April 3, 2008 6:00 AMRock, Paper, Shotgun has published a new interview with EVE Online’s senior technical producer, Torfi Frans Olafsson. The Q&A focuses on his work on the “walk-in stations” concept which will, for the first time, give players a physical avatar for their characters. The changes will allow players to visit space stations and participate in a variety of activities including gambling and hiring NPCs to staff player run offices.There’s also a new interface for corp recruitment. Players are going to be able to rent NPC bots as staff within their offices, which we eventually intend to be programmable. Players will be able to set up dialogue trees, and give and receive items. We’ll be able to have players setting up their own missions using these dialogue tree systems. These bots can also be representative for the players, recruiters or a bar-tender bot. These station services that I mention are going to be player-owned. My vision is to have as little as NPC-driven stuff in there as possible. The avatar-services, bars, and offices are all going to be built by players, and will require rent. Running in bar in Yulai will cost a little more than running a bar in some abandoned low-sec station. If you think about how certain other world-like MMO systems work, people come in, they build stuff, then they move on. Other people come in look around, go build their own stuff, and leave. It’s all empty, dead, but still there. So you have some kind of post-apocalypse where the structures are there and there are no people. I don’t like this because it doesn’t push people together, and that’s why I want upkeep and rent in our businesses. The business that are not people will just fade away, as in real life. So also in stations people are going to be able to meet and play mini games. They’re going to be playing gambling games… you know you don’t call up your friends in real life and say “I know this great ten metre by ten metre hall in town, with nothing in it. Let’s go and stand in there and talk…” You don’t do that. You always have a mission: drink beer, shoot some pool. We translate that directly to games. In Eve people hang out and mine, or run mission gangs. They’re not just chatting. This is why we’re including these gambling games. We’re going to implement some very familiar strategic games, such as poker, and go. These games are all visible too, so they can become spectator sports. People can gamble away their fortunes and give people something to talk about.Head over to the site below to read more.Rock, Paper, Shotgun: The Future Of EVECCP GamesTransGamingEVE Online

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