CCP Games nói về việc tạo ra một thế giới với hậu quả và ý nghĩa trong EVE Vanguard

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"Hello everyone and welcome back to Gamereactor.
Today we have a really interesting interview for you because I'm here with a couple of the members from the CCP Games team to talk about EVE Vanguard."

"Now I'm here with not only Game Director Snorri, but also Lead Product Manager Scott.
So first of all boys, EVE Vanguard, you're not quite in the Early Access phase yet, we're not quite in this period where people are going to be like really diving into and exploring in its full extent, but you've held a few different player tests over the last few weeks, over the last few months, and people have been experiencing the game."

"So tell me a little bit about what those tests have already shown you.
Are people excited about the game? Are they enjoying it?
What's sort of the vibe around EVE Vanguard right now?
Who wants to jump in first?
Scott, you can start, that's fine."

"Yeah, yeah, I think really good.
I think the community that we've already been able to build up is fantastic.
I think if you look at the Discord that we've created for EVE Vanguard already, the community that's built up there is fantastic."

"And it's exactly what we wanted it to be in terms of jumping in with a large group of people and start discussing how we build this game together.
We talked about when we announced this game back in September last year that we wanted to build this game along with the community and this is exactly what we're doing."

"And it's just really great with this new release to be able to do that, to get feedback on some of the things that players have been asking for back all the way from when they could first play it in the first strike test in December and just start getting their immediate feedback on things and being surprised by the things that they can break and they can find."

"I'm sure at some point we'll talk about the egg that was included in the infographic that went out.
But I think this is the nature of that development.
You're right about we're still kind of pre-early access."

"We're calling these pre-alpha tests at the moment and it's quite rare, especially in my experience, to be doing these kind of tests at this early state.
There's a lot in the game that's just using placeholder materials."

"There's things that aren't even textured.
And we've been really surprised with how easily people have understood that's the journey we're going on and that's the state of the game and they can look past that."

"And we just want their feedback on not how certain things look, just how they feel, how they play.
It's just really good and really reassuring because it was a risk certainly to start putting out a build this early into people's hands."

"It's really reassuring to see people look past that and accept that and give us the feedback that we need and they can give.
I think the combination of mega textures, just being very clear where they are, and the really polished assets also to show the visual target without everything having to be like a concept art painting."

"This can be an issue.
It's been an issue to break through with the art crowd because they don't want to show anything ugly.
But it is important because we can't move fast if everything has to be hyper-polished."

"And this is something that we have really been invested in, both from a technical perspective but also just jumping on things that can be done now with an epic release of Unreal.
Let's just jump and try that."

"We're not trying to be a triple-A, three years to make this game and publish it kind of road.
Because it's hit and miss. We don't know yet.
So we need to just be agile. It's a relatively small team."

"And we need to build it with a lot of smaller stakeholders in mind.
The EVE authenticity, the EVE connection, the EVE economy.
There's small things we just have to make sure are working.
And for me, the shooter experience is also something where we just have to keep iterating."

"For me, it's a triple-A shooter.
The actual shooter experience needs to be top-notch.
It may not have the content of an Assassin's Creed with thousands of people working on it, but I want the shooter to be great and then just incrementally add stuff."

"And every feature needs to be impactful.
We don't have the time or the resources to do eight things and then pick the three best later.
We have to actually be more agile, try to pinpoint the fun quickly."

"And it's just really fun. It's hard.
You don't get a waterfall design of like, here's the weapon, it's supposed to be like this.
We need to be more flexible. And it's fun."

"And you mentioned there, a small team, you're trying to maintain that EVE authenticity, and yet you've gone with a game here that is set in the world of EVE Online, but it's also very different to the EVE Online experience that you're traditionally known for."

"You came up with the idea of EVE Vanguard.
What was that process like?
Did you foresee it as a bit of a risk going down this path or was it a grand big adventure that you couldn't wait to begin on?
It's been a journey."

"It all started with Dust.
It all originates from the desire to see a mega battle, like to have a mega MMO where you have boots on the ground and what do you call it?
Someone who does the flying, someone who does the dying."

"What's the sentence?
We do the dying, we're the grunts.
We do the dying, you do the flying.
That's the thing.
And I think that's because you get like a grittier, more human experience through the gun."

"But the idea of combined arms is compelling.
It's a fantasy that's really hard to deliver because it's pretty hard to get motivated about being the person who drives the truck to the front lines."

