“If the game was on a PC, it would be alive”: CCP admits that it was DUST 514 by the exclusive PS3 was a mistake

At Eve Fanfest, PC Gamer had the opportunity to talk with the Eve Online Director Snorri Arnason, who talked about how the game developed in recent years and where it moves. But if we talk about major announcements, then the main event of the fanfest for many EVE fans was not the main game itself, but the CCP return to the FPS with EVE Vanguard – a PVPVE -player, which is associated with Eve Online itself and is the successor to the unsuccessful DUST 514 of 2013.

Arnason himself loves Dust 514: Despite the fact that he already worked in CCP, it was this game that became his road in Eve.

I started working in CCP in 2007, ”says Arnason,“ because it was the first and only game company in Iceland. I was a great lover of games, primarily FPS, as well as Ultima Online and later Warcraft. Therefore, I started working [in ccp], because it just sounded cool. I could do literally anything, for example, by banking or fishing, because I was an engineer and a scientist in essence.

He worked on Eve Online for many years and got into "Deep rabbit hole" her understanding, without playing himself, but he fell in love with the early development of Dust 514.

I played Dust, in fact, as an alpha tester when we created it in 2011, ”recalls Arnason. And this game. I love this game. With her, in fact, my whole passion began. I myself spent an endless amount of money and time on it. In the end, I moved to Shanghai [Dust 514, was developed by CCP Shanghai]. And then I returned [to Iceland] five years ago.

Arnason told why he likes this game so much. According to him, the main thing for him is the idea of ​​constant presence in the game, with the consequences and effects of what is happening.

I don’t want to be gamified, says Arnason. Therefore, when the game invites me to reboot or move on to the second number [continued], I don’t like this idea. I just want to be in the game. So I really liked it, as well as fractions and themes, and all this was mundane, realistic, with a good background, good enemies and everything else. And it seemed to me that this game could develop endlessly, so I fell in love with it so hard.

But Dust had problems, and not the last of them was an unusual CCP solution to make it an exclusive for the PlayStation 3 (Sony acted as a co -player of the game and, undoubtedly, provided a financial incentive for this). It always seemed very strange, because of all the games on PC – Eve Online, of course, it is one of the most unusual. It is impossible to imagine that it can exist on any other platform, and at the same time this interconnected experience never appeared on the PC. In an interview with Arnason, to the question of how he relates to this exclusivity and the decision to close the game in 2016, he answered the following.

I took part in making this decision, says Arnason. It was difficult, but necessary, because we simply could not continue to work on this platform. Then I personally went through all the attempts to develop it: moving from PS3 to PC, update, I went through all these internal phases, we had Legion [A successor announced on Eve Fanfest 2014], various internal code names, etc.D. It was difficult, but at that time I really thought that we would do it, and it seemed to me that if we return to this, we could realize this and return the game to the PC, where it was her place. Looking at Warframe, which at that time was very popular. And I always wanted her to work, and I think that if we were on PC all this time, the game would be literally alive. She would only develop and remain part of Eve.

Now what could be at least, it really exists. In December, limited testing EVE Vanguard will be held as part of FIRST Strike, and this is exactly a PC game that should eventually develop the same way as Warframe. This will be the second FPS from CCP, and it seems that the idea of ​​a shooter associated with Eve Online and affecting the game in some significant way is a dream that CCP is not going to refuse.

I would say that this is almost like a fifth attempt, ”Arnason laughs. "You just don’t know about everyone else yet! So I participated in all of them, conducted all the experiments with shooters, prototypes, and each time we studied something along the way, and, perhaps, not always something good. It’s just that there is a lot of things in the development process, whether it is fast or interesting things, or attempts to catch the spirit of time.

I think we stopped doing this and, creating Vanguard, said: "It’s good what game we want to make, which fully fits into this universe?". And I think that an important step in this was the approach to this game not as a separate game, but as part of EVE, it simplified, allowed us to use the same definitions. Now I would say that we have fewer problems with the tug of rope between the studios. This is a game, this is in Eve, you, in fact, just play another version of the game as part of this game. This means that we do not need to come up with roles for players, we use what we are already doing, namely: strong organizations, creation, destruction, and rely on this.

This immediately means that Vanguard should have an element of the production industry, since otherwise it will not be the EVE game, but just a shooter in the skin of Eve. We need to deeply penetrate the DNA and make sure that we will create a sandbox in which it will be good to play: I am primarily a player in the shooters, so I have a quasiyetalon to whom I also attribute this game, it should be good enough. I think that [CCP London] managed to make a game that is not just beautiful, but when you play it, you feel that it is real because we do that other people or games do not specially. Because we seem to! And perhaps this reduces our audience or something like that. But we are just sure that we must be real".