“What’s cooler?” asks Scott Davis, recently-promoted game director for EVE Vanguard at CCP Games. “What’s cooler: fantastical sci-fi weapons, or militaristic guns in the real world? I think the weapons from the games that we remember playing in what we’ve been calling ‘the golden age of shooters’ are cooler, right?”
I’ve just finished playing the most recent build of EVE Vanguard, an MMOFPS that is setting out to redefine how we think about MMOs and FPS games in one broad stroke. Last time I played Vanguard, there was one fairly unassuming assault rifle and a bunch of featureless enemies roaming the map. CCP has been fixated on the idea of ‘having the community along for the ride’ with the development of this game (perhaps so that it doesn’t evaporate into vaporware, like many other EVE-related projects), and so we’ve been able to see the game in various states of undress. Now, though, it feels like it’s started layering up – and let me tell you, I think the underwear might be designer.
“I’ve got [senior game designer and weapons and combat design boffin] Anthony Massey asking me ‘what’s your favourite pistol, in any game?’” continues Davis. “And I’m not going ‘oh, it’s the 9mm from Call of Duty’ or whatever. No, I’m saying ‘it’s the Deagle from Counter-Strike’ or ‘the Plasma Pistol from Halo’.”
Let me break down these three, new, amazing weapons for you. First up, there’s the shotgun; heavily inspired by the Flak Cannon from Unreal Tournament, its bouncy projectiles interact with level geometry to ricochet off walls, floors, and ceilings. After about five minutes of practice, I was already shooting AI drones around corners: it’s inutitive and impossibly fun. Next, there’s the pistol, which gets more powerful (and has more kick) the longer you charge it up. It’s got strong Halo vibes, but feels like it has more bite than the Covenant small arms from the mainline games. I didn’t get to use this one against a human player, but I’m hoping it’ll strip them of shields in one fully-charged hit. Finally, there’s the sniper; a phenomenal bit of kit with a deeply satisfying UI that scratches something in me on a primal level whenever I get a headshot.
“When Massey goes ‘hey, I’ve been working on this shotgun, what do you think?’ and then we go into a map and we’re just running around shooting each other with this weapon… We’re having a brilliant time,” Davis smiles. “And it reminds us of what that was like to be in Unreal Tournament, back in the day, and just have fun running around killing each other.”
It’s not just lip service, either. This really is what Vanguard feels like now. In my past demos, the game has felt fine: fun, with an interesting hook in the connected, not-quite-an-extraction-shooter way. But now, with these arcade-y guns and a more distinct personality, it feels special. This isn’t just ‘Tarkov in space’ or a pretender to the throne, it feels unique; drawing from retro inspirations but not defined by them.
I tell Davis that I can’t really think of a game – with this budget and scope – that is doing what Vanguard is doing right now; high production values, Unreal Engine 5, but with guns and combat that feels bombastic, a little goofy, and that prioritises fun over a fixation on real-life ballistics.
“I don’t know if we’ll see more from Marathon on that front, because it is still quite sci-fi,” he muses. “But so far, it’s very archetypical: there’s an ACOG scope on a weapon that very much feels like an AR-15, and so on. Maybe Bungie’ll innovate a bit more there. Then, even Destiny is still sci-fi, but it’s still got that militaristic edge to it, too, you know? And anytime Bungie does sci-fi, it goes a bit too space magic, which is something we kind of want to avoid.”
Davis namechecks the Killzone series (“they had some interesting weapons, even though they were all very metal and very chunky”) and we decide that, maybe, the closest example we have to Vanguard right now is Gears. “Funny you should say that,” he smiles. ”We’ve got a few people who worked on the series in CCP Massey and CCP Vipex: both worked on Gears 4 and Gears Tactics, I think.” He wonders if, maybe, a little inspiration has “silently crept in”.