"It's kind of like in a big simulation, a lot of people need to do that.
And people do that kind of thing in EVE Online and they feel like they're doing stuff, they're in space, they're providing value, they're doing the dirty work in that sense."

"And we want to create that fantasy of like, ultimately this is all about, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we're all fighting about the same thing?
You're down here, you're up here."

"Fundamentally, the core of all of this is coming from that.
It just takes a pretty long time to get everything lined up properly.
So this is the fourth iteration."

"So we've basically definitely been finding our feet.
But I think this approach is the best one yet to figure that out because sometimes you just don't know exactly how it is going to work out and then agility is better."

"It's such a game changer for us on the Vanguard project.
A lot of projects have to search really hard for their USP.
For Vanguard, the USP is it's connected to this universe that has a large community of players that are so self-sufficient."

"I think all the narratives you see come out of EVE Online are purely player-driven and the structures they've organized for themselves.
And there's people whose, it's almost their full-time job, which is just to run their corporation, right?
And EVE Online, on this project, we just get so excited."

"The designers are just so driven by this world that they're connected to.
And I think some really good foresight from the engineers across both teams to allow these games to communicate in a very agnostic and easy way."

"It isn't very hard for us to communicate with EVE Online and start setting up those connections.
I think Snorri's right.
It's going to take time for us to really make them feel like they are fluent in the same universe."

"We will start bridging those connections and making them feel more tied as we go on.
But it's just super exciting.
The ideas that we're already starting to cook up from both sides on how we can connect these two games together and, importantly, how EVE Online can benefit you in Vanguard even if you're not playing EVE Online, right?
Connected to that universe, connected to those social structures, you will feel that benefit."

"You will feel that there's this live universe that you're connected to happening beyond the stars.
It's super exciting to see the vision and growth that we can expand into to just keep hitting that."

"It's an MMO, right?
And that is huge in itself because there's a lot of FPS games that have tried that.
It's a dynamic MMO.
I think the difference is it's not sharded and it doesn't reset on downtime."

"Basically, we used to...
Those of us who played World of Warcraft, you'd basically just fight over a turn mill or something and then overnight, it flipped back."

"And you're like, okay, so none of this really mattered?
It was just like a slideshow at one frame per second.
But it felt awesome.
You're changing the world."

"That, to me, was the first moment of like, okay, this is cool.
Actually having a motive, whatever.
But there's an actual motive.
Same with Daok."

"Being able to build your first siege tower to actually build something together and then dominate the other guy.
Those things were different than Battlefield."

"As in there's a thing you could do together and then it was more meaningful.
It didn't just flip.
It wasn't just a lobby.
There's something a little bit more."

"I think that's what we believe a lot of FPS players want.
And that's why we keep also at this.
A deeper...
A lobby shooter or whatever you call it, whether it's extraction or deploy or just lobby."

"But every match means something incremental elsewhere.
That's the cool part.
And if you don't know, you can just go on the EVE Frontlines website."

"There's a star map of like a big part of the universe called Low Security.
And on there you have war zones basically between the Empire factions."

"Like an endless tug of war.
But players are always constantly flipping borders and that actually changes the world.
Then it becomes harder for you to move around or your NPCs attack you if you don't have standings with them."

"But on that map you have basically Vanguard players also having impact because we basically pull in their actions as well.
And that's the model that we see is that all of these dynamic behaviors are being driven by EVE players and Vanguard players in a mega tug of war."

"Coming off the Solstice event that recently concluded sort of at the start of July, you mentioned you delivered a roadmap talking about what the second half of 2024 is going to look like."

"And then you mentioned that you're going to be expanding the Frontline system a little bit in there.
So what do you have in line or planned for the Frontline system that you're really going to look to really accentuate as we go through the second half of 2024 and ultimately get towards early access in the beyond section, as we'll call it?
So I need to run for power cable, but I'll line it up."

"So basically, we're basically trying to figure out how to explain this.
And the best thing that we could find is basically, okay, let's find terms that represent the connection, but you kind of get them."

"And there's two things.
We split them into the conquest mechanic.
Is this objective a thing that impacts the other, like the big world?
Is it PVP inherently?
Is it like about conquest, calling them flashpoints?
So if a flashpoint appears in Vanguard in front of you, and you're like, okay, fuck, I'm going to do this flashpoint."

