- EVE Frontier is a moddable survival horror MMORPG made by EVE Online Creators, CCP Games.
- Player-created content, cryptocurrencies, and applications using smart contracts are core to the game’s experience.
- The game’s Web3 features will be seamless and near-invisible to players.
Even without the blockchain and Web3 tech, EVE Online redefined digital asset ownership with the 2003 launch of its space-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).
Now, more than 20 years later, the game’s getting more than just a Web3 makeover, but a completely independent release that takes the best of EVE Online and converts it into a gigantic player-driven space survival horror game called EVE Frontier.
CCN spoke with CCP Games’ Community Developer Jötunn to find out more.
EVE Frontier
EVE Frontier is a space survival title, or as CCP Games likes to call it, “massively moddable multiplayer online spaceship survival horror role-playing game” (MMMOSSHRPG).
Jötunn says it’s a first-of-a-kind survival experience, and a game that is famed for being one of the most robust and complex digital economies in gaming since launching in 2003.
EVE Frontier is home to the Trinary, three black holes that have warped their surrounding star systems. The result? A constantly shifting, decaying cosmos that wants you dead.
“Everything wants to kill you,” Jötunn says.
“If intensity breeds conflict, then we are building a pressure cooker for it,” he adds.
It’s not just other players trying to take you out and claim your resources; environmental hazards, and dangerous AI-powered monsters are also coming for you.
Though it carries the EVE title, it’s not a simple Web3 clone of the original game. It’s a game where players can build and mod the game in real time to meet their aims.
Though they still share many similar characteristics, they offer very different, distinct experiences.
“Although EVE Frontier has pretty good feature parity with EVE Online (mostly with regards to combat and navigation, though even these are getting major overhauls in coming patches), all of that has been recontextualized to facilitate more survival horror storytelling,” Jötunn says.
That said, the tools still exist to create amazing systems within Frontier, but how they are formed and function is “fully up to the players to determine.”
“With that in mind, the biggest standout difference between the two is just how desolate the Frontier is — but no less fraught with danger or ripe with potential for wealth and power.” he adds.
Scope and Scale
It’ll be a big game too. Jötunn explains that Frontier will be gigantic and contain over 100,000 star systems at launch. EVE Online has 7,800.
“Our dream for Frontier is as the ultimate moddable survival MMO, a game that also stands in stark contrast with EVE Online. EVE Online is a game of excess and abundance, while Frontier is a game of struggle and overcoming adversity.”
Player-built structures will be targeted by drone swarms, once reliable space gate networks become unreliable, and a ship you docked on thinking it was a safe haven, has now been overrun by feral AI. Frontier’s living universe will test its inhabitants, strain resources, and be full of surprises.
“Most of the drama in EVE Frontier doesn’t come from the game itself; it comes from interactions between players. However, since it is a survival game, a lot of drama will also come from people coming into conflict with the universe itself.”
Player Freedom is Blockchain-Enabled
One of Frontier’s aims was to create a new type of survival game, expanding on the “survival” tag with more than the tired game loop of resource gathering, management, and upgrades.
“From day one, the game is designed to be programmable and moddable at its core, empowering players to shape their experience through utility-driven mods and apps, as to truly survive, they will need to sort of mega-craft their way out of the depths of hell,” Jötunn explains
“To truly support that vision, we built the game with blockchain technology from the ground up — not as an afterthought, but as a meaningful part of game design and backend infrastructure,” he adds.
Blockchain is more than a buzzword here; Jötunn explains it as the “key” to enabling a “persistent, community-governed world” that should eventually be able to operate independently of CCP Games.
Doubling down on this, CCP announced its intentions to open-source EVE Frontier’s engine, the Carbon Development Platform (CDP). Jötunn says this will give third-party devs unprecedented access to the game.
“For this subset of our community, the physics, nature, and chemistry of the game are essential pieces of their toolset for shaping the galaxy to their will. It’s a lot like modding,” he notes.
Already, this has seen the community create inventory management systems, stargate maps, and other applications with different utilities that CCP had not implemented themselves.
In-Game Economy
“More than anything, we want to take our time to get the virtual economy of EVE Frontier right, and this means testing and refining many elements with our Founder community before we implement them in the game.”
“For example, all objects and items in the game have a real, tangible, and immutable physical location, meaning they cannot be duplicated or teleported around the universe. Everything must obey the rules of our virtual universe (including us as developers!),” he says.
“We have over 20 years of experience in monitoring online communities in the most complex virtual economy through EVE Online, and we are taking our learnings and approaches to EVE Frontier.”
Player-Driven
In-game objects are programmable tools for players to configure and leverage to meet their own goals. A simple storage container can become a quest-giver, and a turret could double as a toll gate.
“Players who code can use Solidity to write and deploy their own behaviors. Those who can’t will be able to use the tools and ideas of others, or at launch still engage fully, using simple configuration tools and presets — like setting a Smart Turret to ‘kill on sight’ or ‘target only enemy factions’.” Jötunn explains
“We’ve already seen people create bounty systems, automated tournaments, even bridges to dApps running outside the game. Some are wildly inventive. Others are just plain strange. And that’s exactly the kind of creative freedom we want to cultivate,” he notes.
