Despite still having no commercial release date, Oculus Rift is, without doubt, one of the most exciting developments on the gaming horizon. Amongst those enamoured of the tech is CCP Games, the company behind space-based MMORPG, EVE Online. To that end, CCP's Newcastle studio is working on EVE Valkyrie, a virtual reality dogfighting experience designed to distil the essence of the, frankly, daunting EVE universe and deliver it in an immediately immersive format. With the game scheduled for a 2014 launch CCP's CEO, Hilmar Pétursson, was on hand to answer Wired.co.uk's questions.
Wired.co.uk: How did Eve Valkyrie come about?
HP: Last year the Oculus Kickstarter started and I remember going in and saying "That's amazing -- we need to back this," and we became one of the early backers.
How did you hear about it?
Probably through Facebook where I saw somebody back it, something like that. Also there were many virtual reality enthusiasts at CCP that also personally backed the Oculus so we had some dev kits coming to our various offices around the world. [We] put together a prototype of a game like a dogfighting experience using the EVE spaceships in Unity and stewed it up in a few weeks and then we had a demo in our kitchen. I remember I tried it there for the first time.
I put on the glasses and it's like "Okay!" and then I looked down and I thought "Wait a minute, this isn't the shirt I'm wearing." When you saw your own body it's super freaky. I genuinely felt this was my body I was looking at. This is my body but these are not the clothes I put on this morning. It was super surprising how immersive that was and how native you became to the whole thing by the immersion but also this feeling of this is me but...
It was also super fun to play so the guys worked on it some more and then we had the annual fan event in Iceland where about 1,500 people come from all over the world to celebrate EVE Online and celebrate the ten year birthday of EVE.
About 1,000 people tried it and they all loved it. It was always the same experience. People taking [the Oculus Rift] off and they were all smiling and glowing inside. We took it to E3. There probably 2,000 people tried it out. There was a massive queue outside our booth to get onto the experience and we even got some best-of-shows at E3 for this tech demo during the middle of the launch of new consoles! We thought okay, we have something here -- we have to turn Pinocchio into a real boy.
We talked to the guys and put together a prototype. We said: "If you guys were to relocate to Newcastle and work with the Newcastle team on bringing this as a real product to market next year then that's something we want to go into." So the guys moved over there last month and everything is up and running. We hired an executive producer, Owen O'Brien who was previously the senior producer of
Mirror's Edge so he's quite well schooled in the experience of motion sickness in games.
Is motion sickness a problem in EVE Valkyrie then?
No actually. Many people dread motion sickness doing this but what I think is, because you're in a spaceship sitting down and space is weightless, the gravity and turns, even though there would be [G-force] in space, you don't feel it [in-game] as much as if it were an aeroplane. It works out super nicely.
Also, because the experience is so focussed and so perfectly made for VR -- the frame rate is really good, the UI is well thought out -- it's very natural. and, in terms of space, it's very open. It looks very realistic because you dan't have a frame of reference. In a forest you'd see the difference between a computer generated forest and a real forest but in space it's like, yeah, that's what it looks like!
Have you got a release date in mind?
We're on track to release next year [2014]. We need to see how it comes together and of course Oculus hasn't released commercially, it's all dev kits still.
How will the EVE integration work?
Right now we're not focussing too much on the crossover. We just did massive things with Dust 514. You can fire a missile from EVE and it lands on the ground in Dust. It's super epic. We see all this interesting crossplay between
EVE and Dust but it's also super involved to do that level of gameplay. With Valkyrie it's more focussed, simple, elegant, fast-paced and nimble. Starting with too much interconnectivity we didn't feel is the right way to harness the core experience, which is super compelling. We've distilled something from EVE. EVE is notorious for being the game you love to read about, but now you can play
Valkyrie -- just a little sample and maybe it leads you into the rabbit hole... [laughs]
**What have you learned or done differently with
Valkyrie?**
What I've loved about this process is it starts with a core mechanic which is super compelling. That's something new for us.
We're known for having something epically epic.
What's the control interface like?
It's a console controller but some of the controls have you aim with your head, so you look at things. There's a crosshair with a lock on it which is super easy to do. You don't really have to learn anything. I remember faintly when I used a mouse for the first time and you had to learn how -- there are many people who don't bond with games because these abstract controls don't appeal to them, whereas looking around and pressing a button? It's a clean way to do it.
Has Valkyrie impacted on EVE as a product?
I think it's the future, it's so recent and so fast. It will have an input into how we think about EVE, absolutely.
Are you working on anything else for the EVE universe?
This is our focus. Dust for the PS3, EVE for the PC, Valkyrie for the Oculus and they all come together in the EVE universe.
Have you played any other Oculus Rift games?
I've played a bit, but not as much as the guys who are working on this. They're keeping up with everything that's going on. My job is a lot now, not just connected to development like it used to be.
I miss it because it's super fun to make games but I also need to focus on doing my actual job which is to make sure that the company is organised around our strategy and making sure we're making the right high level decisions.
How would you describe CCP's goals?
Our goal is to make virtual reality more meaningful than real life. I think we're making good progress! Certainly something like a VR headset helps a lot with that. When we said this first in 2008 people just looked at me like, "Hilmar, that's weird -- don't you have a family and things like that?" Of course.
That's not what I mean about real life. But think about how poorly designed real life is. Acres of stores full of things we buy and just throw them away and consume and consume and consume and now we need a new thing because it's pink instead of yellow. We're throwing it all away and destroying the Earth and everything around us. If everyone were to live our Western consumption lifestyles we would need five planets. When you look at it we could do so much better. Putting people together through computers in massive immersive experiences seems so much more enjoyable than some of the stuff our reality is offering us.
Do you think optimising virtual reality will impact on reality?
I absolutely think so. For example, with EVE we're running a half a million sized economy. Then I look at my own country, Iceland which has 300,000 person economy. There are more in the EVE economy than in the Icelandic economy.
Iceland's economy has gone through its own trials and tribulations.
I'd rather have virtual economies go through trials and tribulations because they can be exciting and fun, and [then we] make our own economies simpler and saner as a result, -- take the craziness over to the games.
If you look at the international banking bubble it's kind of like a computer game for bankers, then we're all bearing the consequences. I'd rather these bankers did their banking in EVE Online and left the rest of us in peace. When I see what people are doing in EVE Online -- amazing things, massive organisations built on trust and camaraderie -- it's such an inspiration.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