"I know what it means.
I know that I'm impacting the other universe.
That's awesome.
I get maybe different resources or rewards for that."

"Like that's in front of me.
The other one would represent the economic connection.
When I do this thing, an item of value is now being transferred to the game."

"So it's impact or like influence maybe and economy.
We never did economy in Dustbound 4.
Like that was the big thing.
Like we always wanted to have like an economic impact."

"Some materials on the planets would only be harvestable by dust players or planet dwellers.
And this is what we want to, like that's what we call contraband.
And that's what Scott's going to explain more as I run together."

"What a segue.
Yeah.
I think part of it was wanting to, you know, we are generating impact in the Solstice release at the moment, but it's generally quite passive."

"I think completing contracts is generating suppression or corruption.
It was never the intention for it to feel like something that's a side, but generating an impact is part of the reasoning and why we want people to be fighting in Vanguard to affect the front lines."

"We actually even had, this is really powerful for us to realize quite early on during the play test.
We only had contracts for generating corruption.
It wasn't generating suppression."

"And we had people for narrative reasons, for alignment reasons, and even refusing to complete contracts because they didn't want to generate corruption because that was impacting the front lines in a way that was counter to what they were aligned with and what they wanted to play."

"So it was a big push to get suppression in the March update.
And I think it's just driving that, adding more agency.
I think, you know, Snorri's alluded to some of the things we're exploring here is how we can put players to conflict in each other with kind of flashpoints that happen on the map."

"But it's that economic link.
I think that's going to be the real key and the real thing that we want to move forward into is a resource that can transfer between the two games that doesn't just feel like it's one way as well."

"There's, in the sense that I'm generating this resource in Vanguard, but maybe I don't care about the result.
I don't care who it's going to.
I'm generating this resource."

"What am I getting in return?
And it's like this transfer of power between those in the sky and those on the ground is something that we're really keen to expand into to start feeling like players in EVE Online start giving more of a, I'm not going to think of an expletive, start caring more about what people are doing on the ground in Vanguard."

"But it is having an impact on the front lines economically as well.
And they want to, because we want them to start leveraging that.
We've always said, as we develop Vanguard, the first corporation that probably sets up their first Vanguard wing are the ones that are going to really start leveraging the power of that."

"And to do that and to allow that to happen, we need to start adding more impact into Vanguard and more meaning behind it.
Instead of passive impact, players should want to care about what they get out of this."

"Because I think all EVE players really are very selfishly minded.
When they're making decisions in the game, they're thinking, how am I benefiting that?
How is it benefiting to my cause?
And we want that to be felt in Vanguard as well."

"You need a pull mechanic from one game to the other.
You want a reason to invest in it, whether it's time or resources, whatever.
And that's always been missing."

"And we know the impact one.
We know that we can create a king of the hill objective that we send over to EVE.
We know that."

"The risky and the cool part is economy.
How can we create a resource that they want, they as in the pilots, but it's also not required.
Because a lot of EVE players are like, I don't want to think about Vanguard at all."

"To me, it doesn't exist.
So don't make me do this so I can get this.
So we have to solve, okay, what are the other faucets for that resource?
But you still have to have, okay, what if there's someone who's just going to, I'm going to maximize this."

"I'm going to take the full advantage of this.
I'm going to take it as much as I can, and I'm going to use it.
And then everyone's like, then it becomes an arms race.
I'm like, I better get a Vanguard wing set up so that we actually have something to do or to fight against."

"So that pull is majorly important.
But we still, and this is very important, this game should be playable without you ever knowing or caring about EVE Online, the spaceship game."

"It needs to be soloable, like as a squad, PVE-friendly game.
It's just like, this is this cool sci-fi game that I can jump down to planets and do some crafting and build my weapons and do whatever I want to do."

"The difference is that it is meant to become like a full MMO FPS with all of the systems.
But in the meantime, it's a super cool sci-fi shooter being built up and you can join as early as you want."

"Today, if you want, join the Discord.
But also just like, yep, they're on a journey.
I'll join when it like fits me.
But I think there's like something really interesting in this space of like a meaningful shooter."

"And a lot of people talk about the extraction shooter.
And we're joking about this yesterday.
EVE is an extraction shooter.
You undock out of safety and you do stuff and you can be blown up and you lose everything and you return to dock."

