EVE VALKYRIE
HANDS ON WITH THE FLAGSHIP OF THE VR REVOLUTION
Up until the past few months, EVE Valkyrie has been a surprisingly shy character given its grand, aspirational ambitions as a deep space flight combat simulator. That reserved nature has been made to feel even more understated given the otherwise self-confident, eccentric and impatient world of virtual reality that it is a part of. Where other games, and VR technology in general, has been rushing to show curious potential consumers what weird and wonderful places and states we can escape into by simply strapping a plastic brick to our heads, Valkyrie has limited itself to tech demos and promises of what tomorrow will bring. As such, trying to figure out exactly what it is trying to do above and beyond its highconcept description has been difficult.
That eye-catching foundation, combined with its association with the ceaselessly popular and respected EVE Online, has always worked in its favour, however. Promise players a ‘Top Gun in space’ experience and you’re nearcertainly guaranteed a loyal fanbase of pre-release followers... made up in no small part of the tech-savvy, sci-fi literate early adopters of VR that are going to represent the vast bulk of Valkyrie’s initial audience. The idea sales itself. If you build it, they will come.
CCP Games might have up until recently refrained from presenting too many details of the how and why regarding ship flight, combat and the structure of game modes, but that hardly dented Valkyrie’s attractiveness. In anything, the mystery only resulted in more interest.
Now, however, the docking bay has opened and we’ve seen inside the mothership. With hours of play logged on our flight records, we’re in a much better position to understand the intricacies of what this initial foray into virtual space wants to communicate and define. Happily, the most important thing we’ve learned is that this is not just a tech-demo.
To remove any confusion as to what CCP is trying to do here, let’s begin with the facts. Valkyrie is primarily a team-based competitive multiplayer game based around a number of different game modes that task you with either simply destroying your opponents in a fight to the death or accomplishing objectives of mild complexity more quickly than your foes. Single player options do exist, albeit nothing that comes close to what could accurately be described as a ‘campaign’. Essentially, this is a multiplayer game that includes single player options to help you hone your skills before jumping into the fray.
“To be very honest, we’re a small development team of about 30 people based in Newcastle [England]. We’ve got to make sure that we pick our battles sensibly,” explains Andrew Willans, Valkyrie’s lead designer, when asked about the lack of a dedicated campaign. “From the outset we knew we wanted a multiplayer game and our intention has always been to create the best multiplayer experience possible. We’ve focused on that throughout the whole development.
“When you’re in there, with the headset on, with microphones connecting you to the other players in your squad... it’s an amazing thing. To make sure we do the best possible job we’ve had to use every bit of our time and knowledge to make that happen.”
Valkyrie’s competitive game modes read identically to those you’d expect to see from any modern first-person shooter. Team Deathmatch is present and correct, as is a capture point mode dubbed ‘Control’. Without explanation it’s obvious what your goals are and, to some extent, how you should be
coordinating with the rest of your fiveperson team to realise them.
It might seem like a lack of aspiration to include match structures that have been doing the rounds in other games for many years, but the move feels like a smart one when you’re first locked into your cockpit and getting to grips with the presence and the form of VR interaction. The chief difficulty facing Willans and his team revolve around player perception, so it makes sense to include frameworks that are instantly understood by the majority of the audience. By pitting you against others in games of Team Deatchmatch and Control you’re free to concentrate on the new freedoms presented by VR, rather than worrying about the rules of engagement.
“I’m always reluctant to use the word when referring to a videogame, but it should feel ‘organic’ in terms of how you interact with it,” Willians explains with a cautious smile. “Everything should look and feel as natural as it can be. You should know intuitively what the different icons mean, what the metadata is that pops up when you look at something, what the audio cues means and how the haptic [controller vibration] feedback is working.
“That combination of audio, visual and haptic is really how we draw people into what we’ve got. Ultimately, you should be able to look at something and naturally understand what it is and whether you want to explore it further or not.”
These issues have long been solved, to a greater or lesser degree, by games across any number of genres that use a ‘traditional’ television or monitor to present themselves to the player. Taking away the mouse cursor, however, or not needing to layout icons in a way that is efficient for controller users means starting over for everything from menu design to what you allow the player to see and do when in combat.
When inside the cockpit it’s the controller that determines where your ship moves, but it’s your head and neck that determines where you’re looking and what your missiles are locked on to. This means you can guide your ship in one direction, but be looking over your shoulder to keep track of that enemy tailing you in order to make sure you’re not presenting them with an easy target.
Given this combination of headtracking and thumb control, you might reasonably think that you’d naturally start looking around you as soon as the battle begins but that simply isn’t always the case. In some ways, being a well-travelled gamer with a significant history of interacting with digital worlds as we presently know them is a disadvantage; that understanding you’ve built up over the years working against you when it comes to the flexibility here. In Valkyrie’s VR realm, unlearning what you know and how you have acted with games in the past is vital to success.
“You kind of take it for granted that people will look around them and see stuff happening taking place in the battle, but not everyone does,” Willans explains. “Even when they’re in the cockpit of their ship very few people look around and make sure they know where everything is around them and where important info is placed. That’s because your sights are right in front you and that always seems like the most obvious place to focus on.
“In a dogfight you’re so dedicated to looking at the trails made by other ships and trying to line them up with your guns that it’s kind of difficult to remember to look at your dials and see that your shields might be down to fifty per cent and that you’re in danger and might want to change tactics.
“Over time you do become accustomed to the ambience of the cockpit, though, and you begin to ‘feel’ that your shields are at half health and when other things are going good or bad. That’s a big challenge when designing VR: how do you design your spaces so that it allows players to gain that situational awareness when they’re able to look wherever they want?”
