To many, the universe of Eve Online has always seemed appealing, but impenetrable. Having taken a few cautious steps into the fringes of this world a few times now, the idea of being part of a massive space empire, all made up of real players performing real operations and creating real stories is fascinating, and I’ve often been tempted to become a part of it.
However, MMOs are too much for me at the best of times, let alone one that embraces its reputation as a ‘spreadsheet game’, so I’ve never built up the courage to actually dive in and become a part of it. The team behind Eve Online is well aware that there are lots of players out there like me, and their latest project, Eve Vanguard, is something they hope will finally win a section of that crowd over, largely because they count themselves among those not-yet-players.
Vanguard is Eve’s latest foray into the world of first-person shooters. Vanguard sees you drop onto a planet with a squad of up to three and take contracts that give you objectives. These could be things like scavenging for specific materials, claiming drop zones full of loot, or destroying targets out in the world.
On top of that, there are extraction shooter elements, as anything you loot (that isn’t for an objective) you get to take with you and potentially bring out on your next mission including gun mods, ammo, and utility items. It keeps to that classic Eve saying though: only take what you’re prepared to lose, as other squads will be in these maps at the same time, and could choose to gun you down and take whatever you’ve gathered.
In the current version, these contracts are generated by the game, but the eventual goal is to allow the in-game corporations (player-led factions) to create their own objectives, potentially even from within Eve Online, creating a system where the corporation leaders up in their spaceship can send orders to their troops on the ground.
Crossover with Eve Online is one of the major goals here. While the two games may end up with significantly different player bases, CCP still wants players to feel like they’re in the same universe and be able to directly affect each other, though that side of things is still in the very early stages. As game director Snorri Árnason puts it, the team has currently built “two hanging bridges” between the games that they intend to strengthen and expand upon overtime, though we’re not sure exactly what that’s going to look like yet.
If that’s not action-packed enough for you, you can play Insurgency mode, a 9v9 point control mode where you battle for three orbital cannons on the ground that will constantly fire on one of the two ships in orbit, representing either team. When one ship is destroyed, that team loses.
Having gotten hands-on with the game, it’s an experience that requires you to build up momentum before you get into the meaty stuff. Dropping into maps to wander around and gather resources isn’t particularly engaging, but once you have a decent backpack of gear built-up it becomes a lot more fun. Not only do you feel more capable when coming face-to-face with another squad, but you develop your own goals – a feeling that will no doubt be enhanced once integration with Eve Online’s corporations is added.
Vanguard is launching this month into CCP’s version of early access, where all players subscribed to the Omega tier will have access to it, though it has been available to a small group of players since June, and the team has been relying heavily on them for feedback. They’ve praised how helpful the Eve player base has been in guiding Vanguard’s development, even releasing builds with lots of unfinished, placeholder assets while feeling confident that players won’t get bogged down by it and instead give them feedback on the stuff that matters.
“It’s important for us to understand where we put the emphasis on the depth and the strategy,” Lead Product Manager Scott Davis explains. “So we give them something quite simple – it’s generally a prototype – and the feedback we get is ‘I want some more depth here’ or ‘I want this to feel like it has more purpose behind it’ and it allows us to really focus on the right areas.
“It’s a very different way of doing things, so there was a level of acceptance we had to reach culturally within the studio of being comfortable putting unfinished work in the hands of players.”
Even when things do go wrong with this early content, the community is able to take it in its stride and make something memorable out of it.
“Even the mistakes, like the drone making it in,” Senior Brand Manager Emily Akland says. “We haven’t even talked about the egg.”
“Oh yeah,” Davis says as the room fills with laughter. “We accidentally left a prototype in that was just this egg – it was just a placeholder prototype for a drone we were working on – and [the players] started worshiping it and taking it on adventures around the map. People realized it had a large collision volume so they started spawning loads of them to create cages. It’s awesome, and giving content like that to our players, and the positive response we get from that is such a lift to our development.”
One of the reasons the team is so keen on maintaining close contact with player feedback as they develop is that this isn’t the first time that Eve has stepped into the world of FPS. Eve Dust 514 launched in 2013 and while some players loved it, it was shut down in 2016 due to a mixed reception and dwindling playerbase. CCP is keen to not make the same mistakes again with Vanguard, and for that reason, has many Dust veterans in their tester groups to help avoid the same pitfalls.
The main way they’ve done this is to make sure they focus on the shooter first, rather than overhyping and promising loads of cool systems that fit in the fantasy of Eve Vanguard, but aren’t important to the core mechanics that are still being developed. This approach seems to have worked too, as the shooting feels solid – though not world-class – and you have a lot of freedom when it comes to building weapons.
Much like when assembling a spaceship in Eve Online, it’s possible to screw it up. Davies was keen to make sure the system didn’t always result in something usable, and it makes it more thought-provoking when you know that it is possible to make your gun significantly worse if you don’t pay attention to how you do it. The flip side is that there’s way more potential to make something overpowered and ridiculous. Davies told me about how one player turned one of the game’s most basic guns into what we could only describe as “a railgun” with massively destructive capabilities.
On top of that, many of those systems that were promised for Dust but never appeared – like crafting in the field, mining, and PvE – are already there in Vanguard at a foundational level, further showing how this team’s approach has been successful so far.
It leaves Eve Vangurd brimming with potential for exponential growth. It remains to be seen how it actually plays out long-term – whether it brings in its own unique player base or remains propped up by existing Eve fans – but the team has put the game in the best position possible for success, and as long as they continue on this path, I’m optimistic about Vanguard’s future.