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.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/11726"> src="/image/view/11726/preview"
width="200">

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.

href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/11623"> src="/image/view/11439/preview"
width="200">

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.