Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

When developing these sort of products, at least in these relatively early stages of company merging, it takes quite a bit of interaction between the individuals responsible for the artwork and layout of the books, games, and MMOG design. To me, it seems that to truly foster this sort of dialogue between the merged entities the companies needed to come together as quickly as possible. To that end, I queried the two executives just how the merger progressed and if it was fully complete yet from a physical, employee disbursement standpoint. "To start, CCP had more employees at the time of the merger than White Wolf did, and we sent a number of Icelanders to Atlanta already," Hilmar said.

Hilmar describes the sort of cooperation that will one day exist between the two studios.

"We currently have three hostages," Mike stated with a smile.

"And there's a real desire in the Icelandic culture to go live abroad and travel," Hilmar continued after he'd finished chuckling. "So there's a lot of excitement by people to do a tour down in Atlanta."

Synergy is one of those power words that you hear about in company speeches and slogans, but relatively few companies have the sort of opportunities that CCP|White Wolf has as far as lending talents to other portions of their business market. For example, there have been a number of discussions where the White Wolf writers were mentioned as far as helping with EVE Online story, flavor text, and that sort of scenario. From that point of view, I was curious how much synergy MIke and Hilmar expected from their crews and what sort of combined talent pools they could draw from in the future.  "That's starting," Mike answered. "We've gotten to the point now where we've already finished laying down the nuts and bolts of those logisitics, and now we're to the point where we can begin approaching the fun parts that we had always planned on doing from the beginning. This includes using some of White Wolf's writing and development competencies, at least on a trial basis, to see if that's usable for content in EVE. And then vice versa, sending their technical individuals over to Atlanta so we can become the sort of "world dominating internet game publishing company." They've certainly been pushing along that road on both fronts. The tabletop roleplaying game products remain extremely popular, only behind the ever-formidable Dungeons and Dragons in terms of sales, and EVE continues to gather more players to its growing player base.

On the internet front, the folks in the Atlanta offices of CCP|White Wolf have been looking for trained web professionals for some time, and it seemed reasonable to assume that a concentrated effort to renovate the web pages was underway. "We're trying to merge our web presence at least on a technology front," Hilmar said. "That way we can have a unified store system for consumer sales. It's probably going to be one of our first projects, on that front, to sort of unify our business processes in that area."

An area that I've always found confusing in the CCP|White Wolf story has been the way many other industry journalists handle the joining of the two companies, and I'll admit it's an interesting sort of situation. Often you'll find journalists speaking about CCP or White Wolf as singular companies, while things have been truly merged and they're no longer singular entities. According to both executives, the companies are merged, but any confusion that people may have experienced is due to the fact that companies technically can't merge across international borders. "We certainly consider ourselves stronger as a merged company, because we're stronger as a whole than as the sum of our parts," Hilmar said.

Mac users hang on tight; EVE Online is coming to your computers!

With all of the game-based collectible card games emerging lately, I wanted to check in on the EVE CCG that is being produced by the newly combined company. The most recent expansion of the EVE CCG, Exiles, recently hit hobby stores and has been circulating with CCG aficionados for some time, and I hoped there was some new information on another expansion. "We like to allow our products to have their moment in the sun before we announce new expansions," Mike said. "In the coming months, we'll announce the next step for the card game. Really, the focus right now is on organized play, getting more people to play the card game and developing some player leagues and tournaments." As far as an online component to the card game (which is what SOE and Wizards of the Coast have implemented for their products), the Hilmar and Mike seemed interested, but they couldn't reveal anything. "We've discussed our options in that area and we're just looking to see if we should implement that sort of play." Along with an online component, many of the other card games on the market are putting "loot cards" into their decks - cards that give gamers in-game items of some kind. Mike's response to loot cards was priceless:

"You mean, a shameless gimmick to enhance the sale of a physical property for the purposes of advancing online play?" Mike answered with a good bit of sarcasm. "We want our card game to be profitable, but we also want our card game to stand alone. Getting a loot card in these other games is only of interest to those individuals that play the online game, and nothing to a person who plays the card game. We made a strategic decision not to pimp perks in EVE Online to advance the sales of our card game. It's a great card game and should be treated as such."

"To us, it would be more interesting to be able to allow EVE players to experience the EVE CCG on actual space stations, perhaps when EVE ambulation makes its way onto the game," Hilmar added.

Finally for Mac and Linux users reading this article, it's been confirmed that Mac and Linux EVE Online clients are on their way very soon. "We've been working with TransGaming, Inc. to get EVE Online onto the Mac and Linux clients," Hilmar said. "And we're going to take our experience in converting EVE and use that as we develop the World of Darkness MMOG."

It's a tremendous opportunity to talk with anyone in the game development community, but its even more exciting when you talk with the leading visionaries of that company. I must extend my thanks to Mike and Hilmar for taking the time to speak with me and providing Ten Ton Hammer with the opportunity to put the message of CCP|White Wolf into the minds of readers.

---