EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: What about the backlog of features? The community has been waiting for a elements that haven't yet been added. Where does this backlog fit in on the prioritization list?

Arnar Gylfason: Currently, I’ve been updating my list on people who are working on EVE development a week ago, and it’s 140 people. That’s game designers, QA, software, content creation, and art. So, we have 140 people working on it. There’s, obviously, a strong specialization fields for each of them, but you still reach bottlenecks in the production when you have a few guys who understand database programming, or you have a few designers who understand social design. So even with a throughput of 140 people, it doesn’t mean that we can do everything and have it go through as fast. So we have to sort of pick and choose.

Some of the features that have been requested, or need some loving, theoretically, we have enough people to work on alongside everything else, but there are bottlenecks in the production chain where things fall apart. What we are doing, however, is we’re taking our focus off these features, in general, to refactoring older features. This is a process that started, basically, at the beginning of this year and will continue throughout next year till the point where we’ll halt production on new features, and turn to refactoring the old features or updating older game designs.

You can call it development eras if you want. So you add a bunch of new features, then you reiterate on those features until you’re satisfied that they’re polished. In general, what you see is, and I guess the players have been seeing this, and they will be seeing it more in the next release and the next release thereafter is a focus shift to iteration.


Ten Ton Hammer: So that ties into the final question. What’s next?

Arnar Gylfason: Well, we’ve been working on an the Incarna system for years. Four years, to be exact (stop laughing). We feel that we’ve reached a critical mass in development there, and that’s in full production. That’s something to be looking for very shortly. I wouldn’t want to commit to it for this expansion and I won’t commit to it for this expansion, but moving into next year, absolutely, you’ll be seeing some amazing things on the Incarna front.

Then you’ll have the Incursion feature, or the Invasion feature. We’re iterating on the planetary interaction feature as well that we launched earlier this year, and we have plans on iterating on the combat and tactical UIs at some point next year.

That’s the plan, but plans can sometimes change. Plans will change, but currently our plan is that we want to iterate and update the tactical UI for fleet fights. You can always fix live for this particular set of problems, but having to render hundreds or thousands of ships onscreen, or we can take it down a notch and say, when you’re in a fleet fight this big, perhaps you need a different view. You just need to render it different. So that’s something we want to move into and have a certain level of detail loading of combat views based upon the magnitude of the battle you’re in. That’s a sort of game design change that can help lag a lot in the future, but it’s a fairly big refactoring of "Excel in Space." I don’t think players want to lose their "Excel in Space."