Locals may tell you that one third of the world’s construction cranes currently reside within Shanghai, piecing together an unlikely muddle of mega-structures and monuments, rewriting the complex clusters of streets and neighbourhoods on a seemingly annual basis. Regardless of whether you believe that or not, this is undeniably a city in which capitalism has turned seismic – where days and nights alike ring with the sound of drilling, where luxury brands compete for your attention with bundles of knock-off Blu-ray DVDs, and where the glinting baubles of the provocative skyline are largely obscured by the yellow smoke from the factories that paid for them.
Shanghai frequently looks like science fiction – Blade Runner colliding with Mad Max on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, to be precise – the hard-nosed, ideas-heavy kind of science fiction that builds its spectacle from the economics and philosophies of the future rather than the operatics. It feels, in other words, a bit like something Eve Online might have created.
Eve is the MMO with the best stories – the MMO rife with tales of complex backstabbing and glittering amorality, where players form corporations rather than guilds and move about the terrain as spaceships rather than pixies. It’s unashamedly grown-up in its depiction of a sharp-edged universe in which a very human kind of malevolence lurks in the next star cluster, and it’s unashamedly different, too: a long-view game where the outcomes of a smart plan may unfold in months rather than minutes, and which, with its fanatical players and evershifting alliances, seems unbothered by the ticking clock which lures many of its competitors into constant talk of sequels.
CCP, the game’s Icelandic developer, has provided a steady stream of expansions over the years, but now, from a satellite studio in Shanghai, the masters of Eve’s universe are taking their biggest risk yet: building another – very different – game inside the landscape of the first, a game that will be as twitchy as Eve is thoughtful, as direct as Eve is mediated.
“For us, it’s been a learning experience,” muses Kjartan Pierre Emilsson, the managing director of CCP Asia. “We started Eve as a game, but now we only reluctantly call it that. It’s a service. Because it’s a sandbox title, it’s more like a world for us: we create the basic rules and then offer the service of accessing this world. We flesh it out, make it look better and give you more to do in it, and then, as that perspective evolves, it becomes natural to think: ‘Can we look at this world through different goggles? The PC brings you into Eve’s universe as a pilot, but could I put on a different costume and experience this space from a different angle?’”