A message from EVE: Valkyrie Executive Producer Owen O'Brien
It's been nearly three years since I first tried on a modern VR headset and since then I've never looked back. Well actually that's completely untrue. Since then I've never looked back more, or up or down. It's changed the way I look at and indeed play games.
It's not just that you can see the world through someone else's eyes – it's that you can see other worlds through your own eyes. You are there. In an age where we are always doing multiple things at once this is pure and total immersion. There is nothing else. You are the Valkyrie pilot. All that matters is the guy in front of you – and the guy behind you.
We've seen huge advances in the technology and I'm sure this is just the beginning. We've also seen huge advances in our game. It's grown from a tech demo borne out of a passion for VR into a fully-fledged game – built by gamers for gamers. And again this is just the beginning.
I'm incredibly proud of what the team here in Newcastle have created, but what we have built is not an end in itself. Rather, it's a basecamp to start from. Where we go from here is up to you. We want this to be the best competitive multiplayer game on the VR platform. But we don't get to decide that. The players do.
Goethe said that talent grows in quiet places but that character is only developed in the full current of human life. Similarly it is only when a game like this is live and being played by thousands of players that we really find out its true character. That is when it truly starts to develop.
The Founder's Pack is your chance to access the game at the beginning and to help shape it. Over the coming months we plan to release new content and features, maps, games, modes, ships – but exactly what we do and when we're keeping deliberately fluid.
One of the challenges of building for a platform that is truly ground-breaking (and not even released yet) is that we don't know what we don't know. We have not had huge amounts of existing players to test on nor indeed other games to learn from. We are at the forefront of this technology and by necessity that means we will make mistakes – but that's all part of the fun and I would not want to be anywhere else.
We intend to be very open about what our feature roadmap looks like and we want your feedback on its content and priority. Something that may seem important or cool to us may not to you - and vice versa. One of the advantages of being a small team is that we can adapt and react quickly. I'm a great believer that good ideas come from all areas. So please give us your suggestions and as long as they are sane (or better still, the right kind of insane) then we will try our best to get them in. Oh they also have to be good of course – not just (in)sane.
Central to the concept of Valkyrie is that every death is not an end but the beginning of the next life. That we learn more from our mistakes than our successes – "You did not kill me – you made me stronger". It's the same philosophy for us developing the game. This is the beginning of a journey. Welcome to the next life.
Owen O'Brien / CCP Digger
EVE: Valkyrie Executive Producer
CCP Games