Given that Valkyrie is coming bundled as part of the package provided for those that pre-order the Oculus Rift, Willans finds himself in a position of responsibility that most VR game developers don’t necessarily have to worry about so diligently. Being the entity through which many players will have their first VR experience means there is an enormous pressure to make sure the game is intuitive and easily understood.
Not only must icons and visual cues feel natural, but the physical reality of VR gaming must be addressed. If that first experience of VR is negative, it’s less likely that individual will come back for a second dose. In this sense, Valkyrie seems like a smart move for CCP. Given that you take the role of a pilot, it’s natural that you should be sitting down. This removes any of the complexity that other games assign themselves by allowing you to move around, meaning some sort of tethering system is required to keep the player safe within their physical
environment.
you do become accustomed to the ambience of the cockpit, though, and you begin to ‘feel’ that your shields are at half health
All of the changes are driven by real, genuine data that we’ve gotten through us playing the game, or by others players
Further, Valkyrie cannot make induce the dreaded ‘ VR sickness’ that so many have complained about feeling when headsets such as Oculus were first revealed. Willans, however, believes that this is now a thing of the past as hardware has progressed to the point where designers can now fully implement their knowledge of how to avoid this situation.
“We’ve been invested in VR from so early on that we’ve built a lot of best practises that we absolutely want to share with other developers,” Willans reveals when queried about how much of this knowledge has been developed by CCP and how much has come from dialogue with other studios. “First and foremost we want to get our house in order and we want to get our game to the point we want it, but we do also want to talk about this stuff and share what we’ve got with others.
“We’ll be doing a lot more of that, but so much until after release. At that point we can do our post-mortems and talk about everything; successes and failures.”
These “best practises” are not the result of philosophical meditation on the nature of VR and how an audience might respond to it. Instead, they have been derived following years of work and playtesting that has revolved around constantly changing and tweaking the fine details through unwittingly engaging with what doesn’t work as much as what does. When you’re treading new ground and driving without a mentor to teach you, you’re bound to make mistakes.
“We iterate a lot through playtesting. All of the changes are driven by real, genuine data that we’ve gotten through us playing the game, or by others players,” continues Willans. “You can theorise a lot on paper, but when it comes to the game what most important is how it controls and feels that really matters. You don’t know that until you try to do a lot of different things and what out of what you’ve done that works.
“When we look at what speed the ships should travel at, for example, that’s not something that we’ve arrived at my accident. It’s not a case of putting a value into the editor, saying that will do, and then just making other ships faster or slow compared to that. What we’re thinking about is what is the precise speed we need to make sure we give
that ‘ Top Gun in space’ feeling. We need the speed to be fast enough so that you can catch up with other ships, but not so fast that you’re just instantly overshooting each other all of the time.”
As such, Willans is not a fan of Newtonian physics. Valkyrie is not about being a simulation in the sense that it accurately models what would occur should two (or more) ships do battle in the vacuum of space, instead it’s about simulating the excitement of doing so if you had the skills to pull it off and the threat of actual death removed. There’s a semantic argument to be had as to whether that constitutes a ‘simulation’ at all, but it seems churlish to engage in it.
Indeed, and unsurprisingly, Valkyrie is based more on the underlying ideals of its EVE Online sibling than it is on any scientifically-sound future. As you gain more experience by playing and winning matches and scoring kills and/or controlling zones within the three-dimensional maps you earn blueprints which with to build new ships. These ships vary in native abilities, but each can be further customised to suit your preferred play style. As in EVE Online, then, the idea is that you build bonds with your ships over time and through evolving them in line with your own vision.
Fighter class options are typically good all-rounders, providing a safe balance of speed, armour and firepower. The Tank selection features reinforced hulls and powerful weapons, but pays for the privileges through reduced speed. Support ships lack firepower but can improve an allies shields or, if you’re up for taking the risk that comes with getting close enough, damage the shields of enemies. Before matches begin you can select up to four ships to use, with each death providing you the option to switch seats. In essence, it’s the kind of loadout system we’re used to in online shooters... only here you’re limited to four sets of gear.
The limitation forces a degree of strategic thinking, a decision made easier once you’ve gotten to grips with the different weapons and arenas. Maps distinguish themselves from one another in size and the quantity of structures within them: some feature huge space stations that must be navigated around and can be used to provide cover and ambush spots, whilst others are almost completely empty and force you to rely on quick thinking and sharp piloting to stay alive.
Again, like EVE Online, the idea is to provide a game that can be played for hours at a time. The progression format, as well as the potential for tactical complexity, seems designed to reward those that decide to do exactly that. Willians explains: “The type of game that we’re trying to build is one where we’re going to have players that are going to decide to play for three hours or more in a single session. We do that ourselves. When testing the game and the servers we’re playing for three hours straight and only lifting the visor up whenever we want to take a sip of a drink or have a bite of a pizza.”
Not only does Valkyrie need to introduce the idea of VR and make sure that it caters to those tentative newcomers intrigued by this new medium, but it also needs to deliver the kind of depth demanded by players happy to indulge in marathon gaming sessions. Getting this balance right is tough for any game with ambitions of attracting a large audience, not least one taking the risk of being a first mover in a new technological space.
The rewards for a successful balancing act are enormous, in particular when it comes to the reputation CCP will sow for itself as one of the initial masters within the VR space. Getting it wrong will define Valkyrie as the first major failure. While what we’ve played of Valkyrie is mightily impressive, the proof of its quality will only be told when it can be played over the long term and it can demonstrate that it’s more than a flashy showcase for the potential of VR. There is, however, no doubt that it remains the most promising mainstream example of a virtual reality experience. John RobeRtson