Eve Vanguard isn’t the first time CCP Games has dipped its futuristic toes into the FPS genre. That curiosity began with Dust 514, which launched for the PlayStation 3 back in 2013. A free-to-play title featuring MMO elements, Dust 514 shared Eve Online’s setting of New Eden and featured interconnectivity between the two titles.
Eve Online players could hire Dust 514 mercenaries, the outcome of Dust 514 battles affected political powers in Eve Online, and players could work in tandem to coordinate attacks, such as Eve Online players positioning themselves above planets with bombardment equipment to attack a planet flagged by a Dust 514 ally.
While Dust 514 received mixed reviews, it had clear potential, and its interconnection with Eve Online was an ambitious feature that many fans enjoyed at the time. So it was little surprise when CCP announced Project Legion in 2014, a new FPS project that would build and improve upon what had been set in motion. By the time Dust 514 sunsetted in 2016, Project Legion had been renamed Project Nova, but unfortunately, it would never see the light of day.
But that wasn’t the end. In 2022, development forEve Vanguardbegan before it was later announced in 2023. After spending some time with the game and the team at Eve Fanfest 2025 in Iceland, it’s clear Vanguard is channelling that original potential we saw in Dust 514, and is raising the bar to offer a far more ambitious and polished experience.
Interconnecting New Eden
Eve Vanguard is a sandbox MMOFPS where players take on the role of a warclone, technologically enhanced mercenaries, who deploy from Warbarges to explore hostile planets and scavenge for resources, and hunt down enemies in an ever-evolving universe. It brings back that interconnectivity we first saw in Dust 514, promising us both titles will feature “shared goals, efforts, and consequences that echo across both games.”
Senior game designer Anthony Massey tells me the team wants to ensure “Vanguard becomes its own fully encompassed experience”, so while Vanguard players will impact Eve Online, the idea is that they won’t feel they have to cross over or convert to Eve Online.
“At the same time, we don’t want people in Eve Online to worry that if we build the connections in the wrong way that their game gets dwarfed by whatever’s happening in Vanguard. So we’ve been testing different types of connections.”
In Eve Online, players can participate in faction warfare, aligning themselves with NPC factions and helping to settle territory disputes. Players will be doing similar things in Vanguard, and those asynchronous connections will be part of the shared connectivity. Massey also emphasises the new Freelancer roles coming as part of Eve Online’s Legion expansion, which offer player-to-player contracts, will play a large role.
“That’s where we see the bridge being. There are a number of jobs you can do in Vanguard that aren’t achievable or are much more difficult to achieve within Eve Online. Ultimately, players in Eve Online and corporations are giving commissions and contracts to Vanguard players for them to affect the larger space opera.”
Massey explains that “the motivators for someone to want to play Eve and the motivators for someone who just wants to play a first-person shooter are pretty far apart” and tells me that part of the beauty of this interconnectivity between the two titles is that it gives FPS players much higher stakes, a “grander story”, and “deeper meaning”.
Vanguard will feature Bastions, large hubs aligned to different NPC and player factions, and the borders between those Bastions will be the perfect storm of potential conflict. “Ultimately you can end a war between hundreds of players with a bullet, or you can accidentally start a war by shooting the wrong guy in the wrong kind of border dispute,” Massey tells me.
And it’s not just bullets that can cause wars, as Massey reminds me that much of Eve is played outside of the game and within Discord, and even social mistakes can have consequences. While Vanguard can offer the normal shooter dynamics you’d expect, “We can lean on Eve in a way that no other shooter studio would be able to.”
Get Ready For More Space Drama
Vanguard aims to be very player-driven, offering a variety of activities and experiences with different rewards and progression systems, and the hope is that players will make their own stories and history within the game, just like Eve Online.
Even if you’ve never played Eve Online, you’ve no doubt heardone or more of the dramatic community stories of espionage and players stealing thousands of dollars worth of ISK. “That’s ultimately the destination. That’s the goal we want to achieve,” Massey tells me, admitting that it’s “exciting and scary at the same time” to see how players craft their own stories because when so much of the game is played outside of the clients, you lose a lot of control and moderation, and you’re able to’t force players to be nice to one another.
But that’s never been CCP’s goal. “It’s been drilled into us, the Vanguard team, from CCP leadership. One of the beautiful things about Eve is that people are assholes to each other. That creates all of those stories. When it comes to griefing, obviously you don’t want people having a terrible time and community management and moderation is important. But people griefing within the context of the game and that kind of espionage that happens and people being able to be assholes to each other is a key part of why this game has had so much longevity. And you have to lean into that the right way.”
