April 3rd, 2008

Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviews EVE Online Creator

World of Darkness Artwork

Jim Rissignol of Rock, Paper, Shotgun got a chance to interview CCP’s creative director of EVE Online, Reynir Harðarson, who’s currently working on a World of Darkness MMO in Atlanta, GA. The World of Darkness franchise is a set of fictional universes which made its first appearance in Vampire: The Masquerade. The new MMO is already in production and has roughly four to five years left in development.

The quintessential principle of EVE Online, Reynir believes, is player interaction, and will be the foundation to the World of Darkness design philosophy, since the dynamics of player interaction and its freedom allows content that is deeper than any treadmill-driven MMO could ever provide. If you look at the most popular websites on the internet, they’re usually social networking sites or user-generated content sites. MMOs need to be more like that. MMOs need to be sandboxes, not jungle gyms. It’s only a matter of time before you get bored swinging back and forth on a swing or going down a slide, but sandboxes offer limitless possibilities.

Reynir said that CCP will continue to build on top of EVE Online, and not just something that they tack expansions onto, but instead, always keep the game evolving and progressing. The only bad news that was mentioned is that the launch of the Chinese EVE server wasn’t much of a hit.

Read the full interview here.