During our time at Fanfest, we sat down with CCP's Nathan Richardsson to talk about the present and future of EVE Online.

During our time at Fanfest, we noticed a strong focus on the future of the EVE Universe. Developers emphasized that "EVE is real," and the Future Vision trailer demonstrated how EVE Online and DUST 514 can fuse two different genres into an entirely new experience.

Keeping EVE's exciting new direction in mind, we had the chance to sit down with Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson to talk about both the present and future of EVE Online. We discussed the possibility of walking around with our new avatars, gambling our ships away, "physically" meeting with warring factions to host peace talks, and much more.

Keep reading after the jump for Richardsson's thoughts on the changing face of EVE Online.

ZAM: What do you think of the current state of EVE? Although you’re not necessarily the “face” of the project anymore, you certainly have a history with the project.

Nathan Richardsson: The first thing I’d point out is that EVE has never had so many people working on it. Both in terms of those working on our core technology platform, CARBON, and the actual EVE team. The number of people working on EVE is actually over 120 now, which is bigger than many game teams. On top of that, we have contributions from the other game teams as well, because there is a sharing of common technology between the different games.

That said, I think we’re trying really hard to strike a balance between the concept of designing new features for the game versus iterating on the game as it already exists. Both methods can keep the game fresh for players, in their own ways. So while we’re really devoting a lot of resources to the avatar functionality currently, once that’s completed I believe we’ll very much shift our focus to molding what we already have in EVE into an even better game.

We have a host of systems that we’ve already implemented into the game, but that we want to make better, including continuing to work on the UI, so on and so forth. EVE today is very wide and deep, and with the new interactions that we’ve brought forward with the planets, the link that we’re creating with DUST 514 and the avatar system, I think we’ll have plenty of newness for players to enjoy and we can then refocus on making the older elements of the game better.

And I actually think that will be the majority of our focus, because if you step back and look at it, there are so many areas that have been added over time and just have the potential to become so much deeper and such a more integral part of the game. Some of those haven’t been iterated on in a long time simply because there’s a limited amount of things that you can have a team focus on at any one time.

ZAM: But you have been making some efforts to eliminate some of the “little things,” right?

Richardsson: That’s correct, we created a team that was focused on “a thousand little things.” Their entire goal was to go after the smaller things that may not be on the road map level planning, but they need to be done.

So we made an effort to actually create a team to focus on those things. They went through and found the little pieces of the game that are simply annoying, don’t make sense, or are purely insane.

They found a lot of things, went through a number of the CSM requests, and came up with a list that they then prioritized. This helped us immensely because, even though something might not be at a roadmap level, there are still problems that pose incredible frustrations to the user. On top of that, we can pick out which of those top items are actually really easy to do and cross them off our lists.

ZAM: While I was talking with some of the players at Fanfest, there was a relatively common thread among some of the more hardcore PvPers that Incarna is just a waste of time. What would you tell those players?

Richardsson: I fully understand their complaints, and I heard it fairly often when I was the public face of EVE. I get it, I really do. There are different playstyles in the different groups of people that play EVE, and we are never going to please every single person that plays the game with new features that we roll out. Some will just not have an interest in them.

That said, avatar technology has always been a long term goal for us. It’s something that we’ve believe strongly in and wanted to get there for a long, long time. It was a combination of players not simply wanting to be a ship floating through space, and additionally we wanted people to not just create a character and then never seem them again.

We’re hoping that what we’ve done with rolling out the character creator is give players an incentive to really want to see their character and spend some more time with that persona. It’s going to start in the captain’s quarters and then move into establishments.

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