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CCP won’t let two failed shooters get in the way of making the perfect Eve Online FPSLondon calling
London calling
“The fleet does the flying, the marines do the dying,” says CCP boss Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. “I love Starship Troopers.”
In Reykjavík, at last weekend’sEve Fanfest, Pétursson took to the stage to reveal that CCP is now embarking on its third attempt at an FPS - abandoning his casual presenting style to read from a PR-approved teleprompter. “In London, we are doing an upcoming online tactical first-person shooter,” he said. “The project is unannounced. We recognise that hard sci-fi in the Eve universe is something that needs to exist, and we’re committed to doing an innovative, multiplayer, atmospheric experience.”
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Any of those adjectives could have once applied toDust 514, the competitive shooter CCP released exclusively for the PS3 almost a decade ago. A Battlefield-style FPS set across outdoor environments reminiscent of Iceland, it had a genuine USP: live connectivity with Eve Online. Player ships in the MMO could pummel the playing field with orbital strikes, giving the mercs on their side an advantage. Fleet does the flying, marines do the dying.
For its next attempt, CCP overcorrected - abandoning Dust’s wonky ambition for a far simpler design.Project Nova, presented in playable form to Fanfest attendees in the year of Dust’s demise, confined the action to the deck of a single spaceship. Chrome corridors connected control points, which players scrapped over in sensible, grounded firefights - evoking the considered pace and weighty consequence of a Rainbow Six.
Eve: Valkyrie: brought the world of Eve’s dogfights into first-person and VR.
It was, perhaps, a little too self-serious (“I abhor silliness,” CCP Shanghai senior director Snorri Árnason told me that year). And while CCP harboured plans to expand outward from that condensed demo, there was little appetite for more among players. Trapped in the chokepoints of an abstracted FPS map, they struggled to believe they were passengers on a Chimera-class carrier - let alone citizens of the wider Eve universe.
Realising its mistake,CCP scrapped Novaand has opted for a third way. Having made one FPS too hot, and another too cold, it now seeks to make one that’s just right.
Alas, despite Valkyrie being an excellent VR game in its own right, CCP have now pulled out of the virtual reality space entirely.
“It was mainly a talent pool thing,” Pétursson says. “Our Shanghai studio is much more excited about mobile than they are about PC.” As such, the Shanghai team is now leading efforts on a mobile 4X game, codenamed M5, on top of running Serenity, Eve Online’s dedicated server in China. “It’s really born from their desire to become a mobile expertise centre for CCP,” Pétursson says. The Shanghai team weren’t available to speak for themselves at Fanfest, having been caught up in the city’s latest Covid-19 lockdown.
“It’s been a big project internally,” Pétursson says. “We’re both recruiting into the project, teamwise, and we will be starting more efforts in early community-building under NDA. So it’s time to open up the kimono a little bit, while the project isn’t formally announced. There’s no name associated with it, not even a codename - it’s just the London Project.”
Onstage, Pétursson revealed that 63% of CCP employees today joined since the last Fanfest, in 2018. But the growth of the London studio comes in the wake of a painful contraction for CCP. Between 2012 and 2017, the developer invested heavily in VR - backing the technology in a wholehearted fashion that other established studios, with the exception of Valve, didn’t. The most exciting fruits of that labour wereEve: Valkyrie, a heart-in-mouth dogfighting simulator, and the deeply underratedSparc, a Tron-like ball sport.
Ah, Sparc… “It might not be what Wii Sports was to waggle, but it offers a good argument for the precision that the motion controllers allow,” Adam (RPS in peace) saidback in 2017.
The Eve: Valkyrie studio in Newcastle was sold to Sumo Digital, and has since put outHood: Outlaws & Legends. But the Sparc team in Atlanta simply ceased to be. “It was a damn shame,” Pétursson says. “They were quite far from the overall CCP setup, and we needed to consolidate. Something had to give. I wish it were different. The team was phenomenal, and the work shows in Sparc.”
The grand VR experiment didn’t hurt CCP as a business. “If you look at the whole thing, then it was OK,” Pétursson says. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We got in at the right time, but got out at the right time.” The CEO is hopeful that, in two or three years, with the added momentum of PSVR 2 and Meta’s upcoming plans for Oculus, the landscape of VR might be different. “Maybe we’ll be in a place where the VR market is a very viable one,” he says. “And then we would love to take a look again, and see what our prowess from the earlier phase could bring us in that arena.”
Sparc’s pert buttocks were too powerful for virtual reality.
In the meantime, it’s back to Starship Troopers. There’s a feeling within CCP that Eve Online’s fiction is an unusual offering, even within the crowded world of video game sci-fi, and that the FPS genre could stand to benefit. “It’s not science fantasy,” head of PR George Kelion says. “It’s not laser swords.” New Eden’s closest pop cultural equivalent isThe Expanse- or perhapsInfinite Warfare, theCall of Duty campaignin which the Martian invaders were simply humans born offworld, with a different worldview.
“One of the things I love about the fiction of New Eden is that all the enemies in New Eden are humans,” Kelion says. “Even the ones who look like they might not be humans were at some point, or were close cousins of humans. And I like that science fiction where we’re both our own saviours and our own downfall. We have it in us.”
Given that COD has long since turned its back on sci-fi, it does seem as if there’s a space for CCP to colonise with the London Project. “It’s 21,000 years in the future, but the tone and the texture that New Eden has is recognisable,” Kelion says. “And it’s something that I think people want to - certainly I want to, and people on the team want to - see up close, rather than a million miles away. We wanna get in there.”
