“A lot of shooters rely on reset economies,” CCP London’s lead product manager Scott Davis said simply during a demo of EVE: Vanguard, the massively multiplayer online first-person shooter CCP is developing. He didn’t mention names, but he was talking about Call of Duty, so that was obvious. He mentioned triple-A shooters that have annual (or near-annual) development cycles. It doesn’t take an expert to read between the lines.
Specifically, he’s talking about why a lot of shooters feel like they’re a little shortchanged. You pour hundreds of hours into the game, perfecting your builds, figuring out the weapons that work for you, poring over guides on the best combinations of perks and guns, and then you forget about it. Blank slate. Black Ops became Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare became Black Ops, and the dance began again.
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The Chinese Communist Party wants something different. It wanted something more permanent. It’s looking to take the shared-world shooter template set by games like Destiny and Hellraiser 2 and really inject it with something more lasting. Basically, it wants to EVE-ify the MMOFPS space.
“If we can learn from CCP and EVE’s 21 years of being a single environment, we can do the same with shooters,” he explains enthusiastically. “We can make a shooter that lasts. Really finally we can define what an MMOFPS is – a lot of developers have tried it and come very close, but I think we’re in a unique position to really make it happen One goal.”
Did you know? I think he’s right. I spent a few hours at CCP’s London offices in early November to get my hands on the latest version of Vanguard, and it has all the makings of your next favorite persistent world FPS (not that there’s much competition out there, mind you) ). Shooting feels responsive and punchy, the level design is top-notch, the graphics are on par with the PC version of Destiny 2, and the sound design is tight. It has everything I wanted, and I’ve spent over 1,000 hours playing a Destiny game, and that’s just saying that. So that interests me. Even better, this game is a shooter first and an EVE-related companion game second.
“Why FPS? Why is it so convincing?” EVE Online game director Snorri Árnason interjected. “We want to walk planets and pilot spaceships. That’s the breadth, and from there we can fill in the gaps. We want to evoke the fantasy of ‘boots on the ground’ and ‘you fly, we die’… even in the best triple-A games , there are some games that perform well, but not in the sense of that.”
“You don’t have to play as Eve to understand what Vanguard is; it’s an FPS experience that’s deeply connected to the universe EVE is built on,” Davis continued. “Why don’t you do it if you can?”
“EVE Curiosity” is what Davis and the wider EVE team call Vanguard. The main game itself holds the record for the largest PvP match in video game history (8,000 players), and CCP hopes to create an experience for shooter gamers who want to experience the experience but don’t want to be stuck in an eternity of spreadsheet administrators. Davis even said that CCP made a conscious effort to make Vanguard a more “friendly” and “approachable” experience.
But development is slow. In the year since its launch, Vanguard is only releasing major content for the second time. It’s still in pre-alpha stage. But it already has a large community, and the pipes were intentionally tweaked to make sure the nuts and bolts were tight and secure before painting. CCP has also canceled seasonal updates simply because “they don’t work.”
“We’re not going to spend a ton of time on visual effects and graphics and release it, but it’s garbage,” Davis said with a laugh. “We’re releasing game updates with low-resolution textures or placeholder art, and people are engaging with them and having fun with them. For example, people are using mining lasers — whose tiny beams are used to harvest resources — as targeting beams. Mark people on the map!”
Early adopters even fell in love with placeholder art, noting that some proudly referred to WIP assets as “banana guns.” Davis said the player base is working with CCP to build the game. It’s a work in progress, one to be proud of, and there’s no denying that the slow pace of development actually works in its favor. Like the parent game, loyal early adopters saw the potential in what CCP was producing.
“You have to lose yourself and you have to remember who you are making the game for,” Davis continued. “We’re not making games for us developers. Players often don’t know what they want until they get the game and say, ‘Oh, no, not that.’ So we’re going through that experience with them.”
So far I can tell with Vanguard where CCP falls on the MMO to FPS spectrum. Its persistent world is more serious than Destiny (which feels more like a series of seasons with Railroad players riding through it month-to-month), and a little less “freeform” than Helldiver (which, as far as I can tell, is a bit less “freeform”) can be seen seeming to revel in the sheer chaos the players create).
Granted, from a small group of early adopters, the gameplay style has begun to take shape: there are kill-driven players, there are completionists who want to craft, build and collect everything, and there are people who prefer a more social element. But for those who enjoy single-player MMOs, there’s a lot more packed into the experience. Look at how solo-player friendly Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, and Warframe are – all of which I mentioned in my days at CCP.
“I used to play World of Warcraft alone,” Arnason said. “I haven’t done anything socially, but I have done some within the boundaries of social structure. The same goes for Vanguard; you can opt out of all this complexity, you can deploy, get better weapons, and progress. We don’t need to overwhelm someone with these things [that’s linked into the wider EVE ecosystem]”.
Davis went on to explain how we began to redefine what we call an “MMO,” which is exactly the direction CCP was seeking when developing Vanguard. “I think we all fall into a trap – which is why no one calls Helldivers 2 an MMO – where people immediately think of an MMO and think of ‘MMORPG’. We’re not trying to crack that, or be sure People think about MMOs, but try to look at how people interact with real-time games now – which is very different from what it was a few years ago.
“Helldivers 2 may be a couch game, right? But the added charm is that you’re playing this couch game and you’re entering a pure PVE world with your friends or four random people – but It exists in this universe that everyone contributes to”.
CCP believes that the term “MMO” is not only reflected in scale, but also in depth. “A lot of times, I think players can have an impact on the world that they don’t know they have,” Davis explained. “Like at Pioneers, I might get a contract from another player. I don’t need Know This is from another player, but they have decided to give this contract to me because they need something. They may not care if other players pick this up, but these two players are influencing each other, whether they like it or not, or know it or not, right? “
For Davis and Árnason, this is the magic of the MMO sandbox. They say they want to “continue to put more sand in the sandbox” for players to enjoy, and they want to create a safe world where their progress isn’t affected by resets, server wipes, or seasonal shenanigans. In a world where “forever games” are forever vying for our time, I think this is a noble goal: to deliver a forever game that truly lasts and respects the time you invest.
Let’s see if Vanguard ultimately leverages CCP’s existing tools and history. Just be prepared for a long wait.
EVE: Vanguard is now open to founders, with an early access version of the game set to launch in 2025, and a global release on PC in 2027. Vangaurd will be hosting a special event from November 28th to December 9th; to participate and get access codes, visit the EVE Vanguard Discord.
