Interview: Finding The MMO In The FPS Of EVE Vanguard - EVE Fanfest 2025

During last week’s EVE Fanfest 2025 in Reykjavik, Iceland, CCP Games highlighted what the future looks like for their FPS set within the EVE universe. EVE Vanguard follows in the footsteps of Dust 514 in that it aims to be a shooter set within the EVE universe that both influences and is influenced by the grand events playing out in New Eden. As EVE Online creative director Bergur “CCP Burger” Finnbogason has said to me many times, “As above, so below.”

This means breaking free from the conception that CCP Games is simply making a extraction shooter with EVE-like elements. Instead, the team is aiming to do so much more, building up a true MMOFPS with the connected universe where players will drop onto planets, complete contracts, and wage war below the stars of New Eden itself.

As above, so below indeed. 

“I think the November event was the first time we were generally telling press, ‘Actually, we’re not making an open sandbox shooter, which is what we were kind of calling it, right?” EVE Vanguard Game Director Scott “CCP Colins” David told MMORPG in an interview during EVE Fanfest over the weekend. “We are making an MMOFPS and we were starting to talk very conceptually about what that meant. And now we’re talking a bit more concrete about actually what features that’s going to be and [what] that means. So I think it was always really something that we were evolving through.”

Davis says that the November test was the real rubber meets the road moment of whether or not people would “stop calling us an extraction shooter.” Since its reveal back at EVE Fanfest 2023, Vanguard has been saddled with that descriptor thanks to the gameplay on offer very early on. Hell, I wrote the article that called it an “extraction shooter” right in the title. The November test itself was Vanguard’s moment to show that the team at CCP’s London office was building something much more than simply an extraction shooter with an EVE tie-in.

Tthis feeds into the idea that EVE Vanguard is a true social MMO FPS and not simply a hub-based shooter with some extraction elements. The politics on the ground in Vanguard can have an influence on what is going on above, and the wars waged by capsuleers in space will have an impact on what is going on down below. This interoperability is key to creating a compelling EVE experience within Vanguard, and it’s something that speaks to both the EVE-curious, as well as players who fondly remember CCP Games’ previous attempt at a connected shooter: Dust 514. 

“It’s kind of like a drug,” EVE’s Executive Producer Snorri “CCP Rattati” Arnason said in our interview during Fanfest 2025. “If you played Dust, then you kind of don’t want anything else. Like, nothing hits the spot. It’s literally the biggest thing that is ever said to us on social media, it’s always ‘Bring back Dust.’ [...] And it’s the same thing for me. I don’t want to play [Call of Duty] 2 or Battlefield 6, it’s lost its shine somehow. And I think, going back to what it is, it’s nostalgic. It wasn’t the best game in the universe, but it was way cooler than other FPS shooters and I think that’s something.”

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

Vanguard’s Art Director Ben Cottage also notes that this is an exciting time to simply introduce the EVE universe to a group of players who might not have otherwise experienced it, especially when compared to the more realistic and gritty military shooters the market is saturated with right now.  

“I think it’s really exciting from an art perspective, to go down this route [where] we can really exaggerate the beauty of each faction when it comes to the weapon roster. I think it’s easy if you just have like CoD where it’s all M16s or stuff like that. When you’ve got the different empires and factions that we’ve got, there’s a massive sort of scale that we can express really well.”

In fact, much of what the Vanguard team talked about those features that move it away from being an extraction shooter and into the MMOFPS territory that captures the essence of what made Dust 514 so cool. Social areas called Bastions were introduced that act as hubs in different regions of space, with each Bastion exerting influence on nearby planets, ready for Vanguard clones to drop onto below. 

These Bastions can be upgraded by completing commissions for the faction that owns the hub, and, expanding their sphere of influence within EVE’s universe of New Eden. As their sphere of influence expands, they could end up overlapping with other Bastions, causing potential conflict, especially when we throw player-made and corporation Bastions into the mix, post launch. 

These Bastions are social spaces, so the conflict happens on planet, with Vanguards deploying to complete commissions and upgrade both their own arsenals, gain reputation with a faction, and grind to upgrade the Bastion itself. But you aren’t locked to a specific Bastion in EVE Vanguard. Much like EVE Online has Jump Clones which allow you to effectively save your consciousness in one place and effectively fast travel to another Clone positioned in a station across New Eden, Vanguard will allow you do much the same. 