But other than these three stunning guns, what can we expect? Well, Davis confides that his favourite weapon of all time is the DMR from Halo – and something inspired by that gnarly gas-operated bullpup rifle is “absolutely going to make it” into Vanguard at some point. And you know what? It sounds like it’s only going to take the team a week – a week! – to get it into a build.
“I’ve been saying this a lot: we’re trying to min-max game development,” says Daivs. “We’re a tight team, and so we’ve been coming out with ways that to be efficient by, honestly, not wasting our time on stuff that’s crap [laughter].
“This is what the open development’s like, right? Those weapons that you played today, they’re a week’s work, not a month’s work. And that’s how we like to work! We’ll build something out of paper mache, held together by sellotape, and we’ll go ‘is there something in this?’ We say to the players ‘what’s missing? What do you like? What don’t you like? What would you improve?’ And then we go and build it. We don’t spend nine months working on a feature that hasn’t gone through that cycle of validation. And that process is working for us. That’s how we’re spending so little time on the stuff that doesn’t work.”
This is all well and good for players who want shooters that remind them of LAN parties when they were 16 years old, but what about the EVE faithful? As much as CCP wants to tempt new players into the ecosystem with a game that promises to be persistent, respectful of your time, and – importantly – fun, it’s going to be dead in the water without the EVE community’s embrace. To that end, the devs like to summon the spectre of the much-loved, long-lost Dust 514.
“I have a memory of everything that happened on Dust,” adds CCP Rattati – also known as Snorri Árnason, game director for EVE Online and executive producer for EVE Vanguard. “So I carry that responsibility, and I sit there and say ‘that’s not EVE enough’. It’s my responsibility to make sure that Vanguard is as authentic as possible, and builds on the great ideas that Dust had.”
The EVE loyal like to ask why CCP Games doesn’t simply port Dust 514 to new hardware; the players are a loyal bunch, and are fuelled by nostalgia. That’s what you get when you build your community around a game that’s been alive for 22+ years. “You can’t ask a team to port a 17-year-old game,” says Árnason, simply. “You have to give people creative freedom to say ‘okay, we can do better. We can do something differnet, but better’.”
Árnason goes on to say that CCP Games already has “all of the components of Dust in the game” and then “like 50 more.” He notes that Dust couldn’t deliver on some key ideas the developers wanted: procedural generation was very limited; there was no pathfinding or NavMeshes, so AI and PvE were incompatible with the game from the off; manufacturing and resource gathering didn’t make it in. “We’re just delivering the bucket list of what people wanted at the end of Dust,” laughs Árnason. “It’s like, ‘oh, if we ever make Dust again, we should start with this stuff’.”
That’s why Davis and Árnason are drawing, deeply, from wells that aren’t just in the same sphere as Vanguard. That’s how it’s going to connect to EVE, with its focus on player-informed decision-making and narrative. “That’s why we have EVE players in right now,” says Árnason. “EVE players are there for the EVE authenticity. It’s their world. They’re kind of first adopters. They’re fact-checking us. They’re helping us with the interactions, the social systems, the depth, and all that stuff.”
“It’s been really refreshing to make a shooter and not have to go ‘what is Call of Duty doing? What is Apex Legends doing?’” adds Davis. “We’re making a game now where we’re drawing parallels to MMORPGs: asking how does player progression from a locational perspective [work]? Referencing things like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14.”
EVE Vanguard is a while out, yet. It’ll only drop in early access in Summer ‘26 and – if the old release schedule I was shown last year still holds up – it’ll come to consoles sometime in 2028. Maybe. But every time I play, I see this game come more into its own skin, and there’s a newly-bolstered confidence in CCP that I think is well deserved. The developer had nine stations running the game at EVE Fanfest this year, as if to say to the dubious, long-standing EVE players ‘look, it’s real, and it’s good’.
If we keep on getting weapons that put me in the mind of the golden era of Halo, well… I think Vanguard is going to appeal to way more than just a handful of folks that miss playing Dust 514 on their old PS3s.
