Ever since it was first announced and all through its development, EVE: Valkyrie has consistently set the bar very high for what the emerging VR systems can try and achieve. It wants to completely immerse you in the role of a fighter pilot within the EVE universe, with intense multiplayer dogfighting at its core.
That point might surprise a few people, and so once we’d gone hands on with a multiplayer version of the game and got the chance to speak with Andrew Willans, Lead Game Designer on EVE: Valkyrie, it was one of many things we asked him about.
TSA: The first point I want to bring up is something you mentioned in the presentation hadn’t been made particularly clear, which is that EVE: Valkyrie doesn’t have a single player story or campaign, but it’s really focussed on the multiplayer and a little bit of PvE content as well.
Andrew Willans: That’s right, yeah. I think it’s probably because someone had misquoted us as confirming a campaign mode, and the problem with saying “campaign” is that it conjures up visions in peoples’ heads of really elaborate first person shooter campaigns that other companies have tackled.
That was never really our goal. What we’ve found is that all the fun is when you’re flying with real people, and we are a relatively small development team here, so you’ve got to perfect what you do well and what we do well is competitive online multiplayer.
So yeah, we don’t have a campaign as such, but what we do have is some PvE content, and that’s broken down into three main modes. The first one of those is called Recall mode, and the fantasy for this is that you can recover DNA from all the dead pilots, and we can use that to reconstruct these memories in virtual reality which you can then give to new recruit pilots and they can use them as training and to learn a little about the history of the Valkyrie.
Recall mode’s effectively a bunch of short, self contained missions, but they’ve got a narrative element. So you’ll hear bits of the story told from the perspective of, say, Rán, our central hero character, so you’ll get to hear about her struggle and the events that led up to her becoming a Valkyrie. So we are going to tell elements of the story, but it’s going to be within this game mode.
The other thing that we try to do, as well, is try to teach and reinforce the game’s core mechanics, expose the player to the interface that they’re going to use. You know, how you can use your countermeasures, how you can drop an EMP mine. That kind of stuff is going to be exposed in the Recall missions, and the same will ultimately go for the online game modes.
We’ve got Team Deathmatch, which is quite easy to comprehend….
TSA: Surely, everybody understands what Team Deathmatch is by now?
Andy: I don’t think we need to tutorialise that one!
But then we’ve got something like Control, where we can create a Recall mission which taps into the fantasy behind what these control points are. These are sources of energy which are powering the clone vats, which if you tap into, you can drain these resources quicker.
That’s pretty much what they are, they’re self contained missions, so when we say “campaign” that’s probably far too elaborate a term, but that’s something that we’ll continue to add to. It’s a lot easier to come out with all this stuff that we want to focus on and polish to a high degree, and then release more Recall missions as and when we get a chance to polish them to a high enough level.
TSA: It’s interesting that this is coming in the context of Star Wars Battlefront and Rainbow Six Siege, where a lot of people feel that they don’t have enough content, partly because of not having an outright single player story. How are you trying to tackle similar concerns with Valkyrie?
Andy: Well, the Recall mode isn’t the only [single player] mode that we provide. There’s also the Survival game mode where you can experiment with your ships, explore the maps and fight the AI. We also have a Scout mode, which is a bit of a sightseeing mode, where you can learn the maps in more detail and get metadata.
Ultimately, we’re a brand new IP. Valkyrie is a new IP and it’s set in a totally new medium, so it’s kind of hard to benchmark us against established console and PC games right now. We’re in a totally different medium, and I think people will be totally overwhelmed with the sensation of being in VR, and there’ll be more than enough to keep people occupied, I’m pretty confident of that!
Then the job is to maintain and add to the content that’s there.
TSA: I think one of the key things is to have a genuine variety, so it doesn’t always feel the same. Has it been difficult to get that in the game modes and designing maps for something in outer space?
Andy: The maps, we’ve spent a lot of time iterating, with a lot of rational level design methodology behind how we construct our maps. If you just have two carriers that pull up in space and there’s clear skies up until the point that you meet, it can be pretty boring. So our levels are really carefully constructed for the time it takes to get into combat, and also what’s within the level that makes that journey interesting.
Is it asteroids? Is it a mining facility? Is it a huge shipyard with lots of metal structures that you can fly through? They’re very carefully constructed, and I think the only map that we have that’s got a lot of open space is called Cathedral, and that’s got this huge central cathedral like structure in the middle. There’s a lot of space around it, but that one really works because it’s a ferocious dogfighting map with limited cover.
But it is all about variety, so you then have something like Forge, where it’s set in this huge mining complex, so you’re flying through tunnels and asteroids, and there’s drilling laser beams that you’re swooping between. So there’s a lot to see, put it that way, but the stuff that’s there is for gameplay reasons, and it’s super cool if someone’s got a missile lock and you’ve used your countermeasures, to duck behind an asteroid or into a trench is a really clever manoeuvre to break the lock.
The other challenge we had is calling out the scenery, to make it unique in VR. You kind of assume that, because it’s so real and you’re so immersed, that everyone will see everything, but that’s not the case. You almost get combat blind, so we’ve done a lot of work to try and get distinctive areas within the map, so I can say, “I’m behind the huge drill,” and you know exactly where I am.