The Vanguard team has been considering how they will deal with griefing situations like this. Massey gives me the example of a high level player going into low-level space and gunning newbies down, proposing that the team could use Concord, the NPC police faction also utilised in Eve Online. Concord could then place a huge bounty on the griefing player’s head and refresh everyone’s war clones so the low level players can go on a manhunt for that one player who tried to ruin their fun.
“You find those little ways to lean into the fact that players are trying to build their own experience and do their own thing without just stepping in as the GMs,” Massey says.
The ‘90s Are Back, Baby
Eve Vanguard is also bringing back the best of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, taking heavy inspiration from this golden era of sci-fi shooters like Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Halo. This nostalgic throwback is evident from the moment you fire a shotgun in Eve Vanguard and watch the bullets ricochet off the wall in front of you before blasting out damage to unsuspecting nearby enemies.
“Before ultra-modern military themes dominated shooters, guns and projectiles required their own mastery and had strong individual signatures,” Massey said during the Vanguard keynote. “We want to move forward and make sure that our weapons are built on exciting, expressive gameplay, with mechanical and visual variety that reflects the diversity of the Eve universe.”
As the team started building the combat away from having a single weapon, Massey tells me they wanted to do something that didn’t “feel like every other game”. The team brainstormed and listened to feedback on the Discord server, and realised that while some examples were coming from contemporary games, most fans were gushing about how they loved older weapons from the likes of Quake and Unreal Tournament.
“Let’s not just build a shotgun. Let’s look at something like the Flak Cannon from Unreal Tournament and go, how do we build our version of that? Let’s look at the Plasma Pistol from Halo and go, how do we build our version of that? We’re looking at these open world or PvP shooters that play across larger maps, and for the most part, they just stick to those basic military themes.
“This is a really identifiable thing that we can do that’s different, and especially because Eve has so much nostalgia, because the game’s been running for so long, this is something that we think is absolutely going to land with our existing player base. If you’re going to build a sci-fi shooter, you’ve got to have weird guns.”
An MMOFPS With Depth In More Ways Than One
For my hands-on time with Vanguard, I was paired with a player who had not only played an earlier build of Vanguard but who is also a big Eve Online player. I’m proud to say I managed to down him. I’m less proud to admit he was on my team. In my defence, he came around a corner quite quickly while I was shooting enemies, and I did at least get him back on his feet afterwards. No hard feelings, eh?
Vanguard boasts having 68,000 planets for players to explore, and even within a single planet you’ll find diverse biomes. We explored the ruined wreckage of starships, waded through dense jungle, and wandered along a quiet shore littered with the bodies of clones. I found keycards that gave cryptic clues to lost treasures, there was loot to snag so we could craft better weapons, ammo, and other tools, and you could even find deposits to mine from.
While you may choose to spend your time taking on contracts and commissions, deploying onto planets, hunting down targets, and extracting with your hard-won loot while using resources to upgrade your weapons and suit, Vanguard is more than just another shooter.
Massey tells me that only 50 percent of Eve players are “invested in the chaos and the combat and the destruction”, and the others are invested in the social engine, the resource management, and the player-made scenarios. While Vanguard is an MMOFPS with FPS playing a large part of it, it doesn’t mean it’s strictly for shooter fans.
“It will become more of a first-person experience, rather than the shooter aspect being [the] absolute forefront for everybody. There will absolutely be people playing Vanguard that spend all of their time purposefully avoiding combat, going into the far reaches of space, that are just there to explore, tag up different resources, tag up different NPC dens for other people to then go in and clear out later, and other people that want to go in just playing the mining resource game. I think that that’s where we will have a broader reach beyond the shooter market, is that there’s a first-person experience that taps into those different play styles.”
And the beauty of this is that, just like Eve Online, those seemingly individual actions play an important part in the big picture. Massey gives me an example of a player who just mines resource veins and feeds back into the war machine, adding to the resource pool used to create weapons. Even if they weren’t on the front line, they may realise their actions contributed to a large scale war they read about online. “I think that’s beyond just shooting people in the face, that’s the stuff that could be really cool about worldbuilding,” he tells me.
There aren’t many shooters I play, largely because my aim sucks, but I found Vanguard surprisingly easy to pick up and play, and even easier to enjoy and appreciate. While I might struggle to find teammates willing to take the risk of my friendly fire, this is the first time in a very long time that I can say I’m more than just a little intrigued about an upcoming shooter. A large part of that is because of the freedom of how you can play, but also because I love a bit of drama.
Eve Vanguard will launch on Steam early access in summer 2026, but for those super keen to get their hands on the game, the Nemesis Event will be held on June 21, 2025, which will allow the public a last opportunity to play before full launch.
