“First, You Must Survive Before You Can Thrive,” Says Eve Frontier Dev
Though I say it makes it easier, most of the CCP Games team I speak with tell me it will be even more difficult than the cutthroat Eve Online. Eve Frontier is an upcoming survival MMO where players must explore, scavenge, and build up their base in a sprawling universe to survive.
RelatedBeneath The Space Drama, Eve Online Is A Challenging Game With A Strong Community Willing To Teach You The Ropes
Whether they teach you the easy way or the space death hard way remains to be seen.
PostsThough thematically linked and taking place in the same universe as Eve Online, there is no interconnectivity between Eve Online and Eve Frontier.
This Isn’t Eve Online
At Eve Fanfest 2025 in Iceland, I spoke with community developer Ben Sisson and product manager Scott McCabe about Eve Frontier. I told them that despite others saying that Frontier would be more daunting than Eve Online, I surprisingly found it easier to get my head around simply because there is far less happening on the screen at any given time.
“I've said for years, [Eve Online’s] not actually a game, it's 17 games in an overcoat, trying to sneak into the cinema, and whatever game you choose to play… might be very different from what someone else does,” McCabe tells me.
“With Frontier, we've slimmed down a lot of the features, going from this grand strategy to more of a core survival experience. Because of that, some of the illusion of choice starts to dissipate. It becomes more focused on your hierarchical needs. First, you must survive before you can thrive. And because it's a much simpler initial path, I think you're right that it can be a little bit less intimidating to start with. It should be a more focused experience.”
While some might wonder why base building wasn’t just added into Eve Online, instead of a brand new game being made, McCabe explains, “We don't really want to compromise one thing and get this sort of jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. If you try to make a game that does every type of game, then it will be average across everything. You have to ask yourself, will that make Eve Online a better game? It becomes a game design choice as opposed to a feasibility.”
The team gets a lot of people asking ‘why don’t you just make Eve 2?’, but we don’t really need a sequel because Eve is still alive and well. “We wanted to do something totally unique, totally different, and make a game that stands on its own. We talk about it being Eve-like. It should feel familiar if you're an EVE player, but it should be very distinct,” Sisson says.
“In Eve Frontier, we have occlusion. It's one of our key changes to the physics engine that we've made. Your location matters. If someone flies in front of your guns, they'll get hit instead of the target you're shooting at. If you're hiding behind an asteroid, you won't get hit.”
Occlusion also means friendly fire. While you can have grand fleets and giant PvP battles in Eve Online where the ships don’t collide, in Frontier, Sisson warns me, “You will just straight up hit these ships, and what it's led to is some really cool tech that players have developed for themselves that we had nothing to do with.
“If you fire a bullet from your gun, it'll just keep going indefinitely, but you can only lock your target out to a certain distance. Players have been able to hit things far past that distance by having a smaller ship that is less likely to get hit act as a targeting reticule at a distance away. It's a super cool mechanic that's, again, very simple, but unlocks so many different unique gameplay elements that we have nothing to do with.”
Because both games use the Carbon Engine, occlusion could theoretically be added to Eve Online, but McCabe tells me it’ll never happen as it would “fundamentally change Eve Online”, which isn’t what the team wants to do.
It’s undeniable that those who have played Eve Online will feel more than a little familiar with Frontier as the two games share some core controls and have familiar icons and systems in place. Though mechanically some things work the same, the feel is different. The team often refers to the idea of Frontier feeling as though you’re in a dark forest, just you and your allies with a lantern and a gun, trying your hardest to survive.
“Where Eve Online is famous for the huge battles and this enormous scope, Frontier should never, ever feel that way,” Sisson says. In Frontier, you can’t zoom out as far to give players the feeling of claustrophobia and not knowing what is just beyond your field of vision. You’re meant to feel afraid.
Prepare To Be Scared
Eve Online focuses on New Eden, which is densely populated with trillions of planets, and with all the information at the touch of your fingertips. “In Eve Frontier, sometimes one of the scariest things is just not knowing,” McCabe warns me.
He tells me that in an early build, he found a rift far removed from everyone else and began building his base, cycling as much fuel as he could from the rift. However, it finished cycling far sooner than it should have, alerting him that someone else had been there first. “I just had that moment of looking around. I thought I was way out by myself, but someone is nearby, and I don't know where they are. That little moment of, ‘Oh, I'm quite vulnerable’. That's exciting and scary.”
Frontier featuring occlusion also plays into this, as it’s not just about line-of-sight fire, but also having an advantage over others by knowing the territory. Unlike in Eve Online, where you can scan a lot more and see what’s around you, Sisson warns that Frontier players are not “gifted information”, so if you are in an area you are familiar with and someone else wanders in, you have an advantage.
“If you have information about this other person, who may or may not be your friend or foe, you have a position of power over them. If you're the guy on the other side who doesn't have that information, that is a frightening thing. If somebody else out there is better prepared than you, they are like the wolf in a forest who can see through the trees.”