However, just like in EVE, you don’t take your stuff with you. This is a digital consciousness you’ll be transporting, and while you can ship your stuff to another Bastion, it’s going to take time - which is something Scott and the team needs to figure out the right balance to in order to feel EVE but also not feel overly punishing for those who are just jumping into Vanguard as a shooter. 

“It’s something we still need to balance,” Davis explained. “We’re even playing around with the ideas of Bastions in High Sec, and Low Sec Bastions and Null Sec, what that means as well. We want to create an environment where players aren’t just, ‘Deep end, off you go, fend for yourself.’ It really needs to, especially as we were even talking earlier, right? This is a more casual entry into [the EVE] universe, right? How we plot that journey for people and what that really means, and I think the balance of that is really cool. But it’s all born out of the idea of, even if we wanted to - and we don’t - we’re not going to do resets. [...] New Eden doesn’t reset.”

Snorri took it a step further and highlighted how swapping Bastions can also act as a soft reset in of itself, as you’ll need to effectively start over grinding rep with the faction, unlocking systems such as a larger bank, and even figure out the individual meta game that has formed around that Bastion thanks to the types of planets within its influence. 

“It sort of can also just be a time or a material sync to jump,” Snorri offered as a follow-up. “‘I’m going to jump here, you send my stuff, it’s going to show up later.’ And maybe I can’t send all my stuff because I have a smaller inventory. Now in that space, I have to grind reputation to have a bigger bank, and then I can send more stuff. But maybe [then] you realize, ‘I don’t need that stuff anymore.’ Like, ‘I’ve outgrown my stuff here.’”

Scott, an avid survival game fan, likens the experience to waking up on the beach in any major survival game like Ark: Survival Evolved. 

“The idea of going from one Bastion to another feels like waking up on the beach again. And that motivation of having to rely on your skill to kind of bootstrap back up. Bootstrapping is a really important motivation in these games. It’s building that wealth and power.”

Giving Players the tools to create

EVE Online might have an overarching story of its main Empires and factions constantly locked in war over resources and territory, but the story that shines through the most is the one crafted by its players. It’s spawned three whole history books, made headlines in major gaming and sometimes even mainstream media coverage, and fuels the passion that drives almost 1500 players out to EVE Fanfest on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic every time CCP holds the player gathering. 

EVE Vanguard aims to accomplish that same player-driven storytelling within its boots on the ground fantasy that not only is influenced by the goings on in the stars, but can start to influence those stories as well in the coming years. 

“Take the FPS out at the moment and we need motivation that’s driving why people are going down to the surface of planets,” Scott explains. He continued, “And the motivation in EVE Online, what is pushing people around all of space is other players. It’s players as content; I think something that EVE Online has tapped into that not a lot of games realize, which is people keep playing EVE, people keep generating motivations.”

This is, again, where Bastions come into play. These are really like the towns of EVE Vanguard and can both instill a sense of pride of where you live, and eventually a sense of belonging with the faction - NPC, player or otherwise - that controls the space. 

I made the comparison to the Tower in Destiny, a single hub where players can meet, shop, upgrade and group up before heading down to a planet to complete missions, though Snorri likens it more to “multiple Towers,” or “multiple Iron Forges.” But it’s living in these spaces, meeting other players, having that shared camaraderie that comes from learning the meta and learning the space where your Bastion has influence, working together for the same faction and toward the same goals - that can endear pride in the Bastion you’re living in. Throw in Player Made Bastions with freelance jobs (introduced with the Legion expansion later this month), and it adds even more to the table for players to take hold of.

“But then, like having pride, you can start having, like, ‘Okay you live here and you live [there]’ and immediately, ‘We need to be better than those guys,’” Snorri said with a chuckle. “ It’s going to have animosity immediately if you can exist in these places.”

“It’s territorial,” Davis adds. “Like I said, that is now player driven. That is now players driving motivations against each other that we don’t have to be creating content for. We’re creating…you know, we overuse this a lot like, ‘Tools, not rules,’ right? But we’re creating tools for the players to play in their own sandbox and have their own fun.”

Crafting worlds

So how do you go about creating the worlds of EVE Vanguard, especially with so many planets to represent within the New Eden star cluster? Ben Cottage’s team has been working on that since the beginning, and thanks to leveraging Unreal Engine 5, his team is able to make these planets faster than ever. 

Yet it’s not been without its own set of growing pains. 

