EVE Online producer: "I don't ever want Eve to be nice and fluffy"

EVE Online is never going to be a happy friendly people place, according to executive producer John Lander.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Lander discussed the difficulty of maintaining CCP's shadowed vision and making the MMO less than impenetrable to new players.

"I want to try and reduce that barrier of entry to playing Eve. I don't ever want Eve to be nice and fluffy and it's a wonderful place to be," he said.

"I think there's a place in the MMO world for a dark and dangerous, really good sci-fi world where you can be the goodie, the baddie, a criminal, the Good Samaritan. But it's very important we allow as many people as possible to get access to that game."

Retribution makes a number of significant changes to game system and the user interface which are intended to make the basic gameplay easier to understand without destroying the potential for complexity, risk and reward.

But CCP is far from finished, and future expansion won't necessarily be about refining existing features.

“We will put in some really good big expansive things we've been looking at. We've done a lot of prototyping over the last year, but also we've got a backlog of things which could probably take us through another 20 years," Lander said.

“There are some good things coming. We almost have too much choice, which is a great first world problem. As soon as we've prioritised what it is we want to do, we'll start communicating that out.”

EVE Online's latest expansion, Retribution, went live this week.