14 DAY TRIAL // EVE Online is one of the MMO experiences that draw a dedicated gaming crowd, but for mainstream gamers the game often seems to be a boring experience, something that the developer team at CCP is actually counting on.
Kristoffer Touborg, who is the lead producer working on EVE Online, said “Like hauling minerals across EVE: it’s viciously boring, but people still spend eight hours a day doing something and then they go haul minerals in EVE.
“I met a truck driver who did this. He drove a truck in real life, and when he got home he drove a space truck. There’s so many real things that we think of as mundane, but they become great game features.”
The developer went on to talk about how marriage could be introduced into EVE Online as a complex mechanics, saying, “They’d have shared inventory and shared bank accounts and all that stuff. There’s all these dynamics that come out of sharing. Something as mundane as having shared credit cards, in EVE, becomes a feature.
“It doesn’t have to be like the biggest dragon you could ever find. Just take something from real life that might be slightly boring and put it in a different environment, and just watch what happens.”
Touborg believes that gamers are attracted to games that offer low risk and low reward actions most of the time because it gives them the time and the resources to prepare for high reward and high risk situations that rarely appear.
EVE Online has recently received a string of expansions that were not well received by the fans of the MMO, but CCP is planning a number of content updates during the summer in order to correct the mechanics that have been criticized by the hardcore fan base.
CCP is also working on the Dust 514 shooter, a companion piece to EVE Online, which will be launched on the PlayStation 3 before the end of the year.