approach. “More deliberate,” he says sternly.
WHEN WE AWAKE Whether Vanguard succeeds in bolstering Eve’s player numbers for another five, ten or even twenty years, what Pétursson seems more interested in is much more long-term; ensuring the survival of an Eve universe that isn’t merely persistent, but perpetual. The apparent need to leave a legacy
Vanguard will be CCP’s second attempt at bringing FPS combat to EVE, after 2013’s Dust 514
game which allowed Eve players the dubious ability to fire blindly into planetary skirmishes. Despite being a ground-breaking game in that and other respects, it failed to find an audience large enough to sustain it, not least because it launched exclusively on PS3 three months after Sony had announced the PS4. Vanguard has two things going for it that Dust 514
didn’t. One is that it’s bound for the evergreen PC, and the other is that it’s considerably less ambitious in terms of scale, being more recognisably an extraction shooter and not a battlefield simulator. The “module” (CCP is hesitant to call it a game), will be played between small fireteams or squads rather than platoons or companies (sans vehicles), with the aim to get in, find whatever it is your team needs, and get out. There will be a link to the main Eve game through something called ‘Frontline Corruption’ (a feature of Eve Online’s just-released
has facilitated the development of another internal project, dubbed ‘Awakening’. CCP has said next to
nothing about it, only that the game will be separate from Eve, while being set in the same universe, “leveraging
smart-contract blockchain technology”, and backed by $40 million of venture capital investment. In the announcement back in March, Pétursson talked about forging “a new universe deeply imbued with our expertise in player agency and autonomy, empowering players to engage in new ways.” It’s not a game that many in the Eve community
are excited by. Quite the opposite, it seems, which is why CCP is keen to make sure players know that Eve development resources have been ring fenced and nothing is being syphoned into Project Awakening’s development. It may have taken a backseat to AI over the last year, but blockchain games are still reported on in negative terms, so it’s easy to see why CCP are being
Coming soon to obile: Eve Galaxy Conquest
Havoc expansion), with new content and interoperability promised for the future. In short, after years of teasing a number of FPS
projects (‘Legion’ in 2014, ‘Nova’ in 2016), Vanguard appears to be a safe bet, although Pétursson bristles at the suggestion that CCP is taking a more cautious
22 | MCV/DEVELOP October/November 2023
Ten years at CCP gets you an authentic Viking sword. 20 gets you a bigger one
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