I talked a bit about Valve and a good bit about what I believed their greatest innovation was, Steam. Today it’s CCP’s turn. While Valve has put out several very good games, CCP only has one — Eve Online. Now, in all fairness, Eve is an MMO and all of Valve’s games have been single player with multi-player support. (or in the case of Team Fortress 2 multi-player with no single player, and Left 4 Dead with a heavy focus on multi-player and single player addition, same with Counter Strike: Source) Valve does do an excellent job patching in new content and fixes, I’ll give them that. But CCP has kept Eve going for several years now and constantly evolved it. It no longer looks like the game that originally launched back in 2003.

Having a truly evolving MMO world is something I’d consider an innovation. Other MMOs get updates, some even last long enough to see some graphics engine updates. But, none have really gone through what Eve has — most simply gain a sequel instead of evolving.

An evolving world is one small innovation, another is the server cluster. I’m no network guru, no server wizard, so I can’t go into the details that can be found in dev blogs on Eve’s site, but I have not seen another mainstream MMO with a single server that can support the number of players that Eve’s can. Having a single server makes a virtual world a true world. There is no other copy of it (OK, they have a Chinese server, sorry, but for the majority of the world it’s just one) and there are no separations from you and people across the world like so many other games employ. If there is one thing I truly love it’s being able to play with and compete against people from all over the world. Other MMOs tend to say this but few actually have it happen. 

The last part of CCP that I’d like to write on is their community involvement, good and bad. In most MMOs the devs/GMs tend to be aloof, like the gods on Mount Olympus they occasionally descend to deal with the common peoples. CCP tends to always be around the players in some form. They have various teams that recruit players (bug hunters for example) and the council of stellar management (effective or not, it does exist), both involve the players and the devs/GMs. (other games have employed volunteer teams, so it’s not innovative, but the CSM could be) Breaking down the boundaries between players and devs is  good, even if there can be trouble. Anyone that’s kept up with Eve’s player drama for the past few years knows of the T20 scandal where a CCP dev spawned some tech II blueprints for his friends (Band of Brothers). Big drama bomb, and rightfully so. While some would scorn CCP for their involvement with players, and in this case they’d be right, I loved it. I didn’t support the cheating, but I loved reading about the drama and about the whole event. Recently there has been another bit of CCP/BoB drama with the changing of Kenny (BoB) to BoBR (Band of Brothers Reloaded, now nicknamed ‘beaver’ as it seems BoBR means that in Russian) without having to go through the in-game mechanics. (which would cost them sov) While dev favoritism is wrong, the conflict spawned from it is greater than any in-game enemy or event ever created — no raid boss has ever come close to it.

So, to wrap things up. Valve: Steam, really solid FPS titles. CCP: Single server, evolving world, player/dev interaction. Both excellent companies.