“A lot of shooters rely on resetting the economy,” says Scott Davis, lead product manager at CCP London, simply, during a presentation about EVE: Vanguard – the massively-multiplayer online first-person shooter in development at CCP. He doesn’t mention it by name, but he’s talking about Call of Duty, it’s obvious. He’s referenced triple-A shooters with annual (or near-annual) development cycles. It doesn’t take a savant to read between the lines.
Specifically, he’s talking about why players come out of a lot of shooters feeling a bit short-changed. You pump hundreds of hours into a game, nail your build, figure out which weapons work for you, peruse guides about the best combinations of perks and guns, and then you forget about it. Blank slate. Black Ops becomes Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare becomes Black Ops, the dance begins again.
CCP wants something different to that. It wants something more permanent. It wants to take the shared-world shooter template laid out by the likes of Destiny and Helldivers 2 and really inject something more permanent into it. It wants to EVE-ify the MMOFPS space, basically.
“If we can learn from how CCP and EVE has had a single environment for 21 years, we can do that with a shooter, too,” he explains, animatedly. “We can make a shooter that can last. Really last. We can define what an MMOFPS is – a lot of developers have tried, and have come very close, but I think we’re in a unique position to actually deliver that.”
And you know what? I think he’s right. I got a few hours of hands-on with the most recent build of Vanguard at CCP’s London offices in early November, and it’s got all the makings of your next favourite persistent world FPS (not that there’s too much competition out there, mind you). The shooting feels responsive and punchy, the level design is top notch, the graphics are on par with Destiny 2’s PC build, and the sound design is tight. It’s got everything I could want, and I say that with over 1000 hours in the Destiny games. So colour me intrigued. Better yet, it’s a game designed to be a shooter first, EVE-adjacent companion game second.
“Why an FPS? Why is it so compelling?” interjects Snorri Árnason, game director of EVE Online. “We want to walk on the planets and fly the spaceships. That’s the width, and from there, we can fill in the blanks. We want to appeal to the fantasy of ‘boots on the ground’ and that of ‘you do the flying, we do the dying’… Even in the best triple-A games, there are games that perform in impact, but not in meaning.”
“You don’t have to play Eve to understand what Vanguard is; it’s an FPS experience that’ll tie into the universe that EVE has built,” Davis continues. “Why the f**k wouldn’t you do that, if it’s available for you to?”
A word that both Davis and the wider EVE team use for Vanguard is ‘EVE-curious’. The main game itself holds a record for largest PvP match in video gaming history (8000 players), and CCP wants to create an experience for shooter-orientated players that want a taste of that, but don’t want to dive into the eternal spreadsheet admin of EVE proper. Davis even says that CCP is consciously trying to make Vanguard a more “friendly” and “approachable” experience.
But development is slow. A year since its reveal, Vanguard is only on its second major content drop. It’s still in pre-alpha. But it’s got a large community already, and the pipeline is intentionally paced to make sure the nuts and bolts are fastened and secured before the paint is applied. CCP has already scrapped seasonal updates, too, simply because ‘they weren’t working’.
“We’re not spending hours and hours on VFX and graphics and releasing it and it’s crap,” Davis laughs. “We’re shipping updates to the game with low-res textures, or placeholder art, and people are engaging with it and finding the fun. For example, people use the mining laser – with its tiny little beam meant for harvesting resources – as a targeting beam to tag people across the map!”
Early adopters are even falling in love with the placeholder art, and note that some proudly refer to a WIP asset as ‘the banana gun’. The player base is building the game alongside CCP, per Davis. It’s a work-in-progress, and proudly so, and the admittedly glacial pace of development is actually working in its favour. Like with the parent game, the loyal early adopters see the potential in what CCP is crafting.
“You have to lose ego, you have to remember who you’re making the game for,” continues Davis. “We’re not making a game for us as developers. Players don’t often know what they want until they get a game in their hands and say ‘oh no, not that’. So we’re going through that experience with them.”
So far, I can see whereabouts on the MMO-to-FPS spectrum CCP is targeting with Vanguard. It’s more serious in its persistent world than Destiny (which feels more like a bunch of seasons tied together with a railroad players ride from month-to-month) and a bit less ‘free-form’ than Helldivers (which, as far as I can tell, seems to revel in the sheer chaos that its players create).
Already, from an admittedly small pool of early adopters, playstyles are beginning to form: there are kill-driven players, completionists that want to craft and build and collect everything, and people that are there for the more social elements. But there’s also a lot of content baked into the experience for those that prefer soloing MMOs like this. Take a look at how friendly Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft and Warframe are to solo players – all of which were referenced in my day with CCP.
“I used to solo WoW,” says Árnason. “I didn’t do anything socially, but I used to do things within the confines of a social construct. The same is true in Vanguard; you can opt-out of all this complexity, you can deploy, get a better weapon, and progress. We don’t need to overwhelm someone with all that stuff [that’s linked into the wider EVE ecosystem].”
Davis goes on to explain how we’re starting to redefine what we think of when we say ‘MMO’, and that is playing into the direction CCP is looking when developing Vanguard. “I think the trap that we all fall into – which is why nobody is calling Helldivers 2 an MMO – is that people immediately think MMO, and they think ‘MMORPG’. We’re not trying to crack that nut, we’re not trying to determine what people think of as an MMO, but we’re trying to observe how people interact with live games now — which is very different from what it was even a few years ago.
“Helldivers 2 could have been a couch game, right? But what gives it that extra oomph is the fact that you’re playing this couch game, and you’re doing it with your friends or four randoms into a world that is purely PVE — but it exists in this universe that everyone’s contributing towards.”
CCP sees the term “MMO” not just in terms of scale, but in terms of depth, too. “A lot of the time, I think a player can have an impact on the world that’s unbeknownst to them,” explains Davis. “Like, in Vanguard, I might be getting a contract from another player. I don’t need to know it’s from another player, but they’ve made that decision to give that contract to me because they need something. They might not care that another player picks that up, but these two players are impacting each other whether they like it or not, or know it or not, right?”
That, to both Davis and Árnason, is the magic of an MMO sandbox. They say that they want to “keep putting more sand in the sandbox” for players to enjoy, and that they want to deliver a world where their progress is safe from resets, server wipes, or seasonal shenanigans. In a world where ‘forever games’ are eternally competing for our time, I think it’s a noble aim: deliver a forever game that actually lasts, and respects the time you put into it.
Let’s see if Vanguard, finally, leverages the tools and history CCP has on hand. Just be prepared for a long, long wait.
EVE: Vanguard is available to Founders now, and Early Access for the game will arrive in 2025, with a global lauch planned for 2027 on PC. A special event is running November 28 – December 9 in Vangaurd; to take part and to obtain an access code, visit the EVE Vanguard Discord.
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