Interview: EVE Vanguard's 'Interoperability' in the EVE Universe With CCP Brand Director Grant Tasker

Already, the EVE Online name and universe carries a lot of weight and legacy, with twenty years and an infamous community of ambitious space politicians and soldiers—as well as other spin-off games under that umbrella. Therefore, Vanguard, the next major FPS from CCP, brings a lot of expectations, both from eager EVE fans and outsiders looking to dive into the decades-old universe. 

It’s not the first FPS from CCP, and definitely not in the EVE universe, but CCP seems eager to take its old lessons from Dust 514 and new lessons in the gaming industry to bring what they call an “MMOFPS”—a massively multiplayer online first-person shooter. More details unveiled throughout the weekend showed off massive player socialization and NPC ambitions, plus a new play test date and an Early Access estimation of Summer 2026. 

During EVE Fanfest this weekend, MMORPG was given the opportunity to talk to Brand Directors Grant Tasker, who has been with the studio for nearly four years managing multiple titles at CCP. Our time focused on Vanguard as CCP unveiled more details about it at EVE Fanfest throughout that weekend. 

We got to speak about Tasker’s role with Vanguard, and what it means for both EVE players and curious FPS players who may want to join New Eden—and we even briefly confirmed Vanguard will come to consoles as part of the launch roadmap.

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MMORPG: Could you briefly demystify and describe what you do with CCP and how that applies to Vanguard? 

Grant Tasker, CCP Brand Director: As brand director, you're not speaking to a dev today, but I try to help inform and work closely with the dev team to make sure that what we're making has an addressable audience, and that we're able to position it to that audience in an effective manner. So, it’s looking at market trends, looking at marketability, and making sure we're understanding the target audience, and that potential customers work very closely with the dev team and the community team.

It's very different, a fundamentally different role for a game that's yet to be launched, versus a game that is fully operational, and has been for 21 years. The role with EVE Online more is trying to increase the awareness of what EVE Online is and the perception of it. We’re always looking to try and bring new players into the experience side that they may have otherwise not known about or didn't understand or maybe didn't think it was for them. 

With a title that's launching, there's more energy and focus on what the future looks like. Predicting features is very hard, but we’re trying to make sure that we are making a game that players want, and that we can work with the team to maximize areas where we're going to be able to stand out from competitors or differentiate ourselves a little bit. It’s just making sure that the product matches up with the audience's needs, and that we’re able to bring that package to them. 

MMORPG: Could you get into more of the granular thoughts and decisions in your role of introducing this FPS in the EVE universe and within this CCP diaspora of games?

Tasker: Yes, I think it's probably no surprise to anyone that having an FPS within the EVE universe has been an ambition of the company for years. Uh, it's something we've tried before with Dust 514 way before my time. Uh, there is. So it's always been about expanding New Eden’s universe and new ways to play and impact that universe. 

With an FPS, we always kind of thought, it’s an obvious thing—you know, you've got all these planets and these stories that are happening in space, and you know you bring them down to the ground and create an experience there that could be interacted with the wider universe. 

In terms of decision making, it's a collaborative approach, so we have that vision from senior leadership, and I feed into that. We'll [also] try to inform, and take feedback from existing players because we run regular closed play tests monthly, making sure we're listening to players, how they're engaging and how they're reacting to it, as well as looking at market research. 

I conduct market research to make sure that what we're making actually has an audience that's going to have fun appealing and trying to understand their needs and desires and how we can position Vanguard for them. So, to make sure that these things are lined up, right? It's all about a consistent approach and the product. So, how you present it, it's all going to be lined up. I can't say one thing and deliver another thing, so those have to come together. 

It's a very collaborative approach across development. As a brand director, I see a kind of bridge between developing and publishing. The brand is always the bridge between these publishing teams. 

MMORPG: With a lot of these players coming from EVE, what are some of the expectations that you're actively managing for these players, who are coming from this big picture simulation where literally every decision can immediately affect history, and create battles and just become this immediate thing? Because Vanguard kind of presents itself, as I believe some of what they've introduced us as like an MMO FPS. What's that balance you're working with right now?

Tasker: It's interesting because we've obviously for the last year or so, we've had an EVE player base. We have an ecosystem that we can engage with players. We know that, also, there's going to be an essentially much larger audience that don't play EVE, who are interested in this FPS, so that's a whole different thing. My role was to sort of understand that audience, and how we can introduce players from outside the EVE ecosystem. 

But to your point, we have been working with the existing EVE community, [but] not just the [active] players. They could be players who have taken a break. It could be players who played Dust. There are existing human beings within our kind of ecosystem who we are engaging with and putting Vanguard in front of. 

