Project Awakening x VentureBeat: Interview

Read the full interview here.

During 2024, CCP Games will have multiple playtests for Project Awakening, a next-generation blockchain game set with the Eve Online universe.

The next tests, dubbed Phase III, get underway on May 21 where about 5,000 people will test a level of the game for six weeks. CCP Games, a 26-year-old studio, will continue to operate Eve Online (launched in 2003) separately as it launches Project Awakening, which will be a single-shard survival experience.

CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson spoke with me about this recently as the latest effort to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life.

Designed with player empowerment at its heart, Project Awakening is built upon the principles of freedom, consequence, and mastery within a living universe. A universe that will evolve from the actions and efforts of its players.

As a single-shard survival experience, Project Awakening is set in the dark expanse of space where civilization has decayed in the ruin of its own ambition. Players will explore a hostile and dangerous cosmos as they fight to survive against what remains and attempt to rebuild a broken world. The space exists in an area of physical anomaly, where three black holes are arrayed in a kind of three-body problem, Pétursson said.

The space game will be graphically rich. For now, the company is using a lot of EVE assets just to get started with placeholder art. But the game will get more and more of its own assets and its own unique identity, Pétursson said.

"The game takes place in a in a very different part of the world where Eve Online takes place,” he said. “It is a very unique culture. It uses a different type of technology. We’ve been releasing some of the science fiction behind the game, which takes place around three black holes that are spinning around each other in a sort of a “three-body problem” with black holes. And, by the way, the three-body problems involving black holes are a rather complicated math phenomenon. The math literally doesn’t exist to do it. We’ve been working with astrophysicists around the world.”

Powered by the Carbon Development Platform and MUD by Lattice, CCP Games’ Project Awakening is a single-shard survival experience set within the EVE Universe. CCP is creating a persistent world bound by digital physics, where composability and programmability will enable players to build and collaborate on top, outside of and within the emergent game environment – unlocking boundless creativity for third-party development via blockchain technology and cryptography.

As part of the playtest in May, an online hackathon will enable builders to showcase their ideas to CCP, with the winning teams given the opportunity to visit the studio headquarters in Iceland. CCP Games said it is committed to making the Carbon Development Platform open source, allowing programmers and game developers to access the Carbon game engine framework and additional components for free.