EVE Frontier: An Example Of Realism Vs Playability In Video Game Design

Back in the 1990s I learned a few things about game design by attending conventions like GenCon and Origins. One lesson was that realism often was the enemy of good gameplay and game designers needed to choose between the two. The advent of video games allowed computers to take care of the more mind numbing tasks but didn't eliminate the conflict. I was reminded of the realism vs. game play debate today when I read an article on Space.com about the way CCP Games created the EVE Frontier universe.

CCP is known for creating science fiction games like EVE Online and the two software engineers interviewed for the article definitely reflected the science part of the equation. Helgi Freyr Rúnarsson (aka CCP relativistic) has led "world generation and resource design" in the project and received a PhD in computational astrophysics from Portugal's Aveiro University while specializing in black hole simulations. Guðlaugur Jóhannesson (aka CCP Wizard) who developed the backend systems used in Frontier, holds a PhD in astrophysics and is a Stanford University postdoc in cosmic-ray and gamma-ray research.

The Frontier galaxy

The galaxy Frontier is set in was created by using the Barnes-Hut algorithm to recreate a three galaxy merger.

"We're using a full-scale version of that code," Rúnarsson confirmed before going really deep with his explanation of the process: "We have the Hernquist prescription to generate the initial conditions of the galaxies. It's a three-decade-old prescription done by a physicist called Lars Hernquist back in the '80s... He basically came up with nice probability density initial conditions for galaxies to construct them numerically, both their positions and velocities, and all of that stuff."

The second step involves calculating the forces with the Barnes-Hut algorithm: "If you know numerical integration, you have to calculate the forces, and then you have to do the timestamping. Repeat that as many times as you want until you get a nice image..."

While impressive, the model is probably not the most precise way to create the galaxy. But having reviewed CCP's finances for years I'm pretty sure the budget didn't include a line item to purchase a supercomputer. According to Rúnarsson the process ran on workstations in the office.

I began the post teasing how sometimes realism has to make way for game play. Here are some examples.

Crude and fuel. One way Frontier differs from its big brother EVE Online is the use of fuel. The idea of using dark matter as Frontier's version of oil was scrapped for understandable reasons.

...Jóhannesson actually pitched the creatives on using dark matter as the fuel for the ships; the problem was that we know too much about it. "We know for certain it's not clumped, and it peaks in the center of the galaxy, and anywhere else it's uniform, so it would not make for good gameplay. That's why we decided to go for a more hardcore sci-fi experience where the origin of it isn't exactly known."

Developing a game based on real science can be a challenge when our understanding of the universe is developing so quickly. Cutting-edge science that you base your project on can be outdated by the time you actually reach the development finish line. That's why Jóhannesson quips that it's "better make something up that's too far in the future to ever be discovered."

Did I mention that EVE Online is set 20,000 years in the future? 

Ship speed. Yes, really. Ships in EVE Online are realistically too slow. CCP Wizard explained:

CCP Games' efforts to make EVE Frontier's universe realistic occasionally had to be sacrificed to accommodate the game's systems and mechanics. Jóhannesson was bothered by EVE Online's "very, very low" speed when flying a spaceship, but ended up keeping it in Frontier for gameplay reasons. "In our universe, the physical space has friction; the physics engine is modeled as a Newtonian fluid without gravity. So there's no gravity there, and there's friction. The astrophysicist in me was like, 'This is absolutely insane and stupid, and we can do better.' I started talking to people around me about this, and they were 'Yes, this is unrealistic, but we want the enjoyment of the gameplay.' It also would be very difficult to get faster-than-light travel; you'd have to take relativistic time dilation into account... It wouldn't be much fun, so we implement this very non-scientific frictional movement in space so you can... actually see the stuff around you and can do dogfighting."

Pretty nebulae. I grew up in a time when space was black. I guess EVE Online players did such a good job of convincing the art department to add pink to New Eden that they got carried away. The philosophy extended into Frontier.

"When you're within the nebula, that's a very unrealistic image of what it would look like because the space is really low-density material. You need to look through quite a lot of distances before you can actually see all of this nice effect. So I wanted things to look black because space is mostly black, but art decided that wasn't a good idea. So they shut me down again... At least now in Frontier, almost all of the nebulas have some resemblance of a galactic disk in them, so I managed to get that through. But there are a lot of areas where we have to make compromises because we're making a game that should look pretty and be playable."

Systems. Near the end of the article the reader learns the Frontier team really could have used that supercomputer after all. 

Similarly, Rúnarsson and Jóhannesson would've liked to go bigger with the simulation and generation of solar systems: "Technically, with the exact same code that we used to smash three galaxies together, we could have just different initial conditions and run the same code and get some sort of protoplanetary disk that coalesces... That was totally out of bounds in terms of time constraints. We did like a toy model inspired by it... So you're like a kindergartner who's placing planets, making sure it looks kind of nice... What is it that players actually see? It'd be cool if we could've simulated 24,000 solar systems, but the end result is still the same."

Player devs and the blockchain. I never thought about the question, but with Frontier incorporating third party developers directly into the game, the development team needed to ensure whatever tools made their way into the game world fit in with the setting.

Before wrapping up, we also wanted to learn about the 'player-driven systems' and how they work together with all the complexity of the simulated universe. Jóhannesson told us the "base-building component and connection to the blockchain world" means CCP doesn't have "a monolithic power over what happens." There'll be a set of rules in the beginning "to allow people to interact from the Web3 to our game to the game servers and the game itself."

There are rules like gravity to obey, of course, but players can just create systems like hiring someone to move "storage units" across the game universe; this work can later be paid with "blockchain costs or EVE coins, which you can later exchange for something else in-game or outside the game." Generally, the developers are trying to "make consistent rules which players have to obey but can play with."

Some of what was covered in the Space.com article also applies to EVE Online. After all, both Online and Frontier use the Carbon engine. But some of the same principles also apply to video games in general. After all, a game designer's main purpose is to create an enjoyable game, not a simulation that leads to a miserable experience.