"That's literally extraction shooter.
So it's a complete risk.
You're at risk immediately when you undock.
And that's the kind of the recurring joke."

"But we're not just an extraction shooter.
You are also doing mining and crafting and upgrading and killing PVE and NPCs and just having fun.
You don't have to be just thinking about like how to extract."

"You can just like also just be down on the ground and messing around.
And do you see this as sort of a two-way relationship between EVE Vanguard and EVE Online?
In that, yes, you want EVE Vanguard to eventually just be something that people can enjoy without ever setting foot on EVE Online."

"But do you also see it as a way to potentially welcome players and encourage them to make the jump to EVE Online and try that and get the full EVE experience?
Is that sort of two-way relationship?
Is that something you're trying to properly cultivate here?
So we definitely see it as a way to bring an audience into EVE Online that just wasn't aware or daring to do so."

"Maybe they heard about EVE Online and this is an easier way to get into the spirit of the game or the universe.
Myself, for example, the universe is super compelling and everything about it is compelling, but I'm just an FPS player."

"I'm never going to play League of Legends.
I'm never going to play City Builders.
I'm just never going to spend my time on it.
So this allows me to be a part of the saga and the drama as well to just be there."

"But it's not specifically as kind of like we want you to become an EVE Online player at all.
It's more just like we want New Eden, the big universe, to be just filled with people, whatever they do."

"We talked a lot about there's a tap called the EVE Curious that we want to lean into, right, which is all of these players that they like the idea of New Eden, a very player-driven narratives that are created from that."

"Who can't see a report about a war that's just gone on in EVE Online and how much hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment and infrastructure that's been blown up because of that, right?
And it was just because two warring factions wanted, they didn't like each other or they wanted each other's territory and you can't get excited by that."

"But some people just don't want to play the spaceship game.
They don't like the gameplay and they don't want to lean into that, but they really like the universe and they want to be part of those narratives that are told."

"And I think Vanguard really has a place to connect to those EVE Curious players that want to join the universe and get involved in those stories, but want to do so without being behind the helm of a spaceship."

"And you mentioned on the roadmap, obviously we have coming up a variety of additional player founders VIP playtests coming up, which I'm sure you'll tell us all about specifically when they'll be hosted and stuff."

"But one of the things that was very eye-catching on the roadmap was the mention of a major update coming in November time.
You haven't slapped a date on it, but there's also the EVE London Player event in mid-November."

"So can we expect there to be some sort of connection between the two?
I think they certainly line up and it's advantageous.
I think the expansion beat for EVE Online also runs around that time as well."

"We did with Solstice, Equinox and Solstice launching next to each other.
It'll be the same around that November beat.
But we want to take full advantage of the London event."

"And I'm sure leading up to that, there'll be some opportunity for us to show some stuff off as well, I hope, and talk about that.
But yeah, I'd like to say we were really cunning and we planned this all well in advance, but I think it's just a nice little accidental thing that they line up there."

"Maybe someone long ago think maybe we could start setting up these London meets around November because that's likely when we would launch an event.
But no, the two just line up quite nicely for us to be able to take advantage of that."

"Happy to like it.
Yeah, exactly.
But maybe you're being coy, Scott.
It sounds like it's planned, but that's fine."

"We also need for this because now we have where contraband is meant to be the first seed of an economic connection.
We need game play on the other side as well."

"So we need the EVE Online expansion as well to hook up the things that we need to hook up and expand the narrative.
We don't want it to just be like lip service."

"We want to deepen the fantasy of this kind of the planet activity itself.
Skyhooks were the first step in this.
In some way, in a similar way, as I said, like, okay, we want planets to matter and we want Vanguard players to matter."

"But without Vanguard, it still is a meaningful feature.
Skyhooks basically allow us to do that.
It opens the door down to the planets and also unlocks all of these new sovereignty upgrades and all of that cool stuff, new harvesting, new things to refine and build."

"But now we have a gateway, an actual gateway.
This is the connection, and we are investing a lot in the Skyhook itself and planets because they're compelling."

"The problem we're trying to solve is what's the thing that controls these upgrades?
What's the limiting factor as in any RTS?
You need coal and this and iron to do this."

"What are those things?
We originally started with, okay, let's harvest the suns.
That's going to be cool.
Let's build some refineries around the plasma and stuff like that."

