Whitewolf It seems with all the noise of GenCon and trying to pull an interview off of tape, we had a few goofs in our recent interview with Mike "Campion" Wallis from Simon and Schuster. So as an apology to our readers and to Mike for taking the time to answer our questions, we have a few corrections to make that will go a long way to clarifying some goofs on our part. Graciously Mike was kind enough to not only be understanding that some things don’t translate well at a con with a ton of fan noise, but he also was understanding enough to correct us where we went off. In answer to- Div: You would oversee customer relations? Correction and Clarification- Pam should be Pann. She is the Community Relations Manager. Peter "Booster" Binazeski handles the PR for Simon & Schuster Interactive. S&SI is very small (only around 13 people), but is a part of the Viacom media empire, so they have quite a large number of resources at our disposal. In answer to- Div: Eve is being compared against some games such as JumpGate, Earth and Beyond, and the powerhouse StarWars: Galaxies. What is going to set Eve apart from the other games? Correction and Clarification- We dropped the beginning of this from the post. The answer in it’s corrected form follows. “While I have not played too much JumpGate, while with JumpGate I believe its mainly focused on PvP] while with Eve we will of course certainly have the PvP element to it; players will be able to PvP outside the secure zones to their hearts content. Outside of PvP it's so much more, there is an incredible economic model built into Eve. The economy is entirely player based. From the ships to you fly, the modules you use to customize your ship with, weapons your ship fires, to the ammunition your ship fires. Everything needs to be manufactured by players. There is a constant influx or a constant demand for the resources in the form of minerals. Players go out and mine asteroids and get ore, then they refine those asteroids to create minerals, then miners will take those minerals and put them up on the stock market which will then be purchased by the manufacturers. There is a constant cycle.” In answer to- Div: Varying or different types of corporations? Correction-There are 48,000 beta testers currently not 15,000. In answer to- Div: Can corporations become mega-corps with corps under them or sub-guilds? Alliances? Would there be any benefits to corporations for alliances? Clarification- Yes, alliances. [If you look for example at] like Dark Age [there are alliances] worked out between leaders. Corporations can form alliances with one another by having the CEO's of each corporation declaring the intention to ally with one another. It's definitely beneficial for trade or controlling areas of space, including space stations." In answer to- Div: What about those who do not want to be involved in any part of PvP whatsoever. Is there a place for them? Will they be able to PvE or work the economy system? Correction- There are five thousand solar systems not ten thousand. In answer to- Div: RTFM! No one ever reads the manual. The games interface, and the learning curve. Would a player be able to sit down and learn the game within an hour and grasp the game fully? Correction due to misquoting- “Within the station environment, you can click on the Missions tab to access your agency contact. When first starting out, the agency contact will give you basic tutorial missions such as a mining mission, where the contact might ask you to go out and mine 10 tons of Tritanium. Rewards will be given for the successful completion of each mission.” In Answer to- Div: Will there be an open beta? Clarification- "We're currently planning a big PR party in San Francisco at the end of August where we introduce EVE Online officially to the major gaming media. We are 2 to 3 weeks out of beta. At the present time, we are planning for 10,000 testers for the beta test, in order to stress test the system and help to balance the game." Hopefully this clears up a few things from the interview and we promise to look into either a digital recorder that helps filter out more of the noise or a hearing aide for our reporter next time. ;) Be sure to check back tommorrow for more post GenCon Coverage! Discuss: It's all about Eve!
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