“I think the scale is just a fantastic opportunity to kind of show, ‘What does one of 68,000 planets look like?’” Ben explains. “How many planets can we do? We’d like to do hundreds, thousands, you know. But I think what Unreal does for us, it allows us to use like, [procedural content generation] and world partition to create maps quicker than how we were doing it in Unreal 4 with our first map. So I think it just allows us to create more content quicker. So from an art direction perspective, [the] more biomes that we create, the more sets that we create just gives level design a set to use to expand the universe from the ground.”

Davis chimed in, stating that this change had to PCG had to happen because they were simply spending too long building maps otherwise. 

“I hope it doesn’t feel like hubris, but there’s of if it’s cool, let’s take a moment to think if we can do it right,” Scott added. “And we went to the tech art team and the environment team and we said, ‘Hey, we’re currently spending eight months to build one map. That’s not going to populate a universe.’ 

To that end, Davis explains that the team went out and hired a level designer who began building levels using the new UE5 tools, though the team is keen to point out that procedural generation doesn’t mean “press button, get map,” but rather it is used as a framework to build within.

As a result, this gives CCP London a generative framework to effectively build out biomes and create maps using set pieces, allowing them to craft tons of maps without spending eight months just to finish one. 

“It’s a really interesting way to think about it from an art perspective,” Ben says. “Before, where we were like, ‘This needs to look exactly like this, exactly that color.’ Now, what the art team’s thinking about is, if we have like a sedimentary, metamorphic and igneous rock set, that kind of unlocks everything. Then, when you’re looking at colors and vegetation and the variation of all that, you can actually create lots of different biomes with that kind of base set.”

Testing With Confidence

Obviously, with the runway to EVE Vanguard’s big early access launch next year so far out, there’s a ton of testing between now and then to be had before it’s ready for an always online experience. Since 2024, Vanguard has undergone tons of public tests and countless private ones, giving players a chance to shape the world that Vanguard will inhabit come Summer 2026. 

This allows the team to be able to iterate on thighs, test them with players, gather feedback and refine features well before the early access period even begins. 

It also means being confident enough to release features into the hands of its testers without the level of shine or polish - especially visually - that you might expect, instead sometimes handing almost a grey box version to a tester just to get some feedback. 

“It would be very easy to just bark, ‘Hey, we’re working with the community,’ because everyone says that these days,” Davis explains. “But like we are. Mining is a brilliant example. It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re getting a lot of feedback that they mine in EVE, can they mine in Vanguard?’ And then go, ‘Well, let’s not spend eight months building a feature.’”

He then went on to describe a scenario where the team effectively built a prototype (“out of sellotape”) and had something to present to players within three weeks. And while it didn’t look pretty or have cool animations like you’d expect something in players’ hands to have, the functionality was there and testable, and players were able to provide valuable feedback on whether or not the team was on the right track - well before they spent months and months of time and countless dollars building out something that might not have worked. 

“Having that part of the flow is a really important way that we breed confidence,” Davis says. “We’re validating very early whether people even want this thing, and how they want it.”

“I love where we had a conversation ages ago and, as an art director, how do you feel about just releasing gray box, you know?” Ben added. “And you imagine most art directors like, ‘What the f–k are you talking - only polished or nothing for you.’ Honestly, from my perspective, I love it. I’d much prefer us to get confidence from fans that they’re enjoying this stuff. Should be that, then the art team creates.”

Looking ahead

With the September Nemesis test announced, players will have a chance to check out Vanguard in action later this year, about and then it’s heads down to create the version that will release in Summer 2026. Despite it being Early Access come that summer date, you can bet that the framework for Vanguard to start having an impact on the EVE universe will be there day one, and will only grow from there. 

I still have plenty of questions - the demo we played was obviously light on the MMO stuff and more focused on the FPS side of things, but given CCP Games’ desire to get this right, I’ve no doubt that it’ll come. 

That desire is showcased in the release window. There’s a confidence that, despite being announced in 2023, holding multiple tests over 2024 and 2025, EVE Vanguard will still be a compelling title for FPS fans, MMO fans and those who are, as Scott Davis puts it, “EVE Curious.”

“We looked at the experience we wanted to build, we looked at what we needed as a base foundation for it to be a compelling MMOFPS, to take the goals we wanted and it lined up with Summer 2026. That was a really good decision. Working in the industry, I’m not used to this because there was an intelligent decision on what was best for the product, what we needed it to be.”