Frontier is more grounded in science, with this being one of the core focuses of the game. However, the team doesn’t want to go too realistic with Frontier. “We could make it super realistic and turn off all sound in space, but that's kind of janky. It's not very fun, it's not very immersive. So we take some creative liberties, both in visual design, sound design, and game design, to remember that it is, at its heart, a game that we are playing.”
Keeping it scientific, Frontier features a heat system. If you are too close to the sun, your ship will overheat. Doing things uses energy, and expending that energy also creates heat. Your ship getting too hot or too cold can limit its functionality and leave you in a perilous situation.
Some ships will be able to run in hotter environments, but they’ll be easier to spot because of heat signatures, though if you park your ship in front of the sun, that signature will be obscured by the gigantic ball of flame behind it. Adversely, if you’re trying to hide in a colder area of space, your ship may cool to the point where it freezes. You’ll have to make a choice to run and potentially reveal your location to nearby enemies, or risk staying hidden knowing you might freeze to death.
Sisson tells me about a playtest where they had a system entirely in the dark, and players could only see what was right in front of them from the light of their ship. “Being able to use that kind of tech where things just come out of the fog at you, and you don't see them until they're inches away, is such a horrifying experience.”
One of the scariest things about Frontier is that everything you have matters. Those assets you’ve spent ages collecting and gathering to shore up your defences and help you explore mean something, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. The more you have, the more you have to lose.
“That's the whole permadeath thing, or total kill-death vibe we're going for,” Sisson tells me. “If your ship dies, everything you're carrying is gone, unless you can go back and recover it. So if you have a lot of stuff, you're in a position where you're even more vulnerable. Then those moments where the predators are all around you, you're trying to escape, that is the pinnacle of the horror experience.”
Lone Wolf Or Safety In Numbers
Eve Frontier is currently available with Founder’s Access ahead of its proper launch, and at the moment, there is nowhere safe to hide in the game, as others can destroy your base. However, that might not be how it remains in the long term, as CCP Games is aware people want to play games for fun, and presumably having nowhere to hide could dial up the fear too much, leaving players frustrated.
Though arguably there is safety in numbers, Frontier can also be played alone, but no matter how you play, your actions impact everyone as you all share the same space. Frontier players may want to go it alone, or they may want to build communities or massive empires. “This is the beauty of single-shard games, both Eve Frontier and Eve Online, is that your actions in the world may not directly impact someone else, but they are impacting the world, and you share the world, so you are connected,” McCabe Says.
Single-shard games are where all players share one server.
This challenges the team, as they have to make a game equally enjoyable for solo players as it is for group players. Fortunately, they’ve learned a lot from Eve Online, and Sisson explains it’s been invaluable to have that “wealth of information” and not have to start from scratch with Frontier.
Eve Online has around 8,500 star systems, and Frontier’s live server currently has 22,000. That’s a lot more space to poop your pants in. At first, players were concerned that the universe would be too huge and you’d never see other players, but Sisson tells me that concern has since turned into a positive.
“People love the idea that there's a wild, literally a wild frontier out there of untamed wilderness that they can just point their compass in one direction and say, ‘Okay, I'm going this way’, and head out into the nothing and know for a fact that they are alone. But then again, if you're out in the middle of nowhere and you hear a knock on the door, that's very scary. So being able to have all that open space where people can go out there and kind of do their thing and also maybe get too comfortable and be ambushed is a really unique experience.”
But what is that knock on the door when you’re out in the middle of the expansive universe? While the information of what’s happening around you is more limited than Eve Online, McCabe tells me players can “roughly see how much industrial activity is going on in particular star systems”. A player could notice that there’s a ton of industrial activity happening on one side of the galaxy, and by the raw number alone, be unable to tell if it’s one player churning things out, or a large group of players working together.
They could decide to check it out, but you can’t just fly there and back like you’re catching the bus. You have set up fuel depots along the way, harvest resources, and build a path to the other side of the galaxy, all to have a peek of what’s happening there. And if they’re hostile? Well, you’ve just made them a little path to head directly towards you. And those other players might not even use your fuel depots, they could also destroy them, leaving you stranded.
“It could be an ambush that they're actively baiting you to come out there because they know that you're going to come looking for it,” Sisson adds. “The lack of information, this is where we are most different from a lot of other MMOs. When you're in those moments, it really does feel like tunnel vision kicks in. It feels like you are glued to the screen.”
During my hands on time with Frontier, I felt like the wolf amongst the sheep. We were paired with devs to help guide us through our experience, and more than once, when we stumbled across someone else in space (read: another journo playing the same demo in the same room as me), I asked if I could kill them. More than once I was gently chided and told it would be pretty rude. I don’t think I’ll show the same restraint when it comes to the real deal, but then again, maybe I’ll be cowering in some dark corner of the galaxy in fear of a bigger, badder wolf.
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