In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to CCP Games’ CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson about its forthcoming game EVE Frontier.
Starting with his initial interest in blockchain in the mid-2010, he explains why creating the underlying technology for a game with a persistent world ends up with lots of blockchain-like components, so why not just use a blockchain?
More significantly, he explains that CCP Games’ desire to create a game in which third party developers have exactly the same code access has resulted in the decision to open-sourced CCP’s own Carbon game engine.
“We are going to provide the city-building tools but we are not going to build the city,” he says.
BlockchainGamer.biz: How did you first get interested in blockchain?
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson: I am at heart a very curious person. My first job at CCP was CTO, so my curiosity often lies in the domain of technology. EVE Online itself is in many ways a technological marvel. This idea of enabling impossible things through technology advancement is generally my state of being. I am always dabbling in many things. What piqued my interest about blockchains overall was a meeting I had once. It was a pitch meeting for a company that was using the Bitcoin blockchain to store digital assets.
This person was pitching the idea of storing spaceships on the Bitcoin blockchain. I was “wow”. I said “let’s learn more about this”. And then I go on a journey figuring out exactly what this whole phenomenon is. It took an embarrassingly long time to get to the bottom of it.
Obviously, there was a lot of activity in 2017. I followed that. It was very interesting to go to the forums of all these varying layer one chains. This was the CryptoKitties/ICO wave of activity. When I was looking at the communities, one thing stood out. People were talking a lot about EVE and a lot of people were EVE players talking about analogies from EVE. There were also a lot of people who knew nothing about EVE speculating about what EVE was and other MMOs. In many ways, the texture of the communities felt like the early days of MMOs where people were bragging about their own MMO to other MMO communities. It felt very similar. I just became more fascinated, then obviously it all comes crashing down.
So when it was all properly crashed, I became more interested to go to blockchain conferences. I went to my first blockchain game conference in 2018. So that’s when I started going to events after just nerding out on my own.
When did it become clear blockchain would be a useful technology for an EVE Online-type game?
Back in the day when we were making EVE Online, because we came from this background, making distributed architectures to power a metaverse, kind of Neil Stephenson-inspired, and what we ended up with was kind of Minecraft creative mode. We were gamers who were playing games, playing MUDs and Ultima, and this idea of what happens in the world has meaning. It has persistence. Not only character inventory persistence.
A lot of multiplayer games it’s really just your own inventory that is persistent. You’re often not very much acting on the world in terms of the world being a persistent world. There are pros and cons to this. This is in many ways why EVE is often a little harder to get into. It is a lot preoccupied about being a world. When we’re thinking about this, it really does matter how the persistency is done. To make it persistent, we should use technology that is known for being good at persisting things.
Back in those days, most games, if they were persisting anything, they were just doing it into a flat file on the disk of the server. I don’t have any deep archeology to substantiate this, but I suspect EVE is the first database game. When we made this declaration that we’re going to use a database, we couldn’t afford an Oracle database. So Microsoft had an upstart with Microsoft SQL Server. We were going to use that because it was cheaper. People frankly laughed at us. ‘Why would you ever use a database? They’re slow. No game uses them. Nobody has made a database game before.’
But we were ‘We’re making a persistent world. It’s going to have a lot of items. It has to be transactionally sound’. So we go full ham on that. EVE is shockingly much a database application with a fancy graphical UI on top of it. EVE is more like a bank than anything else. And that’s because none of us had made a game before. Like nobody on the EVE team had made a game before. Most of us hadn’t even seen a game developer from afar. It was the first game ever made in Iceland and all that. We came a lot more from an enterprise/virtual world creation background.
But as soon as we released EVE Online, then it becomes acutely clear that people are very interested about what is in the database. There was a lot of fan-side activity around MMOs where people were taking the game’s data and presenting it in different ways, often better ways. So we started releasing Excel documents about the metadata, about the game. But there is this clear call for ‘More, more, more, more!’
So we opened an API to read metadata, read some historical data and a bit of the runtime data. And this sprouts an ecosystem of amazing experiences which third-party developers have created around EVE. You can go to Awesome EVE on GitHub and see what kind of software people are building around EVE. It is a lot of software to help people run companies. Companies in EVE Online literally have their own HR software. They have their own onboarding mechanisms. All sorts of amazing things have been built. But it’s largely based on reads. There’s a tiny amount of writes but it is not a very easy thing to add after the fact. We have a very ambitious roadmap to continue with this phenomenon in EVE, and I think over time, we will get to a very interesting place.
But back to the blockchain curiosity. They are very much obsessed about writes. It was one of the things I quickly realized when I was talking to people in this space. When people are thinking TPS. They are usually thinking about the writes. What is interesting about a system like Ethereum, which is trying to be a computer more than Bitcoin being a database, is that the environment is very adversarial. Everything on Ethereum is competing, competing for attention, competing for block space. It’s a very adversarial environment, just like EVE Online is a very adversarial environment.
So here is a phenomenon that is proven that it can manage a decentralized ecosystem of people in an adversarial state doing writes in a pretty interesting global state on Ethereum. And it’s largely holding up. I mean there’s a lot of issues from UX to god knows what, but at the heart of it, it kind of is a multiplayer computer that people are PVPing on.
In addition, if we wanted to properly do a system where we, the creator of the world, have the same access as third party developers – we have no special privilege – then this seems like a way to build it. It was very much done with an eye towards ‘How do we further enable third party development?’
