CCP Games co-developing with Sumo Digital and PlayRaven for upcoming projects

EVE Online developer CCP Games made a raft of announcements at the latest of its annual EVE Vegas events today. The opening keynote(s) included a lot of nitty-gritty detail on the game’s upcoming expansion, Lifeblood, which was met with hoots and hollers from the congregated EVE elite. Amid all of this, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson took to the stage for the first time at an EVE Vegas event to talk about two upcoming projects for 2018.

The first of these was the highly anticipated Project Nova, the studio’s second attempt at a space-boots-on-the-ground FPS set in the EVE universe. Details are scant, but more are promised in the coming months. What we do know is UK developer Sumo Digital is working with CCP to bring the game’s vision to life sometime in 2018.

Project Aurora, meanwhile, is a free to play mobile strategy game that seeks to shrink the EVE Online experience into the palm of your hand. It won’t link with your EVE Online account, but instead will be an entirely separate massively multiplayer mobile universe which, like its PC-based big brother, CCP hopes will be filled with ‘epic player stories’. Again, CCP is co-developing this nameless game, this time with Finnish developer PlayRaven.

“The industry is getting more and more specialised,” Hilmar Veigar Pétursson tells us. “Having all that specialisation in-house is not a very sustainable. So we are tapping into people who are specialised in genres and platforms. In the case of Sumo, for shooters, and in the case of PlayRaven for mobile. It’s a way to leverage expertise in the world without having to hire people for a small period of time.

“Both companies have a lot of input on game design, a lot of input on look and feel, second-to-second, those kinds of thing. Because that’s usually where the rubber meets the road. Where we at CCP probably have the most expertise is with economies, communities, large scale games that go on forever, collaboration with communities and feedback channels. We are more and more deciding to specialise on certain aspects and then partner with people for others.

““For years and years we have wanted to bring the EVE universe to mobile devices in a way that is tailored to the platform and EVE fans. We wanted to find a partner who is passionate about EVE, has a track record of producing high quality and deep mobile games and is capable of creating completely new experiences on mobile. PlayRaven fit the bill perfectly,”

Lasse Seppa?nen, co-founder and CEO at PlayRaven, is very excited to be working on bringing EVE to mobile devices. “We’re all longtime fans of CCP and EVE Online,” he says. “So we’re immensely proud and honored to be working with such a legendary developer and beloved franchise. It’s really a dream come true to have the opportunity to create a new EVE experience on mobile.”