EVE Online is arguably the most obtuse MMO ever made. Famous for its headline-making space battles, it continues to entertain its audience 22 years after its release. Icelandic developer CCP Games aims to transform how players can approach its persistent sci-fi world, New Eden, with the development of its upcoming extraction shooter, EVE Vanguard. The studio wants players to inhabit the same world through the two games and seeks to answer the question: “What if the events in one game affected the other?”
“Imagine a friend of yours on Twitter says, ‘Hey, there’s this massive war happening in EVE Online. Download the client and join our squad. Jump in and be part of this massive EVE war.’ And no other game can really do that. They can pretend war is happening, but there’s actually going to be a war happening in EVE,” producer Jamie Stanton says.
EVE Fanfest 2025 – EVE Vanguard Keynote:
However, despite its ambitiousness, this isn’t the studio’s first attempt at such an idea—it’s the second. Dust 514, a 2013 free-to-play PS3 exclusive that went offline in 2016, marked the company’s first venture connecting a first-person shooter to EVE Online’s universe.
“Dust 514 is also fully integrated with the notorious sci-fi setting of EVE Online,” a 2013 press release states. “Together, Dust 514 and EVE Online offer a combined sandbox of unprecedented intergalactic scale, with the outcome of ground battles impacting the persistent universe of EVE and shifting the tide of war for legions of participants. Mercenaries can gain an advantage by coordinating with starship pilots in EVE Online, calling in devastating orbital strikes against opposing squads.”
The old press release effectively summarizes the pitch for EVE Vanguard, which enters Steam Early Access in Summer 2026. However, CCP hopes to avoid the perils that befell Dust—the press criticized it for subpar FPS mechanics and having the depth of a puddle—by approaching its early development years with a narrow but deeper scope.
“Forget everything else. This has to be a good shooter first,” game director Scott Davis says. “When we’ve built some confidence around it, we ask, ‘How do we grow out of the perception that [Vanguard] is just an extraction shooter?’”
After laying down the foundation, Davis hopes to add deeper layers of player agency and cause-and-effect across the two games, even if it’s only single threads here and there. In a previous Vanguard technical test, players fought for control of artillery cannons on the surface to fire into the Raihbaka system’s contested airspace in EVE Online. While the limited event showcased the Carbon engine’s potential, the battle failed to have a meaningful, long-lasting effect on the star system, according to a popular EVE analytics tool.
“We have a vision in mind, and we’ve created some preliminary connections, but we have to [expand] very slowly. If we jumped straight to trying to figure out [the full integration] now, we would end up with a half-baked shooter,” Stanton says.
While the studio has yet to establish Vanguard’s full scope, the early build I recently played at EVE Fanfest is promising. The project’s intimate scale transforms minor ship parts into massive wreckages, which serve as points of interest across its dark-but-colorful biomes. While still premature, weapons emit brilliant lasers reminiscent of golden-era sci-fi shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake, supported by ample screenshake and over-the-top sound design. While even earlier in development, graybox objects like mobile item extractors shake up genre trappings by allowing players to secure their loot without exiting the match.
“I’ve been disappointed by games not trying to innovate past having just to take everything away from you,” Davis remarks, voicing his disdain for progression resets, a familiar tactic extraction shooter developers use to prevent seasoned players from griefing newbies with more limited resources. “I don’t like that. And I don’t think a more casual audience, which some of these games are trying to [attract] now, will like having their stuff taken away from them every season.”
To solve the genre’s progression problem, the team is looking to MMOs for inspiration. Starting players in low-level zones with safeguards to dissuade PvP allows them to learn the basics in the paddling pool before swimming to the deep end. Despite featuring traditional matchmaking, CCP envisions its levels as physical locations in a star system, each with static difficulty ranges enabling players to quest in an appropriate zone before graduating to the next level. The studio’s ultimate goal is to allow corporations, the player-led organizations vying for sovereignty in EVE Online, to commission Vanguard players to extract valuable resources from planetary surfaces in exchange for valuables from the stars.
As someone who loves MMOs, I’ve always wanted to play the long-running space sim, but its complicated systems have prevented me from fully diving into it. If successful, EVE Vanguard has the potential to innovate in the multiplayer space and also open a gateway for players like me to participate in the series’ legendary stories from a fresh perspective.