For EVE Online, I think of it as a society of humans who are trying to cater for different needs, different wants—a lot of politicking going on there, right? And so we can talk about that interoperability, the expectations there. The expectation, the exciting thing, is that as an FPS player, I can have a potential impact into this much larger universe that has a rich history. So I think that's a very appealing proposition. And the fact that whatever I do in the game persists and will always persist, it will be etched into the history of New Eden.

That's really, really important to us—we've slowly been increasing the interoperability between the two. I think we've learned the lessons from the past. I think orbital bombardment with Dust [was this] huge, shiny feature, but with lots of challenges. Let's just say we've been taking a more methodical approach to gradually increasing how the two games interact, and that will evolve over time. So initially, we started allowing Vanguard players on the ground to impact corruption and suppression in EVE Online, so they could put their actions on the ground and shift the balance. It was a quite light touch, because we just want to test, do the things, talk to each other when they need to, and can we present that information back to the players in both games.

MMORPG: You mean the Deathless tech that they're talking about, right? I think [CCP] talked about some of the concepts of some of the science stuff that [the Deathless] have brought about. 

Tasker: I'm not the lore guy, but yes. Deathless has a story that's been in EVE Online for a couple of years now, actually, probably a bit longer. But his kind of most recent thing was freeing up pirates to go and create more chaos online. And as part of that, you had corruption, and that was the corrupting mechanism and EVE saw pirates causing chaos and corruption, right? And then you had the defenders creating suppression, and Vanguard on the ground could choose one or the other. 

Actually, when we first put it into the game, you could only do the corrupting. Then, obviously, some players were like, well, I don't align with pirates. We added suppression, so you could do both in December and the ground break event we ran 28th of November to the 9th of December. 

We went further, and we ran live insurgencies. So insurgency already exists in EVE Online. And that's where you can flip systems—so up to a rating of five, plus or minus, flipped. And during that event in November and December last year, nine-versus-nine skirmish experiences would go down there, and they could take control of cannons on the grounds to counter NPCs in the sky, and depending on how they how they performed on the ground, that would impact the insurgency in EVE. So that's where we got to. 

It's sort of slow steps. Insurgency was an improved thing. The future is super exciting—where that could go, and the interoperability, not just from an NPC perspective, but from a player perspective. So thinking about, we're going to talk about contracts and commissions, and, as a Capsuleer, creating content for Vanguards, creating roles for them to go and do whatever they deem the greater good to be.

MMORPG: Some of the other things you mentioned included bringing in those new players, because Vanguard seems really to have positioned itself as an introduction to the EVE Universe for these FPS players. In that framework, or in general, is Vanguard something you kind of expect to eventually transition for them into EVE Online, or do you think that really, Vanguard will stand on its own, as its own experience?

Tasker: It has to stand on its own as an experience. It has to. I don't know what the overall split would be, but… An FPS player is fundamentally different, sometimes to like what the EVE game is. 

There are some people who will not transition from one to the other. I think there are some players who will from an FPS become perhaps their gateway into the game is through the FPS—they may evolve to want a deeper, longer experience and take it on.  We're not relying on that at all. Vanguard has to stand alone as an FPS. At its core, we have to satisfy the FPS audience needs. I think, actually, it's more just like expanding the universe, expanding the awareness and engagement a player can have with New Eden. 

We hear a lot about gamers who are interested in what EVE can offer. But maybe, what the current EVE Online experience is, is maybe just not quite for them. We all know about the EVE learning curve. It's a cliff edge. But there's a lot of people who are interested in this persistent world with thousands of players, each with their own stories and agendas, and the sandbox world, and having a shooting experience within that. Sure, they can grow to evolve into the other, but we're not in any way reliant on that. 

It's the shooter experience. You've got to, if you're an FPS player, come in, run and gun, do your thing, find a bigger purpose, sure, feed into that bigger experience. But, you know, naturally evolved to become a Capsuleer here? That I wouldn’t expect a big proportion of players to do that. 

MMORPG: CCP has this philosophy, I’ve noticed, of kind of angling towards longevity in their games. There's this thing that FPS games tend to have players who are very dedicated, but on the other hand, also, there's the issue of a lot of games going into early access and kind of perpetually being in there, or [early access] could just be generally make or break for any reason. So how are you and the team really approaching this early access period, and, really the time beyond it into the full 1.0 launch? 

Tasker: The honest answer is that we don't know—anything beyond two years in game development is a bit of a mystery. Anyone that says they know exactly what's coming…?  

But yeah, you're absolutely right. Longevity, that’s exactly what that’s about. I kind of think of the term forever shooter, but I don't mean that in terms of a live service thing. It's just this is a game where you can exist. Your character can exist and persist for as long as you want it to, and you come back to the game hasn't reset. There's not a yearly kind of like version. This is just a world that you can exist in, and you can choose to exist in it as much as you'd like or as little as you like, and you can choose to take breaks, and come back. 

