Eve Online devs find the game "impossible to predict, and it’s f***ing fantastic"

Eve Online's Havoc expansion adds a pirate faction to the game's frontlines, and the developers are excited to see how it plays out

Eve Online celebrates 20 years since its official launch this year and plans for the third decade are already well underway. The Eve Online: Havoc expansion will completely alter how the frontlines operate, and Eve Vanguard, a first-person shooter directly connected to the MMO, will add yet another avenue of play for the community.

Two people who have a big hand in the game’s development are creative director Bergur Finnbogason and game director Snorri Arnason, better known by their developer nicknames as CCP Burger and CCP Rattati respectively.

“We own the vision of the game,” Burger says. “We own the horizontal trajectory of the game while our technical director and our production director own the vertical trajectory. So they stop us and say, “Hey, let's try to deliver this,” while we are like, “Let's drive into the sunset,” and you know, be excited about it.”

Eve Online is famous for its gigantic space battles between thousands of players / CCP Games

“It’s the future now and what next?” Rattati explains. “We align on what to get done, and then it’s down to [CCP Shreddy] and [CCP Chimichanga] to do it. We share an office, it's all about communication with them. So we have daily stand-ups we constantly discuss, but like a lot of time goes into listening to the community – What's the community saying? What's the data saying? Who's doing what, etcetera?”

Eve’s ever-shifting nature doesn’t make it easy to plan for the future, and it’s led the team at CCP to focus more on continuous development rather than shipping complete features.

“It takes a long time to run a strategy and come up with it and be focused on that,” Rattati says. “So three years ago, we started working way more on player experience, or emotions that we want to fulfill, and that's like a never-ending job. We want to make organizations stronger, much easier to filter, and keep going rather than just saying ‘We're going to make projects,’ because then it's hard to add more to it after.”

Despite being such a huge game, Burger describes the development team as “very lean” and it means that they have to make sure the game’s immediate future has a clear focus, while keeping the long-term plans in mind, meaning many traditional development styles don’t work for Eve.

The team behind Eve Online has a clear vision of what the space-faring MMO should be / CCP Games

“We have to be very surgical when it comes to what we do and what we focus on next,” Burger says. “Of course, we have a fairly clear picture of where we want to be in three years' time or something like that. How exactly we get there can alter and change; things can move back and forth, but it's all about kind of trying to get to that three-year goalpost in many ways.

“So how we work – it's a lot about defining the backyard that we allow developers to play in and once we've put down these fences, we let them loose within that garden.

“Waterfall development does not work. Sad people make sad products, so we want to excite our developers because then exciting stuff happens and we really tap into the incredible talent that we have by giving them agency, giving them the freedom to work within certain parameters. So it's not about pushing people; it's framing.”

After 20 years of development, the process at CCP is very refined / CCP Games

No matter what the team is working on, though, the team is always careful about keeping the reality of New Eden intact, even if it can be a challenge to create something awe-inspiring while sticking to purely scientific principles.

“There is no space magic,” Burger says, “this is science fiction, there's no fantasy, but it can be fantastical. ‘No fantasy’ does not mean that it can't be fantastical or extravagant, but there is a reason why science fiction has been very consistent throughout the years.”

“There are no aliens,” Rattati adds, “that’s the key thing that I think is very clear. There are scientific rules of nature, like the speed of light, that we don't want to break because we want to make it feel authentic because if you start adding space magic to it, then it just devolves the structure a little bit.”

However, there is also a struggle to stop the real world from encroaching too much into Eve Online. While things like moderation tools can be useful, CCP has a strong commitment to taking a hands-off approach, focusing only on the world they create while letting “humans deal with humans” as Burger puts it.

While the laws of physics are very predictable, Eve Online's player base isn't / CCP Games

“We are 21,000 years in the future,” he explains. “The matters of today don't really matter in the game but because we are humans dealing with humans, you see a lot of the current situations, bubble up in Eve.

“So you can see when there is tension between countries, that tension might build up; when there is a recession in some countries you see trade recessions show up. I mean, we know that Germans play a certain way while Americans play a different way, so there are always these things that go between, but from our point of view, we can't control what the players do, but we try to make sure that the sandbox is as true to nature as we can.”

The team didn’t always have such a firm understanding of its player base though, and Burger and Rattati led a lot of initiatives over the years to better understand exactly what players want out of Eve – and it often wasn’t what they expected.

“For years we had all these assumptions like, players are backstabbing PvPers, and it's a ruthless game,” Burger says, “but we had never really stopped and asked: Why in the world do people play Eve Online?

“We had to do a pretty deep dive and we had to eat our hats and shoes and whatever we had to eat – what humble pie you need to eat – because there were a lot of things we didn't know. Like, we had no idea that 79% of players view themselves as helpers first. We had no idea about the importance of fleets and flying with others. We kind of had an idea about it, but now we understand it – now we have formulas about what are the critical components of Eve.

CCP learned over time that Eve Online players enjoy a wide variety of tasks / CCP Games

“All of a sudden we got a crash course and a master class in how to create friendships, and if you look at CCP as an institution we're definitely a very different company than we were 10 years ago. It's quite hilarious when especially scholars come in and we're like, ‘Oh yeah, let me tell you about friendships,’ and people are like, ‘whaaat?’”

“It's a lot about dog-eat-dog, but ultimately it's a friendship game.” Rattati adds. “That's the weird thing; we've had binary [assumptions] like ‘no PvE, it’s only a PvP game,’ and then we did a survey and 80% enjoyed PvE. Everyone needs to grind, they need that piece of time to build confidence to go into the PvP – people want to opt into it on their own terms. So there's a lot of learning over time.

“I think I'm happiest about the democratization that we were able to do towards player freedom. They can do whatever they want – that’s one way of freedom – but the freedom to organize and do things together is a different thing. I think we've gone a lot into mistaken freedom – as in there are no rules – but I think freedom to do and be who you are is a completely different freedom.”

Eve Online: Havoc's pirate factions will alter the face of war in the MMO forever / CCP

That sense of freedom has never been clearer than in the newly announced Havoc expansion, which will let players side with pirates and act as a third entity out on the frontlines of Eve’s many wars. They can corrupt the battlefield and make it a more dangerous place for all sides, and CCP is excited to see how players react to that.

“A lot of my colleagues in the industry sent me big question marks [following Havoc’s announcement] because in astronomy it's a known fact that with two orbital bodies, you can calculate what their next move will be,” Burger says – at this point, he grabs a water bottle, empty coffee cup, and his phone to demonstrate the physics of the situation.

“But the second you introduce the third body, you have a three-body problem, and you can take snapshots to see what’s happening right now, but it's impossible to know what happens next. That's basically what we're doing. We have, Amarr, Minmatar, and the Angel Cartel and these are in a tug of war. So will these two band together to fight against this one? Will this one fight this one or that one? Will these guys just leave and let the pirates win?”

“But it’s not careless,” Rattati says. “We crafted something, we think it’s cool, let’s see what the emergent gameplay is. It’s a calculated test, but we don’t know the answer.”

“It's impossible for us to predict and it's f***ing fantastic,” Burger concludes.

Eve Online: Havoc launches November 14, 2023.