"Then a counter proposal just happened in pre-production.
What if it's planets?
We just go the other way and just get energy and those resources from planets, but then we can build out way more of the fantasy of people and clones and all that."

"It's way better.
Suns are almost like a dead end.
Okay, I tapped into the suns.
Okay, done. What can I do more?
Planets are infinitely cool."

"We already have planetary interaction.
We can expand way more on that.
Can we install planetary governors?
Can we build infrastructure on planets?
Can we attack planets?
Can we bio-virus bomb them like in Warhammer?
Just like, well, killed 40 billion people here."

"That's the cost of running an empire, but way more science fiction, way cooler.
It's all pushing and prodding both these products each other.
I can comment on something you said as well."

"I can give you an answer there.
On the private playtests that we plan on running, we don't have any dates to announce at the moment in terms of when we're running those dates, but just encourage anyone who wants to get involved, the Discord is going to be where it's going to be kicking off and where they can find out those dates and get involved when we announce them."

"I think what we're going to be using the Discord for as well, and hopefully some other channels, is because we're not going to be running playtests publicly as frequently as we were between December and June, we still don't want to lose that feedback loop, so we're actually going to be, as we're working on stuff, as we're starting to demonstrate stuff, get it in front of players as soon as possible."

"So whether that's more formal means like more dev diaries or just we're encouraging devs to just go in the Discord and post something, right?
Like, hey, I'm working on this, what do you think?
And trying to kind of informalise how we talk to our players a lot more about the content that we're working on."

"So if anyone is super interested in even just seeing stuff or getting involved in giving us your thoughts and feedbacks and ideas, we're hoping the Discord can be a central hub for that."

"Well, I think we're about to run out of time, so one final very quick question for the both of you.
Early access is regarded as coming beyond, sometime in the future."

"Do you have an internal timeline for that?
Are we looking at 2024 or is it 2025 onwards?
We just need to be flexible on that because basically we don't want to exit our kind of protected founders access too early."

"We just want to have like, okay, this is a great game.
We're not going to, we don't want to rush it.
We don't need to rush it really.
Like, it would be detrimental to do it too quickly."

"We don't want to be forever also, like in a protected blanket.
So like, that's why founders access was the kind of the method that we need to be out in the open, but we're also a little bit like not out in the open."

"We're not like we're saying like, hey guys, like don't, we're not ready for prime time.
Don't come in with your like triple A comparisons and say like, well, you can't have a game with one gun."

"Like we know that, like don't tell us the obvious parts, but like we just want to be comfortable and like kind of boldly going out into like, okay, we're ready for a wider audience."

"So I would say that like our retention, our numbers, our feedback needs to be like in a good place.
And I think also we just need to be in a place where like we have a really strong message."

"Like at the moment it's kind of hard.
There's like, there's too many things that people are guessing at.
Like, I wonder what the connection is going to be."

"I wonder what this is going to be.
I wonder if it's an extraction shooter or this, like we need to harden it a bit and have a stronger identity before we're kind of ready to rock and roll, I think."

"Yeah, I think there's like some, there's features, moments and experiences in our game that we're lacking before we get ready to start pressing those buttons because we've all worked on projects where as soon as you press the button, you can't go back, you can't un-press it."

"And we've all worked on projects, I think that press the button too early.
So it's good, we're in a good place at the moment that we can take our time."

"We do have some like internal ambitions.
And I think for us, it's more important that we're setting the guidelines in terms of what the experience needs to be before we move into that period rather than just setting an arbitrary deadline for ourselves."

"So that's the thing that we're trying to build out now and work towards is making sure the experience is right before we open it up to a wider audience.
Well, there you have it."

"You know, if you want to check out eVanguard, you will be able to have chances to do it in the coming future through the founders pre-alpha sort of system that you guys are running."

"For early access, stay tuned.
Right now we're in this as what I'm going to call early access, early access.
But yeah, stay tuned for more information about that."

"There's plenty of updates coming to the game that I'm sure we'll learn more about including the big major update that you guys have been teasing in the roadmap."

"So stay tuned for that in November.
Otherwise, Snorri, Scott, thank you for chatting with me today.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you both.
And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing more of eVanguard in the next one."

"And hopefully in a future Game Raptor interview when we get to learn more about the game.
So stay tuned for that.
Otherwise, thanks guys."

"And yeah, we'll see you all on the next one.
Take care, everyone.
Thank you very much."