HomeFeatures
Why CCP haven’t stopped trying to make an EVE Online shooter for 15 yearsFourth time’s the charm
Fourth time’s the charm
Image credit:CCP Games
Image credit:CCP Games
If you’ve followed CCP, you may get a sense of de ja vu. This isn’t the first time the developers have tried to make a shooter happen in EVE Online: it’s the fourth. It’s just they’ve only gotten one out the door before.
In 2014, CCP releasedDust 514, a Battlefield-like big team shooter, where players would fight on the surface of one of the many planets dotted across EVE Online’s New Eden. The exciting sell was that players in the MMO could bombard the battlefields of Dust from orbit with their spaceship’s lasers. One of the weaknesses of Dust 514 was thatit was a PS3 exclusive, whereas EVE Online was strictly a PC affair. It also didn’t help that it was released just six months before the release of the PS4, and CCP never ported it over to the new console.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settings
But we never saw Legion in action. Two years later, in 2016,CCP ceased development on Dust 514 and Project Legionand immediately announced a new shooter project “without the limitations of technical debt and development paths”. That new game wasProject Nova, a team-based shooter where mercenaries fought each other inside the bellies of some of EVE’s ships; despite this the game was only set in EVE, not connected to it.
Promo shots for the console-only Dust 514 |Image credit:CCP Games
Four years later, in 2020,that project was shuttered. The development of a new shooter shifted to the recently opened CCP London. “Due to significant changes in the scope and direction of our sci-fi multiplayer shooter game concept, it made sense to update how we refer to this project internally,” CCP’s head of PR, George Kelion, wroteon Reddit. “So, we are no longer using the codename Project Nova for this game concept.” That new shooter was to become the newly-announced Vanguard.
However, Nova’s former director, Snorri Árnason, now EVE’s game director, saw a problem: “It was clear we were trying to make a game to compete with Destiny, and we wouldn’t be able to do it.” Bungie has spent nearly a decade developing Destiny, broadening its scope to cover a multitude of planets, and stuffing its armoury with guns. On day one, Vanguard ran the risk of being how Messner described Project Nova – “little more than another generic sci-fi shooter”, and one that was far less rich than the competition.
“I’ve played Call Of Duty since the dawn of time,” Ecker says. “You’re a purist with that kind of stuff.” It’s where your friends are, where your character is, and where you’ve amassed all your progression and collectables. As Ecker puts it, it feels like “you’re contributing to something more,” making it very hard to coax players away. “We didn’t have that when we were doing Vanguard and EVE in their own lanes, but a light bulb went off basically that we can integrate this closer with Eve. Now that we’re putting it together, this is something that I think only we can create.”
Árnason, a big fan of Dust 514, who relocated from Reykjavik to Shanghai to work on the shooter as a senior producer before leading Project Nova, supported pairing the two games: “The EVE connection has always been the unique thing. Not 20 weapons or 50 levels or tanks and space.” Though, Árnason is also well aware of the risks. Speaking about Dust 514 to Jeremy Peelback in 2016, while promoting the much-trimmed down Nova, he said the PS3 shooter’s biggest problem wasn’t the platform; it was that it “It failed to contain scope, and delivered too many average features instead of few top quality ones”.
Image credit:CCP Games
While you could see turning the standalone Vanguard into a game that connects into EVE Online as an expansion of scope, Árnason disagrees, saying, “When we finally found the heart, and that’s the sandbox, moving on became so much easier. It relieves a lot of pressure; we’re not competing against Destiny; we can be up there on the quality but not necessarily the width. We’ve seen a lot of forward momentum since that decision.”
After the decision in December to join Vanguard to EVE, the team had to take a step back before they could move forward. “You can’t build a separate game and then smash it into another game and expect it to work,” Vanguard’s lead game designer Gavin Skinner told me. When he joined in April this year, “[Vanguard] was in bits. We had core mechanics – moving and shooting – and it felt good. Guns felt impactful. But we had a lot of stuff from previous iterations; there have been three or four versions of the game.” The team have spent most of 2023 paring the game back and rebuilding from its new foundation, Skinner says, conscious of “how it would tie into EVE from day one.”
