Would You Play EVE 3.0?

On Friday, venture capital firm a16z published a video featuring an interview with CCP Games CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. The interview was another example of the tough financial situation Pearl Abyss finds itself in. After losing ₩41.1 billion ($35.6 million) in 2022, the South Korean game company finds itself still trying to develop Crimson Desert and PokeV. In order to fulfill one of Pearl Abyss' major goals, developing a Web 3 game, CCP Games had to look for outside financing.

Mention of subjects like web 3, crpytocurrencies, blockchains, and play to earn send many, if not most, serious gamers fleeing. Honestly, I can't blame them. The closest I've come to playing anything remotely like a game having those components is EVE Online. Which leads to the question, if Project Awakening is a modernized version of EVE Online, would you play the game?

What do I mean by modernized? For example, correcting CCP's original sin of building a single-threaded application. Back in the beginning, CCP Games gambled that the future was bigger and bigger processing chips rather than multi-threaded processing. In other words, imagine an EVE Online capable of hosting fights of 5,000 players comfortably.

Or what about the mission system? Did anyone else get tired of rescuing the Damsel at least once a week? I know I did. But the old system in EVE involved handcrafting each mission, meaning updating those missions is prohibitively expensive. What if the mission system is dynamic and easy to update? Does anyone find that prospect attractive?

What about the user interface? Instead of being tied to the old spreadsheets-in-space UI, what if the developers were allowed to build a completely new UI without having to worry about legacy code? Would a better UI draw players in to play the game?

Talking about legacy code, is anyone interested in playing a game in which certain bugs never are fixed because they are attached to long abandoned features that still affect systems? EVE Online veterans know I'm referring to the POS code. For anyone who doesn't know what POS code is, all I have to say is, ignorance is best.

Or the map. No, I'm not referring to the horrible in-game maps that require the use of external maps like Dotlan. Instead, I'm referring to the security areas within the New Eden cluster. Imagine an EVE where, instead of high security space dominating the middle of the map, a disaster occurred that destroyed civilization in the middle of the map and the NPC empires controlled the outer ring of regions. Each of the four empires (Amarr, Caldari, Galente, Minmatar) would control space at the cardinal points of the map, with security steadily dropping until the core of the cluster is reached. Would that entice players to the game?

For a more general public, or for the really old veterans of the game, what if avatar play is added to the EVE universe? What if, instead of trying to developer their own engine (Carbon), CCP decided to use Unreal Engine 5 instead? We know during the VR years that EVE characters and graphics were ported into UE4 for EVE: Valkyrie. So the technology exists. Would players want to play a game in which the developers finally deliver on the promise of walking in stations?

Once again CCP cannot do this on its own. Pearl Abyss cannot help financially, although they will back CCP making a game if it incorporates web3 technology. The only way a game like the one I described above gets made is if the crypto-bros and their money become involved. So the question becomes, would the visceral revulsion at web3/blockchain/NFT/play to earn games override the desire to play an updated version of EVE Online? Would you play an EVE 3.0?