Vampires from Outer Space?

A Glimpse of the World of Darkness MMO via EVE Online

March 6, 2007

For years and years, fans of White Wolf Publishing have cried out for one thing: a World of Darkness Massively Multiplayer Online Game. The topic would spring up on the official forums all the time. People wanted this game.

When the announcement of a CCP/White Wolf merger was announced, many World of Darkness fans were excited…but they had one qualm. Many did not know who the guys at CCP were and, even for those who did, they merely saw a company that had made their success on a sci-fi game involving spaceships. It wasn’t the horrific real-world of Vampire the Requiem or Werewolf the Forsaken.

Being an avid White Wolf fan and a follower of EVE Online, I was also questioning the decision. There must have been a reason for the merger, but I was cautiously optimistic. I asked Nicole (our industry relations specialist) to schedule CCP and I knew I had to see if I could get any info about the WoD out of their developers.

Enter this afternoon. I rushed from my previous GDC meeting as fast as I could, nearly leaving Nicole in my dust trail. This was an interview that I had to be at. I didn’t expect much, but I knew that WoD gamers everywhere would thank me if I could come up with anything.

At first, the answer was just what I expected. “We are still very early in development, and we’re still hashing out the actual way the game is going to be played out,” said Magnus Bergsson, CCP’s chief marketing officer. “There just isn’t any information available yet.” Understanding CCP’s plight, I nodded my head and stepped into my EVE Online shoes.

However, while the focus during the rest of the interview was focused on EVE Online, we didn’t come away empty-handed regarding the World of Darkness MMO. And, in some sense, we actually saw a very early alpha build of the World of Darkness game engine.

For those of you that were worrying that CCP couldn’t build a solid character model 3D graphics engine, fear not. I have seen just what the developers at CCP can achieve in the graphical realm. During our interview Bergsson, we were asked if we’d like to see some footage of EVE’s new avatar system, which allows you to move around on stations outside of your spaceship. With our trusty camera in tow, we proceeded to record the visuals. 

You can see the video that Jeff Woleslagle pain-stakingly brought to you by clicking here.

Throughout my years in the gaming industry, I’ve seen many demos and videos of games in early stages of development but none has compared to this. While EVE has always been a breathtakingly pretty game, I wasn’t sure the developer team at CCP could deliver.

But they did. The animations were fluid, the movement they exhibited was natural, and scale was epic. But the most important thing…

It was truly beautiful.

Now this is exciting for EVE gamers, but there’s more to this graphics engine than the new avatar visuals that will be available in EVE. World of Darkness gamers, you can begin rejoicing.

I couldn’t keep the smile off my face as I watched the early alpha video, and I turned to Magnus with excitement in my eye.

“Now, this is the same engine that you’re going to be using to develop the avatars and character models in the upcoming World of Darkness MMO, correct?”