In an expanded documentary produced in collaboration with PC Gamer, CCP Games is providing a deeper look at the hardcore space survival MMO EVE Frontier after its showing at the 2024 PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted. This more unforgiving and zoomed-in sister game to EVE Online is also in the middle of a 10-day free trial of its closed alpha, allowing players to try it out for themselves without committing to an early access founder pack until February 24.
EVE Frontier is using blockchain, a technology I’d otherwise written off entirely, but it distinguishes itself from the wave of low-rent Web3 projects and questionable Ubisoft or Square Enix efforts we saw in the early 2020s. The developers at CCP have actually articulated a vision of what they want Frontier to be, and why they think blockchain needs to be a part of it. With Frontier, CCP is proposing an MMO built on moddability, with immutable rules CCP calls “digital physics” in place to preserve the game’s balance without requiring constant developer intervention.
I don’t know if this vision could be feasible on a more traditional online game’s codebase, but CCP’s promise of being able to program and share modifications to an online game on the fly like this doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve seen in games. CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pètursson likened it to EVE Online’s reliance on distinctly unsexy database software to deliver its still one of a kind emergent, digital economy. “Never did we really position the game, ‘Eve Online: The First Database Game,'” said Pètursson. “And we’re not really looking to do that with EVE Frontier either. It is not really a blockchain game, no more than EVE is a database game.”
The primary vehicle of Frontier’s moddability is a spaceborn structure called a “smart assembly,” something EVE Frontier creative director Pavel Savchulk likens to your chest in other survival games, just with this added dimension of programming and mods on top. CCP chief blockchain engineer Cheryl Kara Ang shared that, EVE Frontier’s closed alpha playtests, one of the smart assemblies’ most impressive uses has been a player-created, automated king of the hill PvP tournament, where the assembly itself was programmed to run games and distribute gold accordingly.
Aside from its novel approach to modding, EVE Frontier has core gameplay reminiscent of EVE Online. They both run on the same Carbon engine, which CCP intends to make open source alongside EVE Frontier, which strikes me as a compelling display of the company’s commitment to Frontier’s player-driven gameplay.
Frontier’s space travel and combat is injected with a variety of new, survival-focused systems to make its simulation feel bigger, scarier, and more threatening than EVE Online, to the extent that EVE Frontier product manager Scott McCabe said its gameplay will be “bordering on survival horror.” Fuel and maintenance concerns will problematize travel, something McCabe hopes will make Frontier’s galaxy feel larger.
Savchulk described Frontier as carrying a “dark sci fi Pinocchio story” with its punishing conditions. With their strange, Blade Runner replicant bodies, Savchulk said we’ll be playing “as something that is probably even less than human, and then gradually digging your way out of that towards becoming a real human again, evolving towards a proper transhumanist form, something that would be properly adapted towards life in space as opposed to if we were to go to space now.”
In addition to feeling larger due to the dangers of travel, this galaxy will be significantly larger in absolute terms compared to the one in EVE Online, which had 7,805 star systems as of 2022, compared to 20,000 in Frontier’s current build and 100,000 planned for the final game according to Savchulk. This more threatening approach extends to the combat of EVE Frontier as well, which introduces occlusion and cover to EVE Online’s familiar space battles. This should allow for stealthy surprise attacks, hit and run tactics, and a greater emphasis on how the layout and features of individual systems will contribute to the outcome of a battle.
Even as a crypto skeptic vindicated by the FTX collapse and NFTs getting bullied out of mainstream games, EVE Frontier sounds interesting, with an emphasis on emergent, collective player behavior that strikes me as a logical evolution of EVE Online. You still have until February 24 to try out the closed alpha version of CCP’s grand blockchain experiment with no strings attached, while CCP is selling founder’s packs with unlimited alpha access.