On Wednesday CCP issued a press release granting the general public some sort of idea what Project Awakening is all about. Since I'm a blogger and not a games journalist, I'm going to copy large portions of the press release into this post, but with a twist. After every paragraph, I'm going to give my thoughts. Interested? Let's begin.
REYKJAVIK, Iceland – March 13, 2024 – Today, CCP Games is excited to reveal the first details about Project Awakening and announce PHASE III, the next closed playtest for the in-development title set within the EVE Universe, starting May 21, 2024.
Interesting that the first paragraph provides useful information, namely that a closed playtest will occur in about two months.
With a 26-year studio history, Project Awakening represents the next step in CCP Games’ journey to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life. Designed with player empowerment at its heart, Project Awakening is being developed as a single-shard survival experience built upon the principles of freedom, consequence, and mastery within a living universe. A universe that will evolve from the actions and efforts of its players.
I normally don't ask for comments, but how cringe is the phrase "create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life"? When I first heard Hilmar utter the idea at Fanfest, I thought the words were just marketing speak. A decade later, the phrase still pops up in interviews and press releases.
But I buried the lede. Project Awakening is a survival game. The EVE Universe was created by an apocalyptic event, the collapse of the EVE Gate. The question is, what is the time period players will experience? I image not the same as EVE Online, which would reassure the existing player base.
As a single-shard survival experience, Project Awakening is set in the dark expanse of space where civilization has decayed in the ruin of its own ambition. Players will explore a hostile and dangerous cosmos as they fight to survive against what remains and attempt to rebuild a broken world.
The reason for asking which time period is, will CCP attempt to recreate the period immediately after the collapse of the EVE Gate, or a period after that depicted after EVE Online in which all the major powers, both NPC and player, destroy each other? My bet is on the latter, as CCP already has most of the art assets created for the things players will use to recreate the New Eden cluster.
Powered by the Carbon Development Platform and MUD by Lattice, CCP Games is creating a persistent world bound by digital physics, where composability and programmability will enable players to build and collaborate on top, outside of and within the emergent game environment - unlocking boundless creativity for third-party development via blockchain technology and cryptography.
Now for some technical information. Can a CCP Games press release not mention technology? I think not! First, the Carbon Development Platform is related toe CCP's Carbon engine. I found the trailer for the Carbon engine.
Next came the thought, who is Lattice and what is MUD? Lattice was nice enough to put in a FAQs page to provide a quick summary. The current description is:
Lattice is an engineering and product-focused company pushing the envelope of Ethereum applications and infrastructure. We are the team behind MUD, an open-source operating system for developing autonomous worlds and other ambitious onchain applications. Our team is also building Redstone, a Plasma-inspired L2 chain, which will scale autonomous worlds and ambitious applications built with MUD. You can learn more about our history below.
In 2022, we launched OPCraft, a fully-onchain procedurally-generated voxel game that attracted over 1,500 unique players who submitted 3.5 million transactions over the course of ten days. OPCraft was built by Lattice in just 1.5 months using MUD v1, an early version of our operating system. You can learn more about OPCraft here, here, and here.
In addition to MUD and Redstone, our developers are building Sky Strife, an onchain RTS game, and other infrastructure-level products related to MUD.
MUD is not an acronym for multi-user dungeon. Instead:
MUD is an operating system for developing onchain applications on any EVM-based blockchain. MUD is a departure from traditional patterns in writing smart contracts, and was developed in response to a number of observations around the difficulty of developing onchain applications today. Unlike traditional smart contracts, MUD enforces a separation of state (saved in Store, and acting as a replacement for Solidity compiler-driven data storage) and logic (which is defined using Systems, and reads and writes to the Store).
Additionally, MUD comes with an automatic indexer for applications designed using MUD. Unlike traditional applications which must be written with view functions, custom indexers, and subgraphs in mind, our indexer automatically works with any MUD application, allowing anyone to easily query state and sync with the network. MUD also introduces World, which is how we orchestrate new applications built using MUD. World is a new network where you (or anyone else) can deploy state and logic.
Visiting the MUD website shows the system is open source and has two additional games, Primodium and Words 3, not listed in the FAQ.
Now back to the press release.
To participate in the development of Project Awakening, players can now apply to join PHASE III, the next closed playtest starting May 21, 2024. PHASE III will allow players to engage with programmable game systems and build their own features and functionality within the world. As part of the playtest, an online hackathon will enable builders to showcase their ideas to CCP, with the winning teams given the opportunity to visit the studio headquarters in Iceland.
I usually do not play survival games, but I signed up for the test. Interestingly, while the questions included asking whether applicants are streamers or coders, they never asked about bloggers. Then again, we're easy to forget about. I'm not even sure any bloggers are members of the EVE Partner Program, at least as bloggers.
As part of today’s news, CCP Games is also excited to announce its commitment to making the Carbon Development Platform open source, allowing programmers and game developers to access the Carbon game engine framework and additional components for free.
