Planetary Interaction and the Future

Dear EVE players.

I am Marcus, or CCP Omen. I am Swedish and I am a recent addition to the Game Design staff of EVE Online. I started in late May and since then I have been working on the Planetary Interaction team.  I have about six years of experience in the game industry and my previous work includes Dreamlords, Battlefield: Heroes, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and my latest project "Super Squid" for the iPhone.

This is my first dev blog, I hope you will like it.

Best regards
Marcus

The current state of Planetary Interaction
Planetary Interaction is good, but it isn't excellent. The technical hurdles and game design challenges for implementing Planetary Interaction were tremendous (for example making all the planets look good up close). While our desire to chart new worlds always gets us into a fair amount of trouble, we fearlessly embarked on the journey of bringing the planet surfaces to you and have come a ways since then.

Gaming history
A lot of work lies ahead in guiding Planetary Interaction towards our ultimate design goal through staged releases and connecting it to CCP's upcoming game, DUST 514. As you may or may not have heard, Planetary Interaction will constitute the main intersection of these two games, something we refer to as the "DUST 514 link," bridging them into one even-more-massive EVE universe.

Right now we are working on the underlying framework and solidifying the various "symbiosis" aspects of the design. Stay tuned! The teams leading the work on this link reside on opposite sides of the world-perhaps fitting for Planetary Interaction--one team here in Reykjavik one in Shanghai. The bearing is set but with such a complicated goal, the road isn't going to be easy.
What lies ahead?
For EVE Online: Incursion we have dedicated most of our team's resources to integrating player and CSM feedback into our designs.  We are also paving the way for the DUST 514 link, but that is mostly behind the scenes. We have been looking a lot at this post when designing the improvements to Planetary Interaction and we will continue to do so.

Here's some stuff you can expect in Incursion.

·    Upgradable Command Centers will allow players to increase and decrease the CPU/Power capabilities of their colony without having to tear it all down (existing undeployed command centers will be migrated to the new system).

·    Only the first Command Center must be bought and hauled in space, after that there is no longer a need to haul command centers in order to upgrade

·    Surveying has been radically revamped and will allow players to create extraction programs that span anything from an hour to 14 days!

·    Extractors can now be moved when in program creation mode

It's a privilege to work on EVE Online and Planetary Interaction; I look at the future and see great things but none of it would be possible without the best and most dedicated player base in the world. Thank you for your feedback. We hope you will enjoy the improvements we plan on bringing to a planet near you!

• CCP Omen