This December will see EVE subscribers invited to play Vanguard in a limited-time First Strike event, and it is more proof of concept than a server stress test. It will only have one map, one gun, and a couple of contracts for players to experience. “We have a million ideas and hypotheticals for Vanguard,” Ecker says. “But this December test is really going to be, ‘Okay, we took the first step, did we take the first step in the right direction?'”
“That’s why we started like we are, beginning slowly,” CCP’s vice president of product Sveinbjorn Magnusson says. “We’re working it out. We care immensely about the quality of the experience and how we build the foundations to evolve new methods to interact with the world.”
“This is a way to allow people to interact in more ways with EVE,” Magnusson tells me, explaining why the team at CCP keeps trying to make a shooter happen. “Our story of EVE is rich and fruitful and full of opportunities [but] controlling a ship is an immense job; it’s not for everyone, and people want to participate.”
Image credit:CCP Games
CCP has been working on a shooter set in the world of EVE Online for more than 15 years, and in that time, it’s managed to get one project over the line, which ran for a little less than two years before closing. As Péturssontold Jeremy Peel last year, “We’re extremely stubborn about wanting to make [this] happen”.
“First-person shooters are just way easier to get into,” Ecker adds. “You don’t need to dedicate 40 hours a week; you can play an hour session of a first-person shooter and still feel a part of the grander thing. It’s a big opportunity for someone that goes, ‘Love EVE, love everything about it, love sci-fi, but I will never play it because I don’t have [the time] to get into it’”.
Attendees immediately saw how the game could fit into their EVE schedule. “With EVE, people take breaks for years or even decades before they come back and log on,” Stefan ‘Erstschlag’ Schönthal, an EVE player and streamer, told me. “Having this Vanguard FPS module as something else you could do to get your foot on the ground and shoot people with a gun. That’s great variety.” And, for people who don’t already play EVE but will start to see Vanguard appear on Twitch during the test in December, “it’s building the hype,” Schönthal says. “[A] gateway drug into EVE, so to speak.”
In 2013, I travelled to CCP’s studios in Reykjavik to see EVE and Dust link up for the first time and watch the orbital laser strike play out in a staged match. It was impressive, but as now with EVE Vanguard, CCP talked about a grand future while simultaneously stressing that what they were releasing was a deliberately small first step.
“This is important for people to understand,” CCP’s resident economist, Dr Eyjolfur Gudmundsson,said at the time. “We are not saying we have delivered everything [that Dust will be] when it has come out. This is the first step. It took us ten years to get EVE to where it is today. This is the first step on the journey of Eve and Dust together. There will be a second decade of development. It’s important that people understand that there are so many new things here that it’s not just another shooter coming out.”
Image credit:CCP Games
In the decade since my first trip to CCP, the developers have tried making an EVE-connected shooter, and tried making a standalone shooter. They’ve tried making a big team game in the style of Battlefield, with tanks and plans of VTOL jets and mechs, and they’ve tried making a small-scale team deathmatch shooter, more similar to Counter-Strike. Until recently, they were making a shooter the devs described as competing with Destiny, and now they’re making a shooter similar to Escape From Tarkov. For 15 years, CCP has been trying to find the shape of a shooter that fits into EVE Online. The team have said each time that they’ve learned lessons from the failings of the project that came before, they’ve said how powerful the universe and connection to EVE is, and why it makes their shooters unique.
CCP talk about a future for Vanguard where the players on the ground act like the Marines to EVE Online’s players’ Navy. Mercenaries served contracts from players in the sky, building structures on the planet’s surface to send resources to the stars in return for supply drops for their efforts. But, as compelling an image as that is, as it was in Dust 514, Project Nova, Project Legion before, that future is over the horizon, and the focus right now, as Skinner says, is “getting it feeling good.”
