Eve Lead Designer: Drama Is Cool!

Eve’s lead designer (you know Eve, it’s that really hardcore PvP game that we at Broken Toys are honor bound to despise because, um, I’m sure there’s some reason that can be found in any 200+ comment thread on Darkfall) was interviewed by MTV and I bet you can guess the first question!

When you give players freedom to do whatever they want, then you’re going to have these sorts of massive political scandals — and the players really love it. The largest alliance in the game was broken up by a trader on the inside and when this happened we were really worried at first because we were like, “Oh no! Everyone’s going to quit!” And it was really horrible for us.

That was in the morning, but a couple hours later the buzz on the forums was crazy, subscriber numbers were growing, and everybody was really excited. Because everyone was becoming complacent and bored with being the biggest alliance, and then all of a sudden now there’s war and turmoil. People who used to be in the alliance were re-subscribing and everyone was really excited about it so it’s not necessarily always a bad thing when this sort of stuff happens. Somebody on the other side was interviewed, and he was saying “When you beat the biggest raid in World of Warcraft you don’t get an interview in The New York Times but when this sort of thing happens it makes real-world news.”