EVE: Valkyrie

~ the eulogy ~

I missed this one at the hardware layer. In 2016 a consumer Oculus Rift was 599 dollars before you counted the machine capable of driving it, and Oculus did not ship to Turkey at all. Getting one meant an importer and a markup and a customs line, for a device with about four things worth doing on it. The headset was the gate and I was on the wrong side of it, along with most of the world.

Valkyrie began as an internal hack week project at CCP called EVE-VR, demoed at the EVE Fanfest in Reykjavik in 2013 on an early Oculus development kit. People came out of that demo talking the way people talk about a technology they have just been converted to. It was the single most effective piece of evangelism virtual reality had in that period, and it was a side project by a company that made spreadsheets in space.

CCP built it out properly and released it on 28 March 2016, the same day the consumer Rift started arriving in boxes. PlayStation VR got it on 13 October 2016 and the HTC Vive version followed that November. For a while it was the answer to the question of what you actually play on the thing you just bought.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The game itself was good at exactly one thing and knew it. You sat in a cockpit and turned your head to keep an enemy fighter in view while your hands flew the ship somewhere else entirely. That separation of looking from steering is the trick nothing on a monitor can do, and Valkyrie was built end to end around it.

What it could not solve was population. A multiplayer-only game needs a crowd, and the crowd here was capped at the number of people who owned a very expensive headset in 2016. Reviews within six months of launch were already noting how long it took to fill a match. On 26 September 2017 CCP shipped an update called Warzone that dropped the VR requirement and opened cross-play with flat screens, which is a strange thing for a VR flagship to do and was a fairly clear admission of the arithmetic.

~ what got buried with it ~

In October 2017, one month after Warzone, CCP announced it was ending VR development completely. It closed its Atlanta office and sold the Newcastle studio that had built Valkyrie to Sumo Digital. The company that had done more than almost anyone to make people believe in consumer VR got out of it inside four years, and said plainly that the market had not shown up.

The servers stayed on anyway until 1 July 2022, when CCP pulled the game from sale along with Gunjack and Sparc, and set 5 August as the end. The part that stings is what went with it. Valkyrie had a single player campaign, the sort of thing you would expect to survive a shutdown, and it did not. It was gated behind the same online service, so switching off the servers deleted the offline game too. Anyone who bought a 599 dollar headset in 2016 to play this now owns nothing that runs.

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