CCP dusts off an interplanetary shooter concept with links to the stars
What do you do when you’ve built a universe that is too large to be contained in a single game? For the publishers of most series, the answer is simple: a sequel. Not for CCP, however, which has been sustaining its debut game, the interstellar MMORPG sandbox Eve Online, for two decades now. Instead, the Icelandic studio wants to create games nested within its larger, persistent universe like matryoshkas, zooming in from the intergalactic sagas to tell stories on a much, much tighter scale.
And so we find ourselves down on a planet’s surface, approaching the carcass of a ship, of the kind that would be controlled by a single player in Eve Online. And, indeed, could be – lead product manager Scott Davis says that eventually this entire map “could be the result of a specific inter-player battle in the wider game”. From our perspective, though, this ship is the dominant feature of the entire landscape, the flames belching out of its side a rare source of light and colour in the barren volcanic setting. Our squad of three is here to pick it clean, and dispatch any other scavengers – NPC or player-controlled – who might have had the same idea.
This has long been a dream of the studio, CCP game director Snorri Árnason explains: “the ultimate science fiction”, able to hop between layers of conflict with the ease of a Star Wars wipe transition. “There are concepts lying around from 1998, of ‘you’ll see all the humans individually’,” adds creative director Bergur Finnbogason. They’re both longtime CCP employees, and remember all too well the studio’s first attempt at realising this dream.
2013’s Dust 514, on which Árnason was a senior producer, was a free-to-play shooter that allowed Eve pilots up in orbit to drop bombardments onto the battlefield in realtime. It had its flaws, among them the misfortune of arriving late in the PS3 lifecycle; three years later, it was gone. Yet CCP maintains that the game was a success, not least in introducing players to this universe: Davis, a fresh recruit to the company, tells us that this was his gateway, while another member of the London studio met his wife through Dust.
It’s perhaps understandable that CCP has never quite let go of this concept. “There have been internal prototypes going on for some time,” Árnason explains – such as Project Legion and Nova, Dust successors which got far enough into development to be announced at Eve Fanfests in 2014 and 2016 respectively. Árnason describes these efforts as “bumps in the dark”, adding that Vanguard “is the longestrunning, and the strongest team by far”.
So committed is CCP that it has built a studio around the idea in the UK’s capital.
