Eltra Ardell
Goonfeet
Special Planetary Emergency Response Group
402
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Posted - 2014.05.06 00:18:00 -
[1] - Quote
Free updates, more modes, and a new platform
Late last year, erstwhile EVE Online executive producer Jon Lander proclaimed -- perhaps emboldened by his own game's impending ten-year anniversary -- that CCP had "a five-year roadmap" for the recently-announced free-to-play PC shooter Project Legion.
"We're not going to ship a unit and then in six months it's off the shelves and people have stopped playing it," he said at the time. Of course, six months ago people began buying the PlayStation 4, which may raise some doubts about the game's longterm success.
CCP's vice president of business development, Thor Gunnarsson, isn't worried at all.
"We already see that Project Legion, during Fanfest, had been driving fan interest for CCP. We actually track that together," he tells me. "We so know that our fan base, Legion-curious players, are reading and joining forums to get into our game."
More generally, though, Gunnarsson seems confident in CCP's ability to support the PC well into the next few years. "What we hear, anecdotally, is that PC sales are increasing," he says. "Valve and other developers have done a phenomenal job of managing PC gaming, like they did with Half Life, Call of Duty, and Battlefield," he effuses.
"We can make the logical assumption that something similar will happen as Project Legion comes to market," Gunnarsson continues, noting that EVE's large PC install base and incremental success since 2003 will give it "long legs" moving forward.
His ultimate declaration on the subject is this: "If you look at the large picture, you'll see that CCP is not falling away from the PC. What about Valkyrie? It took consoles years to consider VR gaming."
Gunnarsson's enthusiasm is partly diplomatic, I'm sure, but fansGÇÖ enduring interest in the PC is the crux of Project Legion's development strategy, which is to keep players coming back with a periodic trickle of high-quality -- and, most importantly, free -- updates.
The foundation for these types of updates was laid when Project Legion was demo'd at Fanfest. Several minutes in, CCP rolled out a free, updated roadmap of the game, starting from the Alpha, which overhauled the game's graphics, added content, and re-structured much of the game's user interface and menus.
More updates were made when the game was shown more, only a day later.
"Here we are in the late stage of the pre-Alpha, and we've completely overhauled the whole thing," explains executive producer Brandon Laurino during a brief chat. "Even for a PC MMO, that's pretty outrageous, but you've never had that for a shooter game. You've never had something like a demo or a version 1.0 of something in your hands and then had a huge graphics update on it."
Project Legion has been officially announced for less than a week now, but the Shanghai-based team responsible for it is already in active development on new gameplay modes that should be available "very soon." (I should note that "very soon" in this case means up to three years from now.)
In its current iteration, Project Legion is a competitive, player-vs.-player, deathmatch-based affair. However, CCP Shanghai are working on cooperative, player-vs.-environment modes that they hope will encourage corporation-level play: "Survival" is a wave-based Horde mode, and "Infestation" will involve scouring any enemies trying to establish a toehold in corporation-controlled districts.
In both modes, groups of players will fight against drones, the so-called "rats" or "mobs" of Project Legion, to gather money and other resources. The idea is that these PvE modes will give players and corps new entry points into the robust in-game economy that ties Project Legion and EVE Online together. Eventually, CCP plans to implement space elevators to carry those resources from the planetary surfaces of Legion to the orbiting fleets of EVE, linking the two games physically as well as thematically, economically, and structurally.
Other upcoming modes include GÇ£Penetration,GÇ¥ which will allow Legion mercenaries to raid and board EVEGÇÖs Titan-class warships, and GÇ£Gladiator,GÇ¥ a set of organized tournaments that will include in-game betting and streaming.
The EVE universe spans hundreds of star systems and thousands of planets, each of which will need to be dynamically populated with weather patterns, terrain, vegetation, and architecture. Racially variegated weapons, vehicles, and space stations are also in the works.
If that sounds like a lot, thatGÇÖs mostly the point. GÇ£This is the way that CCP does a game,GÇ¥ says Laurino. GÇ£WeGÇÖll never make a Project Legion-2, right? WeGÇÖll never update the graphics, package up a bunch of content, and say, GÇÿOkay, now this is a $60 expansion.'GÇ¥
GÇ£ItGÇÖs just all part of the game as a service that we provide to our users. ThatGÇÖs part of the value proposition that we offer,GÇ¥ he continues. GÇ£This is not the end of the major, free updates. WeGÇÖve got quite a few more planned for the rest of 2014 and then out for two years, out for five years, out for ten years, just like EVE.GÇ¥
Still, CCP will eventually need to develop a PlayStation 4 version of Project Legion, link it to the PC version, and then tie both of them to Tranquility, the London-based server that governs everything that happens in the EVE universe. And theyGÇÖll do it, ideally, with as little downtime as possible.
A tall order, but one that CCP are already familiar with. GÇ£When we launched EVE in 2003, it was running on Windows XP at the time, on DirectX 7,GÇ¥ Gunnarsson tells me. GÇ£We migrated to DirectX 9 with a live game in operation and ran a dual rendering across DX7 and DX9 for many years. We launched the Mac version the same way.GÇ¥ |