More details revealed ahead of an alpha playtest in July
EVE Vanguard, the latest attempt by Fenris 'I Can’t Believe It’s Not CCP Games' Creations at crafting a first-person shooter counterpart to EVE Online, continues to gestate within Iceland’s best-funded spinoff vats. Nearly three years after being revealed as a Shoot, Loot 'n' Scoot extraction game, it’s running its first alpha playtest – titled Operation Avalon – from July 7th-20th, with Fenris staff promising attendees of last week’s EVE FanFest event that it will dutifully tighten up the gunplay that players of previous 'pre-alpha' tests criticised as loose and floaty.
More intriguing, however, is what the company calls an "economic bridge" between EVEs Vanguard and Online: the ability to conduct on-foot Vanguard raids into ship graveyards, containing parts salvaged from real player-owned ships that were destroyed in the MMO’s space dogfights, before putting those parts up for sale back inside EVE Online itself. Thus opening a potential lifeline for defeated ship captains desperate to reclaim their stuff – or, perhaps more likely, the EVE universe’s biggest new hardware ransoming operation.
Here’s how it’ll work in the full game, per FanFest’s Vanguard keynote. Once a ship goes kablooey in EVE Online, any surviving modules that aren’t quickly looted are shipped to a graveyard facility. In Vanguard, players can raid these graveyards and extract with pocketfuls of recovered modules, reclassified as Contraband. Contraband can then be loaded into warbarges that will then appear back in EVE Online, where pilots can dock up and buy those modules with mutaplasmids (which Vanguard players can use to permanently upgrade their merc-clone).
It’s obviously not as immediate and/or violent as how Fenris’ least-unsuccessful EVE shooter, Dust 514, handled crossover moments through MMO-to-FPS orbital bombardments. But it does sound like it could play better with the parent game’s famous capacity for player-propelled drama and economic skullduggery. It’s not hard to imagine tales of disgraced fleet commanders redeeming themselves by launching a Vanguard-based module rescue mission on an alt account, selling the saved modules back to themselves, or of industrial saboteurs controlling the supply of Contraband to benefit or bankrupt certain corporations. The spoils of each graveyard will always be specific to the space system they were recovered from, so players of both games won’t have trouble tracking down parts that were sourced from particular battles.
There are other ways in which EVE Vanguard will affect the goings-on of EVE Online, which might sound more familiar to those who tried the bizarrely PS3-exclusive Dust 514. Vanguard missions, while most acutely focused on looting kit that will enrich and improve your character, will also act as what Fenris call the "ground warfare" component of Military Campaigns: the structured conflict between EVE’s major Empire factions that are being added in this June's Cradle of War expansion for Online. Vanguard players can therefore "conscript" themselves with a chosen faction and take on deployments that will aid their war effort. Vanguard’s story, which concerns recent EVE Online baddie The Deathless building a warclone army, will apparently also see warclones (the player characters of Vanguard) teaming up with capsuleers (the player characters of EVE Online) in pursuit of lasting galactic power.
This is still all very much future-tense, of course, and despite the imminent alpha milestone, Vanguard does look like it has a lot of voyaging left to do – not least because it’ll be up against recent extraction shooter mega-hit Arc Raiders and the less moneyspinning (but more functionally interesting) Marathon. Even assuming it makes it to a full launch, something Fenris’ (then-CCP’s) Project Legion and Project Nova never had the chance to do.
I briefly played an "early version" of Operation Avalon build at FanFest – too briefly to make a guess at Vanguard’s long-term fortunes – and it has indeed acquired the tactile qualities you’d want in a guns-first game, its cheapest SMG able to sling slugs with impressive bark and tangible weight. Although, outside of the enormous shipwreck at the map’s centre, which more learned fans could likely identify from the MMO’s spaceboat catalogue, there was also little moment-to-moment sense of being connected to the wider EVEverse.
Still, that could change once the Military Campaigns integration spins up, and almost definitely will when you’re rifling through broken ship bits for a module that your arch-nemesis would pay big mutabucks for. In the meantime, the Operation Avalon playtest is open for signups via the EVE launcher and on Steam.
Correction: The original version of this article described playing Operation Avalon with mentions of missing textures and animation bugs. I've since been told that the build I played is actually older, and the mentioned issues will be fixed in the release version, so I'll cop to not quite fully parsing the words "an early version of Operation Avalon" during the keynote.