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by Cody “Micajah” Bye

The following article is the conclusion to our interview with Nathan Richardsson, the executive producer of EVE Online, that was conducted at the Austin Game Developers Conference. In yesterday’s interview, we talked with Nathan about Trinity 2, parts of Revelations 3, and a bit about the concept of Empire building. You can read the entirety of that interview by clicking here.

Once you’ve finished up there, come on back and read the rest of the interview that we’ve posted for you. In today’s conclusion, Nathan and I discuss testing the 20 new ships that they’re building for Revelations 3, the upcoming democratic council that CCP|White Wolf is putting together, and we even touch on the World of Darkness MMOG. Continue reading to find out more!

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Nathan Richardsson tells us what's next for EVE Online.

Other than factional warfare, players on the EVE Online forums seem most interested in the twenty new ships that are coming down the pipeline. When creating those new ships, I asked Nathan what sort of testing and balancing went into implementing those new vessels and how much time that actually took. “It starts with internal design, simply looking at the roles we’d like the ships to fill and what the players are looking for,” Nathan began. “We take those thoughts into consideration when we’re building the classes that we’re looking at. After that we take the ships into small focus groups where we have a select number of people who are highly talented in certain areas of the game, and we let them test out the ship.”

“That process usually takes a couple months,” Nathan continued. “We then release the ship to public testing, which goes all the way up until release. That’s where the real polishing gets done. Obviously with 20 ships, we’re putting a lot more people onto these ships to see how they function. There’s a lot of new, shiny stuff coming for the players.”

Another new aspect that is coming just around the corner is the democracy system that the EVE developers are trying to implement. The player council is certainly something that CCP is trying to implement into the game, but from other interviews that have been published the whole process is still in a fledgling state. “We’re putting in a bigger infrastructure that will allow the EVE community to actually vote in players to this council,” Nathan said. “Those players voted in will have direct access to us and we’ll fly them out to Iceland. On top of that, we’ll have public meetings where they’ll bring up issues, and I think that will bring a lot of transparency to the whole process.”

“For instance, there’s a lot of people upset about the idea of implementing factional warfare, because it’s against our core principle of giving power to the players,” Nathan continued. “It’s kind of us putting semi-control over what the players are doing, and we want to get as far away from that as possible. We’d rather put in tools to build Empires so players have the control themselves.”

On top of the Trinity 2 graphics upgrade, the developers are also introducing 20 new ships to the game.

A this point, Valerie “Pann” Massey (EVE Online’s communication director) interjected a bit of information into the mix and tried to clarify exactly what this democratic council was all about. “We’ll be talking more about the council at FanFest,” Val said. “As Nathan mentioned, we really want to emphasize that the transparency issue is not about looking at CCP the business; this just pertains to EVE Online and what goes on inside the game. We’re not going to let players make HR decisions for us.”

Nathan laughed and added, “It’s not about auditing our books.”

“The intent is to clarify the real issues that are out there,” Nathan continued. “Forums and other venues have their own problems, so its really about getting issues addressed by allowing players to see that we’ve thought – and what we’ve thought – about particular problems. You may see and answer one forum thread on the message board, but there’s no way to guarantee that 200,000 people are going to see that thread. In fact, there’s often a post on that exact issue a few days down the road. Creating this framework for the democratic council, hopefully, is going to be a pretty awesome feat.”