There’s a lot of work that’s gone into it, and I’m pretty confident that the maps that we’re shipping with are of a very high quality. There’s definitely lots to see. We certainly won’t be in a situation where you’re just flying endlessly through space!
TSA: No, you’ve got the Battlestar Galactica-like launch tubes, but a lot of the dogfighting in that show was just in open space in a corridor between two lines of fire.
Andy:Â Yeah, and I think Cathedral’s probably our closest map to that, but even then, it’s still got a good vibe to it.
TSA: Off on a slight tangent, you’ve obviously iterated an awful lot during development, so what is it that you’ve found to be the best way to get people to engage with the virtual world and feel and act as though they’re actually there?
Andy: Well there’s a couple things we’ve done, one quite recently within the main menu, but the one we got quite early on was the look to lock missile system.
We found a lot of people were putting the headset on and they were sat very rigid, as if you were in a traditional game on a 2D monitor. Trying to get people to look with their heads, we came up with this mechanic which is the look to lock missile. By making one of your primary weapons head tracked, it forced a lot of people to go outside of their comfort zone.
By getting people to move their heads and look for targets in an offensive manner, you also teach the defensive side. You get used to looking around 360º in the cockpit, but then you also spot other things. So when you hear a missile lock and you hear an enemy on your tail, you’re more comfortable with looking around to see where their position is. You do a lot more glancing out the side of the cockpit to pull manoeuvres. […]
The other example for that would be the hub, the main interface. We had something that was quite traditional that wouldn’t look out of place in a normal game, but about five weeks ago, we were just thinking this needs overhauling. The innovation and the “Wow!” needs to happen the moment you boot the game. The idea behind it was to put the player in the middle of a star chart, like when you go to a planetarium and you’ve got all this stuff around you.
One of the golden rules you might hear about VR is to always put a crosshair for the player’s eye, so when you look, you’ll see a symbol where you’re looking. We didn’t always agree with that, and some of the VR golden rules are made to be broken, so we put a lot of effort into making all of this information appear dynamically depending on what you look at.
I joke, but it’s like having AR within VR, because as you’re looking around, you might see a planet and the metadata just appears. So when everyone has ideas of what Google Glass is, seeing a path drawn out as you walk down the street and getting information on what’s showing in the cinema as you walk past, that’s what we wanted to do within the hub. So as you look at the options around you, the metadata appears, you get some haptic feedback, audio cues and some visual feedback. All of that combined makes it feel quite natural to look at something and press ‘A’.
It was really cool to see people instinctively doing that, both yesterday and in San Francisco.
TSA: One thing that I found yesterday was that after a couple of rounds, I felt the need to take the headset off and have a little break. It might have been because of how intense and unrelenting the competitive world is, but is that something you’ve seen with other people, or find yourself, maybe?
Andy:Â I think it’s an acclimatisation thing, definitely. I possibly felt it a little bit myself, when I was on the DK2 kits, just at first, but I think the ramp up to how long you want to spend and how intense it gets is so fast.
We invited my brother and some of my mates into the office. We regularly have clan nights, where we play first person shooters, so I got all of my clan and brought them into the office. None of them had played VR, so I said, “Look guys, we’ve got three hours where we’re testing the European servers and three hours testing the American servers. I just want to see how you feel.”
So I got everyone set up, got a load of pizzas in, and they just couldn’t get enough. They were in there for, like three hours straight, and this was their first experience with VR. They lifted their headsets maybe three or four times to have a bit of pizza! [laughs]
We have a lot of our pre-alpha early adopters who help us stress test the balance, the systems, the weapons and the loadouts. When we swapped servers, they swapped servers with us, so we find that people in America are tuning into the European servers and vice versa, and people are basically gaming for six hours straight. If we put the server up, people are on them and they don’t leave them until we shut them down!
But by the same token, I appreciate that everyone has a different tolerance and a different level. So that was why we get some modes in there like Scout mode, and why the whole of the interface and the hub need to be really cool to be in, that there’s some play to be had, even there. So if people do find combat too intense, they might want to take some time out and go fly for a bit, or look at their ship and customise things.
Obviously, when we ship, we’re going to have matchmaking behind things, so hopefully that’ll sort out the players who aren’t massively competitive from those who are rank 15 in the first weekend and don’t stop to breath and eat! [laughs]
TSA: [laughs] Maybe you need to have a setting so you know if someone’s going to treat it like an endurance challenge.
TSA:Â So finally, even though Valkyrie is coming to other platforms, you’ve been linked closely with Oculus Rift throughout. You’ve just announced that Valkyrie’s going to be bundled with Rift pre-orders, but how big a deal is that for the game?
Andy: I think it’s huge. It’s a huge nod of appreciation to the work we’ve done, and that partnership has always been fantastic. Oculus have made sure that we’re always up to date with the latest advances throughout development.
In terms of what it’s going to do for us, anyone who buys the headset, we are automatically in their homes, effectively. So the job for us is to make sure we’ve got something there for everyone, and that when people load us from the homepage they’re blown away and they’re kind of like, “This is it. This is the killer app. VR has landed!”
I’m pretty confident we’re going to get that.
Thanks to Andy for taking the time to speak with us. Be sure to check out our preview of EVE: Valkyrie, which went up a little earlier today.