EVE Online first appeared on the scene in 2003 and has seen a fairly healthy player base since its release. Multiple free expansions have been made for the game, and multiple attempts have been made to make a spin-off game that expands on the EVE Universe, but EVE Frontier is special for one particular reason: developer CCP Games wants it to be EVE 2.0 essentially, featuring mechanics that the original EVE Online infrastructure simply couldn’t hold.
EVE Frontier, which goes into Founder Access on December 10th, is pitched as a space survival game that takes place entirely in ungoverned and undiscovered space. And it’s utterly huge: there are over 20,000 different solar systems to explore, with the developer testing out builds with over 2 million different solar systems. In the center of all these systems are three black holes, which will be used to change the rules of the universe and offer up new survival challenges to players so that they don’t start finding the title too easy.
“We want to build the world in a way where it is perpetually regenerating itself, constantly changing. When you’re mining the rift where the crude matter comes from that can then be turned into fuel, those rifts appear in places dictated by the way that the three black holes orbit each other. They cause rifts in space, which you open up by adding negative energy to them before tunneling into another universe and taking their resources,” CCP CEO Hilmar Petursson told us during a press event in London last month.
An influence brought up during a presentation showing off the pitch was that of FromSoftware, specifically Elden Ring. CCP wants this game to be hard, with fights breaking out over even the smallest resources, and they want people to be strategic about using celestial bodies as cover. This all sounds really cool, so what’s the catch? Well, it’s all being done using Blockchain.
Despite EVE Frontier’s bold premise and the claims backing it, there is a very obvious question mark for many when discussing CCP Games’ next game: the implementation of the Blockchain the studio is planning. While they’re very careful to not want to have the game associated with NFTs at all and are insistent on this being them using technology that’s existed for years to solve problems, there are still several unanswered questions on both the implementation of the technology and why exactly they think this is the best way to advance EVE, especially given the sheer hatred of both Blockchain and NFT technologies online for how bad they are for the environment and how destructive they can be. Though, it should be noted that CCP Games states that the tech powering EVE Frontier is “environmentally friendly” and doesn't use any more power than the current EVE Online infrastructure.
During last month’s event, we were shown a series of early player-created modules that were all created using the Blockchain. There were some interesting creations, but also one really worrying one: a module that fully randomly generates quests using AI to write them. The ethical concerns surrounding generative AI are great, and the environmental cost is pretty large, as supported by a number of sources. There are ethical ways to use AI, but the question comes as to what level of oversight CCP is going to have here, and whether they’re willing to really make sure AI is being used for good. There are no plans for AI guidelines here yet, according to the developer; in fact, judging from the enthusiasm that was evident during the presentation, they encourage it.
They want players to go wild with the possibilities that are presented to them. Still, without any curation whatsoever, the problem arises that the good stuff has the potential to be completely buried under the stereotypical variety of fan creations. Per a presentation, EVE Frontier will be “built by players, owned by players, and secured by players”, which sounds like a dozen different red flags all shoved into three different buzz words due to how many previous projects of this ilk have actually essentially been scams masquerading as other things (not that I believe CCP Games would stoop to the level of scamming their player base; I trust them too much for that).
Thankfully, according to Petursson, however, the crypto portion of the game will be almost imperceptible unless you’re actually looking for it.
“It’s like how EVE Online exists on a database, but you don’t have to engage with the database. We’re being upfront about the technology in such an explicit way because people have very strong opinions about the technology, and we don’t want to hide that we’re using it. When you actually play the game, though, you won’t know. A lot of people playing early builds of EVE Frontier have asked where the crypto integration is, even though it’s always there. You have currencies, like in an MMO, assets, like in an MMO, [and] there’s a wallet like EVE Online. You don’t even have to think about the crypto.”
When pressed on exactly what the level of moderation is planned to be here, CCP stated that they’re planning to essentially only act on the most heinous of creations, meaning that most of the time, the players will be left to their own devices. So what does this mean, exactly, for the game? If players were to log into it a year into its lifespan, can they expect to see a game that’s completely changed, left to the whims of a player base that wants to sow chaos? Or will CCP be forced to have a better vetting process?
Frontier will also have two bespoke currencies: one for in-game purchases that can be earned through playing and one that exists entirely on the blockchain and has external value. The thing is, all these promises of value outside of the game have been used by dozens of games before this, and the problem is that the game eventually becomes more about value than gameplay.
There’s so much promise with the general pitch for EVE Frontier, there’s so much potential here, but the use of blockchain technology threatens to derail any success the title might have completely. There’s also the lingering question of whether we could ever see the game come to console systems, but Petursson isn’t optimistic about that possibility.
“We could technically get it to work on a console, but it’s more to do with keyboard and mouse than the actual power of the console. We could make a console version of EVE Online, but like Frontiers it’s very complicated. Vanguard, since it’s being developed on Unreal and is a first-person shooter, is a lot easier to give console support, but EVE Online and EVE Frontiers are a very different story.”
I do think that it’s worth keeping an eye on EVE Frontier, if only to see what they do with the technology. The pitch for the actual game is certainly intriguing, and it’s an extremely ambitious idea, but the real question is is the ambition too much for the technology to hold up, and is it actually something with a long shelf-life? If it’s just a case of chasing trends, then EVE Frontier is likely to be a game that players of the MMORPG try once and bounce off, but if it actually tries something worthwhile? It could truly be the next phase of the EVE universe.
Full Disclosure: Travel and accommodation to this event was provided by CCP Games.
