Burn it to the ground. All of it.
There is this thing called the circle of life. You may have heard of it. Everything alive must die and from death comes life, or something like that. It’s easily confused with the life cycle, which sort of says the same thing; but when applied to a product is bizarrely reimagined as some kind of machine on which it’s believed that, if you pedal hard enough, the inevitable end can somehow be kept at bay.
Eve is a product that CCP has been sweating over for more than 20 years. And while the end has been successfully delayed, it has only gotten closer. It is closer at the start of the game’s third decade than it was at its second, which was closer than it was at launch. How close? Not for me to say. My task here is to offer a vision for the fourth decade, which, assuming Eve hasn’t met its end by then, I believe requires CCP to embrace the circle of life – to let the life cycle complete and begin anew.
A sequel, basically. But not just any sequel.
Gamers of a certain vintage will remember how disastrously most MMOG sequels have turned out, with Asheron’s Call 2 being about the best example of not to make one (Everquest 2 also to a lesser extent). More recently Blizzard made some of the same mistakes with Overwatch 2, as did Taika Waititi’s character in the movie Free Guy; which is to not be a dick and destroy everything your players have created in one game just to release another that isn’t sufficiently better.
Players have created a hell of a lot in Eve Online. Probably more than in any other game that has ever existed. You might reasonably argue that there’s so much player content that it would take Star Citizen levels of investment combined with the Call of Duty turnarounds to make an Eve sequel good enough that players would be willing to let 20 years of shared history end. I would agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly. But what if they didn’t have to? What if CCP made a sequel in which players could take all of their stuff with them?
Eve is a game of systems built on top of systems built on top of systems. Some have taken the weight of those above, others not so well, which has increasingly meant that CCP is spending most of its time shoring up all the stuff that’s crumbling under the weight of the newer features piled on top. Therefore we can all imagine the features of an Eve 2 without the need for it to just be better and bigger. Done right, it would be bigger and better by default.
Key to everything is Eve 1 existing for long enough so that Eve 2 has a chance to thrive, and the gateway between two remaining open. From a lore perspective, imagine some NPC scientist somewhere bringing about the end of New Eden, requiring the empires to come together to engineer some mechanism to open a new Eve Gate to a hitherto unknown galaxy (lots of potential for events and community goals there, too). A predicted date is set upon which New Eden will burn out (or up - the technical term alludes me), prior to which Eve 2 will open up and players can begin to pour forth and settle new New Eden, all without them losing the riches that identified them in the old one.
Maybe the status quo would continue, maybe not. The point is that players will have new tools, new possibilities, a whole new galaxy – all without losing everything they have built up. And being a new beginning, it means there is a jumping on point for new players to make their mark. Because without them, the circle of life will just get smaller and CCP will have to peddle that much harder.
