Project Awakening x MMORPG

The below is an extract from MMORPG:

Project Awakening is headed towards its next testing phase this month. Phase III is set to begin on May 21st. A new interview with CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson sheds some light on the game’s development, testing plans, and how it will link to and be separate from, EVE Online.

For the Phase III test, which is expected to last six weeks, around 5,000 people will get to test out the new build. CCP is approaching Project Awakening like it is a living universe that will grow and change over time. This is where the team’s stated philosophy of player empowerment and freedom, emphasized when they unveiled initial details about Project Awakening, come into play.

In the new interview with VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi, Pétursson talks about how Project Awakening will become even more of its own thing over time. This means that, while it takes place in the same universe as EVE, it is its own culture, the technology is different, and the team is even working with astrophysicists on some of the math that applies when setting your game in a place surrounded by three black holes that spin around each other.

They’re creating a persistent, single-shard survival experience, meaning that players will shape from top to bottom. Tests are set for May, September, and December, and will help the team refine things and bring them together. As for expectations, well, CCP is looking for more about what works rather than simple numbers.

“We’re not so much obsessing about how many,” Pétursson says. “Whether people love playing the game, just like they have done with Eve Online. There definitely is a critical mass factor in these kinds of sandbox experiences. You need a larger number of players and then a percentage of them will be creators.” In this case, it involves creator tools and a blockchain framework to build upon.

The May playtest also comes with a hackathon that invites creators to show CCP their best ideas, using the game’s tools, and being able to modify things while the test is running. Pétursson says, “We believe we have figured out a way to make this all work in terms of security and access, but also in a sane economic way, people with our programming can’t just change the game so that they can win it. But, of course, we have to test that. It’s a lot to get right”.

The full interview goes further into details about the Carbon platform, their partnership with Lattice, and other EVE games EVE Vanguard and EVE Galaxy Conquest, the first CCP mobile title.