I managed to steal some time from Nikola Cavic, Marketing Manager at CCP. As you all know CCP is the developer behind the massive online space game, EVE Online . Founded 10 years ago in Reykjavik, Iceland the company has prided itself on the popularity of its flagship product EVE Online which now boasts more than 190,000 active players and generally around 30,000 to 40,000 active trials.

"There are several key factors that make EVE Online what it is," explained Nikola, "the continuous improvement is one of them." Over the game's four and a quarter years it has gone through several massive revisions and story arcs. CCP is now set to roll out Revelations 3 somewhere around the end of October, early November with a brand new graphics engine upgrade, Trinity 2.0. To get a feeling of how big this upgrade is Nikola said that there are 2GB of additional stuff in it and it will be fully DirectX 9 compatible with DirectX 10 compatibility coming in 2008. But even though the upgrade is massive the minimum PC requirements to play are low, "We are trying to keep them as low as possible so that the most people can play," said Nikola. Looking at the current minimum requirements one would have to agree.

Minimal system requirements

• OS: Windows System 2000 SP2 /XP
• CPU: Intel Pentium III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800 MHz
• RAM: 512 MB or more
• HD space: 6.0 GB
• Network: 56k modem or better Internet connection
• Video: 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or above
• Drivers: DirectX 9.0c (included) and latest video drivers

 CCP also has a 2-year expansion plan already laid out with a rough plan for the next 5 years. When I asked him how they decided what needed to be changed in every update he mentioned ship balancing so that things remained interesting and mentioned that they have over 300 volunteers working on getting better gameplay. "We really take pride in how close we are with the community," he said. And this pride shows in everything from EVE TV , with 10,000 to 15,000 viewers online, to E-ON - 80 pages of glossy, high-colour news, interviews, previews, exclusive fiction and player guides - both of which draw heavily from the actual community instead of simply being run by outsiders.

Speaking of community I also found out that CCP is hiring and that they have taken on over 70 new people this year alone, "I just found out we hired three new people while I was here [Leipzig]," he said laughing.

 Turning from the future to the past I was curious how the last war went. He said that between 40,000 and 50,000 (about 25% of the population) took part in the last war. "We had up to 1000 people fighting in one solar system," he exclaimed. That's a massive amount of overhead for the server but they just purchased some new hardware to help make sure things will continue to run smoothly. 

With all this already established in the universe one might wrongly come to the conclusion that it would be extremely difficult for a new user to get into the game and work their way up. But with the newly redesigned new user tutorials one can be up and running in the game in no time. Nikola also made sure to point out that everyone can have a purpose in the game, even someone just starting out with a smaller ship. "If that new user got several friends (also new users) together they could possibly take out a large ship if they played it right." New users can also act as scouts and reconnaissance and they will feel useful and have fun, and that's what it's all about.

Wrapping up I asked him about the merger with White Wolf . The two companies fit together well he said and they share some common goals for the future. While CCP HQ will remain in Reykjavik, the HQ for White Wolf will stay in Atlanta, Georgia. Finally, I asked him a burning question in videogame and pen & paper gamer minds around the world. Will CCP be developing a White Wolf license into an MMO. He said that it was too early to tell and they are still getting used to each other, but the smile on his face told me he was holding something back and it only makes sense that they take some of the world's leading tabletop RPG's and turn them into the world's leading MMORPGs now doesn't it?

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