EVE Online’s New Player Experience will continue to improve

EVE Fanfest 2017 (Credit: Brynjar Snaer – CCP Games)

EVE Fanfest 2017 came and went, and with it arose plenty of new surprises and updates for the EVE universe. CCP Games introduced a new cinematic intro for EVE Online, new updates for EVE Valkyrie and EVE Online’s New Player Experience and more.

EVE Online’s New Player Experience Will Continue To Improve

The New Player Experience had a huge revision last winter with great success. It has helped with bringing in new players, and CCP Games will continue to make additional updates. That means improving the user interface and continuing to help players find purpose.

“People come to [EVE Online] and they’re more like, ‘Okay, show me why I should be interested in this,'” Andie Nordgen, EVE Online’s executive producer, tells Nerd Reactor. “They don’t have this huge investment upfront. It puts more pressure on us to show you not just a bunch of systems in the game, because why would you care. We have to also show you why should you care. We realize that until you have understood why you should care or not, we need to give you something. We need to give you an experience that is enjoyable.”

“The way I usually express it, ‘How can we let you learn the game by playing the game?'” Nordgen resumed. “I’m very much against this idea that you should go to school and then you can play the game. No one wants to do that today. We’re working on stuff now where you kind of get thrown further into helping your empire do stuff. You want to play the game. You want to go on important operations for your empire. You want to get some rewards for that, and of course, learn as you go along.”

Balancing Subscribers and Free-to-Play Users

EVE Online makes it easy for new players to jump in, thanks to the free-to-play portion.

“We were trying to figure out a good way to open up access to the game without losing a lot of the core progression and monetization design,” said Steven Clark, EVE Online’s game designer. “We didn’t want to throw out our subscription system or make any other really destabilizing changes for current players. But we also really wanted to just make it so that people could come in and play whenever they want, especially when they can come back and check in whenever they want, which was really tricky. If you’re an old player and you used to fly titans, and you want to check in, you probably shouldn’t be able to use your titan for free because then you would never have any other reason to pay any more.”

“Current players who are subscribed are excited to have more people in the game,” Clark continued. “But they didn’t want free players to take over EVE. They want to keep things more or less consistent with how they’ve been. So we had to find a balance. It worked out really well. We ended up finding a really cool set of stuff that free players could do that gave them an honest EVE experience. Totally gave them the access to pretty much every part of the game but also made it really worthwhile to be a subscriber.”

New EVE Online intro cinematic

CCP Games released a new intro cinematic titled “Birth of the Capsuleer.” Here we see the capsuleer becoming one with the ship as they embark on a journey filled with exploration and conquests in New Eden.

CCP Games continues to improve on EVE Online including the New Player Experience. Thus the world of New Eden will be a place where old and new players can come together… or wreck each other apart.

EVE Online is a huge space MMORPG that takes place in a big server. Players are able to do battle via PvP or PvE, mine, commit piracy, trade, and explore in a universe filled with thousands of star systems. The game has really long battles. For example, the Battle of B-R5RB involved over 7,000 players and lasted for 21 hours.

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