What’s Next for EVE?

An Interview with Magnus Bergsson, CMO of CCP Games

That was the question we presented to Magnus Bersson, CMO of CCP Games and one of their representatives at GDC 2007. On Tuesday of the conference, we had an opportunity to sit with Magnus and conduct a very candid and honest interview with him. His answers are extensive, knowledgable, and provide some intriguing answers to questions that many of us were stewing over. Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle acted as the Ten Ton Hammer point-man, but John "Boomjack" Hoskins and Cody "Micajah" Bye also chimed in with a few queries. Please enjoy the rest of the interview and make sure you check out the rest of the CCP news on our GDC portal!

Ethec: So what’s new on the EVE horizon? You’re going to release EVE Voice soon, correct?

Magnus: At the end of March, we’re going to be releasing EVE Voice, which we’ve been working on for quite sometime. Initially, we thought it was going to be a smaller project, but we soon realized it was going to be pretty tremendous. And that wasn’t only for us but also for our partner Vivox as well, as they tried to make sure the back-end would work with all the users.

Nobody out there has tried to integrate voice service to this many users on a single shard (server), so technically it was challenging. I think EVE is the first game to try to attempt this sort of voice communication on this scale. Dungeons and Dragons Online had this feature, but I think they were limited to 20 people per channel. EVE is trying to do many more than that.

But we are now in the final stages of beta, we have some select corporations in-game testing it now and it’s going really well. The quality is really good, and it integrates nicely into the game. It’s an optional service and the users will pay for a whole year - at least initially - for a discounted price of $9.95.

We wanted to give users a choice, because many of the users are still apprehensive about voice. Having voice as default was an option, but we didn’t want that strategy to backfire. If we had made the choice to provide the voice option as default, it could’ve given an excuse to the folks who didn’t want it to complain. We expect, however, that after the users have grown accustomed to it, that most of the users will start using EVE Voice.

For many users, we believe that they will not be able to survive without voice, at least not for long. We are surmising this because it is almost impossible to do combat with chat. You just can’t type fast enough. And the gangs that DO use voice will have a distinct advantage.

We had a battle the other day where one side had 600 people and the other side had 400. Now imagine the amount of organization and command that had to take place, and then, even after all that, the battles are still chaotic. So it’s really just a required thing in these types of situations.

A lot of people were also concerned with the security of the third party voice chats, and how they display IP numbers. With the EVE Voice solution, that security is taken care of.  

Ethec: With 600 people on a side, how do you begin to differentiate between the users?

Magnus: It’s all a part of the gang system. The gang boss, he can mute people and so forth. When he speaks, it basically shuts everybody out. He has priority services for his voice. With our system we can do stuff that you can’t really do on team speak, which can get quite chaotic.

Ethec: What about the surrounding areas, will those people be able to hear other users on EVE Voice?

Magnus: We’re not going to have voice available on local. Have you ever been on Jita? For those of you that haven’t, Jita is a big commerce system where there’s always about six to seven hundred people in there. It would be kind of interesting if we allowed voice chat to go on in there.

That’s just a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen! *chuckles*

But all the player created channels, they will have voice. These channels can become quite large.

Ethec: Is there a number, a maximum limit of players that can be in a channel at once?

Magnus: We don’t know that there is. It’s kind of hard to test because you have to have people talking to actually stress the channel. We only have so many employees, so that’s kind of hard to test.

Boomjack: Do you think that things will break down on a personal level before any technical issues arise?

Magnus: Yes. But if we need more hardware, then we’ll throw more hardware at it.

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