CCP dusts off an interplanetary shooter concept with links to the stars

Creative director Bergur Finnbogason and game director Snorri Árnason

What do you do when you’ve built a universe that is too large to be contained in a single game? For the publishers of most series, the answer is simple: a sequel. Not for CCP, however, which has been sustaining its debut game, the interstellar MMORPG sandbox Eve Online, for two decades now. Instead, the Icelandic studio wants to create games nested within its larger, persistent universe like matryoshkas, zooming in from the intergalactic sagas to tell stories on a much, much tighter scale.

And so we find ourselves down on a planet’s surface, approaching the carcass of a ship, of the kind that would be controlled by a single player in Eve Online. And, indeed, could be – lead product manager Scott Davis says that eventually this entire map “could be the result of a specific inter-player battle in the wider game”. From our perspective, though, this ship is the dominant feature of the entire landscape, the flames belching out of its side a rare source of light and colour in the barren volcanic setting. Our squad of three is here to pick it clean, and dispatch any other scavengers – NPC or player-controlled – who might have had the same idea.

This has long been a dream of the studio, CCP game director Snorri Árnason explains: “the ultimate science fiction”, able to hop between layers of conflict with the ease of a Star Wars wipe transition. “There are concepts lying around from 1998, of ‘you’ll see all the humans individually’,” adds creative director Bergur Finnbogason. They’re both longtime CCP employees, and remember all too well the studio’s first attempt at realising this dream.