Player feedback was crucial for shaping Eve: Valkyrie

These days Eve is much more than Eve Online, and Eve: Valkyrie and Eve: Gunjack are two titles that are moving the world of Eve into the realms of VR. At Slush Play in Iceland, we caught up with Stefanía Halldórsdóttir, General Manager of CCP Games, to find out how this movement to VR has been for them.

"When we started working on a game in VR," Halldórsdóttir explained, "we realised this is not something where something takes place in front of you, you're in the centre of it, and that's the cool thing about VR. So one of the design criteria was we have to give people the feeling of the presence, we want people to feel like they're the Gunjack, we want them to have the excitement of something [that] is happening."

In regards to moving into VR, she said "it was super important to leverage listening to the players still [...] so we did a lot of play tests and we listened to the play tests and to the feedback people were giving and it was really important for us to test the game outside of our own team, outside of CCP and we did, and we tested it at Fanfest, did analysis of all the feedback and we actually tweaked the game until it just felt right."

During a talk at Slush Play Halldórsdóttir hinted at something called Project Arena and we couldn't resist asking a bit about that as well. "Project Arena is being built in Atlanta by a super clever team and it's a full body VR where you can play against each other throwing discs at each other. You can either throw them directly or they can bounce off walls. We took this project actually to Fanfest to test it, got super good feedback on it and everyone said 'I just want to play this game', and this is also something that we value. It's trying to get things in front of people, not always being like inside our own offices working on something. We want to get things in front of people as soon as possible, then we know does it make sens to build, and Project Arena is one of those things."

Eve: Valkyrie is out now