We have realistic expectations around early access, and what that means, and how long we’re being. Perpetual early access is not our goal. We do plan to launch out of early access and onto consoles and have a moment. Then when that moment comes, there is a roadmap towards that, but things change. And the thing that we are really keen to make sure we do is we listen to players—and we understand we don't have all the answers, and we'll learn things, and we'll get new ideas, and we don't always know how long those things are going to take, right? 

So we have a plan to exit early access. We have a plan also for a V1, and we have a plan to launch on console. So early access will not be perpetual for us. How long it will be, that's a question I couldn't tell you today with a degree of certainty. 

MMORPG: And there does seem to be a lot that goes into distinguishing like Vanguard, apart from the other like EVE Universe games, not just as an FPS, but just as its own title, in terms of the mood, the atmosphere, and even the audience. What are you and the team working towards as an image, and what has that been like within that wider EVE Universe?

Tasker: We're going from a one IP company to a four IP company, right? Last year, soft launched Galaxy Conquest on mobile. We've obviously announced Vanguard. We're getting into early access next summer. In the soft launch, at the minute, we're running monthly internal play tests and play tests; we're running almost daily internal play tests. We're running monthly play test with our founders. And we're doing these bigger events every, every so often, trying to get back to your point. And then, obviously, Frontier is a new IP as well…

MMORPG: So now you're kind of almost—I don't want to say competing against yourself, but it's easier for some players to start blending these together, especially with the non-EVE Online titles, like, oh, just another EVE game that's coming in. 

Tasker: It's definitely a challenge for us. I'm not going to say we nailed it by any stretch. We're learning all the time. We are going from a one IP studio to four IPs—What does that mean? How do we differentiate? 

Vanguard has a shared universe with EVE Online; New Eden is a shared universe, so it shares a lot of the same tone and emotion. It's a beautifully corrupted world, is how we describe it. And so, there are mature tones and themes in there. Loss has meaning; there's thousands of characters dying whenever a ship goes down, right? Not to wash over that, but, like, it happens. Death, construction, war and politics. It's a mature game. 

How we differentiate [Vanguard]... we kind of were under the umbrella of EVE Online a little bit when we first announced it. We talked about it being a module. EVE Vanguard is a standalone product that shares that universe and has interoperability that can influence both games. 

There's a degree of shared identity and hierarchy, but we also are establishing its own unique, what I call, brand codes. Have we got them locked down and everything today? No, we're going through research right now on Vanguard, so we're putting that in front of potential audiences, gathering that feedback, and we'll be coming out, getting posted to early access. We should be in a position where we have a very clear identity of what EVE Vanguard is, and how we kind of differentiate it between the rest of the IPs.

MMORPG: What have been some sticking points so far in that research, and having all these play tests, and just working with the material so far?

Tasker: One would be like, character, like—who are you as a Vanguard? What do you look like? That's been a challenge that we've had to go through. But I'm pretty excited about the character direction we're going in now, and it's being validated as we go now. Previously, some of the character, direction we put out just didn't land particularly well, and we're aware of that. We heard that, and we're set about addressing that and making sure that in the future, that information, that feedback, is coming in earlier in the process. 

MMORPG: Is there anything that you're super excited to kind of put out there right now as the Brand Director, and it also sounds like an FPS player? 

Tasker: I look at it from a commercial perspective. Like a lot of Hunt: Showdown, and what they've done in terms of their gradual growth over time—it’s raising, and their player base has grown over time. It's not been this big spike and then a massive drop, and then dealing with, kind of, like, the challenges of bringing new players back in. It's been, it's been sustainable growth. I'm excited about how we approach that. 

I'm super excited about the stuff we're announcing [during EVE Fanfest]. Today [Friday, May 2], we're announcing a few things, but we're getting into it more tomorrow [during the Fanfest keynote and panel]. 

Obviously we're making a shooter at the minute. We've had one gun in the game for a year or so, there’s three more. We're been prototyping, testing with founders. You’re going to be able to play them in the September Nemesis event. I think the adaptive weaponry is really exciting—that's definitely something I'm pretty excited about. 

We're doing something that I don’t think anyone else is doing in terms of our approach to an MMO FPS, this shared universe of thousands of stories, where players can create their own stories, and you as an FPS player can impact those. I'm looking forward to some of the further future stuff for the interaction between players in both games, and how social structures and social organization player organization is going to manifest down the line. 

But for now, more guns is great, the stuff we're doing with the curated modular maps is amazing, I think. [Lead Technical Artist Raven showed at Fanfest how] we're able to create really good, high quality, high definition maps in a suitable cadence that's going to satiate the appetite of FPS players. It's amazing. The stuff they're doing on Unreal 5 is phenomenal. 

[Disclaimer: Travel and accommodation for EVE Fanfest was provided by CCP Games. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.]