An Invisible Web3
It’s no secret that EVE Online is one of the most complex online games available right now, meaning it’s got a pretty steep learning curve.
Pair that with crypto, and there’s a risk that players could be isolated from the game. But Frontier’s taking a different approach. Despite all the crazy Web3 features, the aim is to make all the blockchain features “seamless and invisible.”
There shouldn’t be any sense of an obtuse front-end and complicated steps and setups. It’s the tech that’s underpinning the game, and as such, it’ll remain in the background
“For example, when you create an in-game character, that is a smart character and has created a wallet (which we call EVE Vault) tied to that account and character automatically. Then you immediately have an enhanced form of inventory management off the bat,” Jötunn explains.
But make no mistake—the game is a “virtual hell,” as Jötunn puts it. New players can expect to receive a guided experience through the first steps into that “inferno,” and they’ll be accompanied by “Keeper,” a digital assistant akin to Fallout’s beloved Pip-Boy.
Noting his “obvious bias” as a long-time EVE veteran and Frontier community lead, Jötunn says he’s always felt that EVE was daunting to players, and that the community should “take pride” in the outreach it freely offers to players.
Altogether, the game sounds almost too good to be true, and another overpromised Web3 cash grab venture. But through their trials, what they’ve seen is that once people get involved with Frontier, they realize the community is “yearning” for what’s being built.
“I joke sometimes that it feels like our players are working nearly as hard as we are to manifest Frontier, and it often feels like two very different kinds of development teams working together, simultaneously building the exact same game. In a very real sense, our players are building the bedrock of a civilization from scratch.”
He admits there will be challenges, but the players have repeatedly overcome these struggles and adversities and produced incredible results.
Community Response
The Web3 label can be cumbersome for gaming startups looking to break into the mainstream. But for a well-established franchise like EVE, there is arguably even more pressure to deliver.
“There’s certainly been no shortage of criticism, and we’re not naive about where that criticism is coming from. There are a lot of valid concerns that people have, both about blockchain, Web3 and their implementation in other games (can you call them games?) that range from overcommercialization to just plain crappy gimmicks,” Jötunn says.
EVE Frontier’s closed alpha kicked off in December last year. Initially, it had limited participation, but over time, the team has opened the game up to more players, which has seen the return of some famous EVE Online veterans, developer engagement, and plenty of wars breaking out.
Through this, the team has seen that they’ve been able to overcome blockchain skepticism by showing what Frontier is “all about” in terms of the game’s systems and the universe being built around them.
He says these concerns “begin to fade away,” and the focus shifts to “what we are making: a game.” Once EVE Frontier goes public, “players will see what we’re really about.”
For CCP Games, transparency and honesty is the way forward, and this includes sharing goals and future development plans, something of which its “Founders ,” i.e., early backers, have “intimate access to on a daily basis.” He hints that these may be made available to the wider public in the near future.
Into The Unknown
There are plenty who would assume that Frontier is a side project that’s destined to fail, especially bearing the Web3 label. Naturally, there’ll be some pushback.
“What we’re attempting to do here is something nobody else has really even conceptualized, something that pushes the boundaries far beyond literally anything that exists in the market currently,” Jötunn says.
Moreover, all of this incredible potential exists within the rich narrative and lore framework of Frontier, coated in a “dark forest survival horror aesthetic.”
“While I do understand the instinct to tell someone to stay in their lane, no great act of creation has ever been accomplished by someone unwilling to take risks, ” he notes.
But it’s not just CCP taking a gamble; in EVE Online and Frontier, players are asked to wager their assets in high-stakes gameplay with real-world consequences.
“There’s this inside joke within the EVE Online community that essentially boils down to “everything is PVP.” If you’re a market trader, you’re into market PVP, or if you’re someone who sits in Discord all day and yaps at your opponents over battle reports, you’re into Discord PVP. Everything on the chain competes for attention, mindshare, and ultimately, block space. In that sense, the chain is its own kind of PVP,” Jötunn explains.
Frontier encapsulates the familiar struggles of Web3 and puts them in a game. Jötunn assures the community that there’ll be much more to do than be a PVPer, or builder, or a miner.
“If EVE Online has shown us anything, it’s that there is no shortage of tasks to be completed and jobs that need doing. Builders, traders, fighters, planners. Logisticians, tacticians, experts. Explorers, archivists, politicians, propagandists. I see a future for Frontier where the only limit of what you can do is your own willingness to do it, ” he notes.
To the naysayers, Jötunn extends them an invitation to view the game’s videos, learn more in its Discord, engage with the community, and take part in one of many free play tests they conduct “all the time.” As he says, “We believe in making great games.”
Looking ahead, CCP is on a mission to create virtual worlds “more meaningful than life.” Therefore, it’ll always be looking to explore and experiment with the latest technology to fulfil this vision. “You’ve seen this with our VR titles and with Dust.” Jötunn concludes.
With EVE Frontier, CCP Games will leverage Web3 tech and look to raise the bar once more.