Making Carbon open source makes sense, as MUD is also open source.
“We have been co-developing games with players for over 20 years: by making the Carbon Development Platform open source we are now taking the next step in this journey. Our vision is to open up game development to everyone. Whether you are a player, a developer, or a programmer, we want to empower you in building virtual worlds. As part of this we are excited to reveal the first details about Project Awakening which embodies this philosophy. Players will have a new series of tools at their disposal to add their own features and functionality to the experience, a new way of leaving their mark on the world. If you are a builder and want to be a part of this journey, then apply to PHASE III and join this new extension of the EVE Universe” said CCP Games CEO, Hilmar Veigar Pétursson.
I normally try to ignore Hilmar, as he says a lot of pie-in-the-sky things. Sometimes, though, he's involved too deep to ignore.
“We’re excited to bring the Carbon Development Platform to our creative community, allowing them to harness the power of the Carbon game engine” said CCP Games Senior Development Director, Ben Hunter. “We look forward to sharing more details and insight on how the public will be able to access Carbon in the future.”
When I want to know about how a project at CCP is really doing, I look at what the guys closer to the project say. In the case of Project Awakening, that's CCP Vertex.
“We are proud to reveal our partnership with CCP Games. Integrating MUD with Project Awakening will enable the creation of an autonomous world bound by digital physics” said Lattice CEO, Justin Glibert. “A universe where actions have consequences, which exists on rules as concrete as our own reality.”
I'm not quite sure what to think about Glibert at this point in time. Is he echoing what Hilmar is saying to get along, or is that how everyone in the blockchain/Web 3 world thinks?
For more information on Project Awakening and to apply to PHASE III, visit the official website www.projectawakening.io/.
Some final thoughts. Project Awakening currently is being designed as a survival game. I'm assuming as a survival game the avatar and FPS tech in EVE: Vanguard will come in handy. From just reading the press release, I imagine the time Project Awakening will take place in is after the time the current civilization in the New Eden cluster fades away. The EVE universe is set in a universe defined by a might apocalyptic event. Why not do the same for Project Awakening?
Finally, the big question. Why include Web 3/blockchain technology in Project Awakening? A very good question, as the mere mention of those words will have many potential players run away screaming, never to give the game a second look, much less a first chance.
In the opinion of someone who's had at least two accounts subscribed for over 14 years, I only really have one answer: compensating third party developers. Forget the thought of riches for CCP and the investment group that poured $40 million into the game. I think Project Awakening will need player/programmers in order to build the applications necessary for other players to survive and even thrive in the new world. Hilmar said the following in a promotional interview back in April 2023.
There are a few elements where I could hand-to-heart say it’s a better substrate to do certain things. Number one, there’s a lot of third-party development around EVE Online. It largely takes place through an API gateway. So we have a database which is our persistent storage. Then we have the ability to access that persistent storage through an API gateway which is kind of controlled by keys. And if you have the keys you can sort of execute on behalf of another person and you can kind of get through the API and get through to the data and compose the data, etc.
Currently we don’t really allow many reads through this system. It’s really only rights and the reason why we are kind of at that level is the pattern is quite powerful. But it does have limitations like metering the amount of executions it can do, etc, etc. So smart contract blockchains actually are a pretty good model where people could create third-party code that runs coexisting with other third-party code under the gas economy that exists on blockchains. That helps with kind of people writing messy code that just costs too many opcodes and things like that.
So pay for your own execution is actually a useful construct to meter third-party development in an open way in a large persistent storage. This combined with the memory interaction model between smart contracts and the underlying kind of state. I mean it’s a little bit problematic for blockchains in a public way because it just doesn’t scale very well. But there are many tricks we have learned through the development of EVE Online which map very well onto the concept of sharding as people have been using it in a blockchain. So we think we can get a little bit easily around the scalability problem by kind of leaning into sharding as a method to do that.
Then you have the ability for players themselves to compose elements of the world through writing smart contracts, uploading them, and creating infrastructure for the rest to do as EVE players have already done. You can go to EVE on GitHub. You will see amazing amount of infrastructure created by thousands of people over the past 20 years and that’s amazing. So this is another amazing way to do similar things. so that’s number one.
I've heard and read players say that the IT organizations within the largest alliances and blocs in EVE are often more professional and effective than those of many real world corporations. If the aim of the developers is to create a game with the need for third party developers built into the foundations, then maybe Web 3 technology has a place. Maybe.
For right now, the fact Project Awakening falls within the survival genre is a bigger drawback for me than the presence of a blockchain. Trying to bolt Web 3 technology onto an existing game like Hilmar originally wanted to do is a huge red flag that almost made me cancel my EVE subscriptions. Having a purpose-built game is another matter. So I'll keep watching the development of one of CCP's new games and hopefully the folks in London are able to catch lightning in a bottle.
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