Because a huge part of the success of EVE Online is the ecosystem that has developed around the game and explores many directions that often we don’t have bandwidth or frankly even imagination to do. So, how about building it on that premise? Yes, there are scalability issues, all sorts of issues, but at the heart of it, Ethereum is a multiplayer computer where engineers can do PVP. So every time I was rattling this in my brain, ‘How do you really, really make a system that is provable sound?’, you end up with something with a lot of blockchain-like components.
One of our ideas was to take Ethereum, pull out the Merkle trees and use a Merkle tree-less Ethereum to run a scripting engine, which actually isn’t a bad idea. But then we thought about if we truly are to just be a janitor of the system with no more agency than somebody else, then we also need to find a way to decentralize the whole computer. And once you’re in that, you just end up with something like a blockchain.
How should we think about EVE Frontier in relation to EVE Online?
A mental model is to think about what EVE is in a more anthropomorphic sense. I always think about it more like a city than a country. And I think about it like a city because when I am, let’s call me a mayor. It’s a city and I’m some sort of mayor. I prefer city more than country because countries are a fairly late state development. Only the past couple of hundred years. But cities have existed for thousands of years. A city state is where it’s at for most of human history.
So let’s take a city. Let’s imagine EVE is like Rome. It’s freaking cool. It’s existed for thousands of years. It still exists. It’s a pretty amazing place. It’s gone up and down over the past few thousand years, but it’s legendary.
Okay. Now we’re going to build a new city. I think New York. New York is a young city on the standards of Rome. It’s built out of different materials, steel and glass and we have urban planning. It’s made very differently. We’re now building a new city out of different materials in a different place. It should enrich Rome indirectly just through its existence. Rome is not a worse city just because New York exists. I also like the Rome-New York analogy because a lot of Italians helped creating New York. New York has a bit of an Italian vibe.
So is New York Rome 2.0? I mean, not really. It’s just different. That’s why we also tuned the EVE Frontier’s premise. It’s more like a survival experience than an MMO. It’s a persistent world multiplayer, single-sharded survival experience. I don’t think anyone has done this and it seems like a genre that should exist.
And when I think about this, Daniel Day-Lewis’ movies come to mind. Is it The Last Mohican? Is it There Will Be Blood? Or is Gangs of New York? It’s somewhere on the spectrum. It’s hard to place it. Best that people try it and figure out what Daniel Day-Lewis movie they are playing in.
What’s been the reaction of EVE Online players to EVE Frontier?
Number one, EVE players want everyone at CCP focused on EVE Online. So when we thought of this project, factoring that in, we made sure we raised outside capital. If you go back to the Rome-New York analogy, if our subscription fee in EVE Online is a tax on the Romans, then we’re not using that tax to build New York. It really is a separate venture, so we raised private capital to do it.
But people are naturally demanding to make their living experience better. We have hundreds of people at CCP Games who are dedicated to EVE Online.
I believe that by building a new city, we will become better at building cities, in general. The fact that we’re building Rome and New York at the same time will just give us a better understanding of what it is to build a city. There are pieces of technologies and techniques and procedures that over time will make us better city builders and that should benefit both. So rather than putting a skyscraper on top of the Coliseum, which would be one way to do it, we’re just, now we’re going over here, we’re going to build New York.
It’s interesting that this is very much a from-the-ground-up project.
Not only are we building it from the ground up, we are building the tools for people to build it with us. It is very much built on the premise that we are going to provide nature and physics, but we are not going to build the actual city. This is a true decentralized effort. We’re going to build tools for people to build cities. We’re going to build city builder tools. It’s a rather unique thing to do.
And already we’re seeing tremendous success. Already in the playtest, people have built amazing things with the tools we have provided and also given us even more focus on making sure that the tools are transformational.
I should also mention terms of the blockchain, you’re building on Redstone, which is an Ethereum L2 blockchain from Lattice.
Yes, we’re building on top of MUD. Our interface is more MUD. Redstone is the best way to run MUD right now, but what has helped us tremendously is the MUD framework, which has created a kind of abstraction that is very elegantly done by Lattice so we have a good kind of middleware for lack of a better word.
Then we currently run it on Redstone, which is going great. It’s the best way to run MUD, but the beauty of MUD is we could fairly easily move it to any EVM-compatible system.
And referring back to building tools for building, you’re also open-sourcing your Carbon game development engine.
I think it is a part of the openness ethos. We are doing as much as we can, and maybe even more than makes sense, is making everything as open as can be. The economy is open. We are building this as much in an open way as can be.
People do question that it’s a lot of work to go open source with something that has been closed for decades. I often propose a different question. What is the value of having it closed? There really is no value in having it closed. Even Unreal Engine, which is one of the most amazing pieces of game technology ever created, the source code is open.
It isn’t quite an open source project, but the source code is open. You can contribute to it. We use it in our London office. We’re building EVE Vanguard with Unreal 5, and it is amazingly more easy to use it like that. We used Unreal 3 before, which was closed source.
The fact that Unreal 5 is open just makes everything so much simpler. We find a lot of bugs. Any piece of software that has millions of lines has bugs in it. But our precision in pointing those out and even proposing fixes is so much higher when we just have the full source code available. So if you are a third party developer building EVE Frontier with us, the fact that you can see the whole source code is just going to be better.
And even if it isn’t readily obvious why some of the engine pieces and the editors etc benefit from being open source, they just will. I know. A decade from now, the city built on Frontier will be inherently better from all these things being open.
Find out more at the EVE Frontier website.
Comments are closed.