EVE Online has a decades-long reputation at this point for being a sprawling, ruthless, libertine space sandbox full of crime, war, betrayal, and player-built empires. And from its conception, EVE Frontier is really all of those things dialed up even further. Blending its space MMO heritage with elements of the survival crafting genre and employing the blockchain to – so the devs say – give even more control to players, it's certainly a thought-provoking prospect.
Let me get this out of the way first: Frontier is, yes, a blockchain game. It also features a cryptocurrency token that can be bought with real money and spent on in-game purchases. (EVE Online has had the ability to buy its subscription token, PLEX, with real money and sell it for in-game money for a while now, so that specific aspect isn't new.) I am highly skeptical, personally, of these kinds of rotating Silicon Valley hype words, and nothing CCP has said to me so far has made me less so, as a rule.
But I do believe, based on the conversations I've had with these devs, that they are genuinely interested in the tech primarily on the basis of the gameplay features it might enable. I asked a lot of hard questions, and don't think they're trying to drum up investment capital by invoking magic words or cash in on some kind of crypto rug-pull. Their faith in this tech might be misplaced, in my opinion. But I think their desire to leverage it is generally in good faith.
CEO Hilmar Pétursson told me that the intent with putting Frontier on the chain was that if, for instance, a meteor were to hit their offices in Reykjavik, the universe they, and we, created could persist without them. It also opens the door for CCP to step back from being active administrators some day and simply be another organization within the decentralized EVE Frontier ecosystem. On the topic of environmental concerns, I was assured repeatedly that using "proof of stake" verification, it was possible to run Frontier's blockchain elements using about the same amount of energy as the traditional EVE Online servers that have been up for years. I don't know enough about the tech involved to independently verify this, but it's what I was told.
At the end of the day, it is what it is. So let's move on to how Frontier actually plays.
A DARK FOREST
While EVE Online started with large areas of high security space populated by NPC factions with their own laws and police, Frontier is exactly what it says in the name: an entirely fresh canvas of wild space with no rules but the ones we make and enforce as players. We're still controlling spaceships in third person, making jumps between star systems to collect resources and craft industrial stations, consumables, and equipment, and shooting at NPC baddies or other players with lasers and rockets. It feels very familiar, moment-to-moment, as a long-time EVE player. One big exception is that combat is a bit more intuitive and complex now with obstacles like asteroids being able to block weapon fire realistically based on their precise shapes.
Everyone starts out in your own dark corner of the galaxy with a single ship and a home base, beginning a journey to tame the stellar wilderness from square one. When I asked the devs if they thought players would eventually build their own permanent civilizations, maybe up to and including something like EVE Online's Concord, they told me the potential is definitely there. But there is a certain level of added attrition in Frontier, partly in the form of terrifying, wandering world bosses that take the shape of rogue AI – hulking, almost Lovecraftian metallic beasts in the black with unknown motives.
Frontier also aims to be a moddable MMO, which might sound like a strange prospect. Initially, much of what you build in the 3D world will be restricted to remixing premade assets. You won't be able to import your own meshes from Blender, for instance, though that restriction may not last forever. But we were shown a lot of ways players could push the boundaries of the genre and their own imaginations.
HIGHWAY TO SPACE HELL
One way this manifests is in the gate network, which will be entirely player-built. You could set up your own interstellar highway connecting what will initially be isolated star systems, and even charge in-game resources or crypto tokens to use them. Of course, there's nothing necessarily stopping another player from building their own bypass right next to yours with lower tolls or even for free. You also don't have to ask for resources at all. You could make other players solve a riddle or follow you on social media to use your gates.
Obviously I can imagine many dystopian permutations of this kind of libertarian space sandbox. More than anything, it kind of reminds me of Minecraft anarchy servers like the infamous 2b2t. And when I asked Pétursson if CCP's lawyers thought he was crazy, he very matter-of-factly confirmed that they do. But CCP is trusting that the players will be the ones to self-police the worst excesses.
If McDonalds were to come in and try to establish a stargate network that required you to watch a commercial for their new combo meal every five jumps, they would also need to provide their own around-the-clock security or anti-corpo player federations could simply come in and blow it all up. To what extent these brands might find it's worth hiring mercenaries in a video game to protect their ad buys remains to be seen. And there is something fascinating about that, I have to admit.
The one thing CCP will not ever allow modification of, the bedrock upon which this universe sits, is its laws of physics. A ship still has mass and will behave like something with mass would, even if you make it look like pregnant Sonic the Hedgehog. And anything you build will still ultimately require a supply chain that can be traced back to mining matter from black hole clusters. If you want to use your real-world riches to buy a bunch of tokens and bootstrap an in-game empire, you'll still need to buy those finite resources from players who took the time to gather them, at market rates. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. There's no way of bypassing that.
SEE YOU ON THE FRONTIER
EVE Frontier is, if nothing else, an intriguing experiment in the making. It could be an absolute trash fire, and I remain actively wary of its blockchain and cryptocurrency elements. But I did have fun playing the small bit of it we got access to, and it is an enticing invitation to settle and develop fresh empires in a blank slate galaxy with no major NPC factions to work around. But if you don't want to take my word for it, you can try it out yourself with one of Frontier's paid Founder packages right now.
