Legendary game developer CCP Games this week lifted the lid on Eve Frontier, a space survival game set in the Eve Online universe that features blockchain integration.
Initially referred to as Project Awakening, Eve Frontier appears to have a lot of similarities to the massive Eve Online game, but with more of a survival focus—and the ability to use crypto tokens and blockchain code to impact and reshape the game in new ways.
Details are still a little thin on the ground, but with such a prestigious development studio behind it, hopes are high that Eve Frontier could be one of the first truly triple-A blockchain games. If the sound of that has piqued your interest, this is everything you need to know about the game.
What is Eve Frontier?
Eve Frontier is an upcoming video game being made by Icelandic developer CCP Games, the studio behind the deeply hardcore and long-running online space sim, Eve Online.
It’s being touted as a space survival simulation, where you awake from stasis as the last relic of humanity and are plunged into a world where drone swarms scour the landscape—and the remaining survivors fight for limited resources. What that means for players, it appears, is that they will need to collaborate and even create resources in the world to survive.
“In the beginning, the world is like a massive beast to be tamed. It’s angry, it’s primal, it’s evil—and it’s out to get you,” CCP Games founder and CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told Decrypt in March 2024. “The world of [Eve Frontier] literally wants to kill you.”
So far no gameplay has been shown, and we have very limited info on what you’ll actually be doing in the world. But it’s a safe bet that at some point, or maybe for the entire game, you’ll be able to pilot a spaceship.
CCP Games raised $40 million in 2023 in a round led by VC giant Andreessen Horowitz to fuel its blockchain gaming ambitions. Pétursson has been actively involved in the crypto world for years, even speaking with Decrypt about the future of blockchain gaming back in 2020.
Is it the same as Eve Online?
If you’ve heard of Eve before, then it’s likely because of Eve Online, the gargantuan space MMO that has been going for over 20 years at this point.
It’s notoriously one of the most difficult games to get into, with layers of complexity from both the game itself and the extremely die-hard community that still inhabits the world. There are tons of things to get involved with, from politics to space wars, capitalism, and even accounting if you are so inclined.
However, Eve Frontier is not the same game as Eve Online. It’s a completely different game that will not be linked to the main MMO in any way, other than sharing a franchise name and likely the lore of the universe it is set in.
There has been some speculation that Frontier is designed to be the game that ultimately replaces Eve Online, but until we get a better look at the game, there is no way to tell if that’s going to happen.
How is crypto involved?
CCP has been keen to stress in the interviews it has done around Eve Frontier that this is a game that features blockchain technology, but is not billed as a “blockchain game.” That hopefully means that CCP is making a game first and foremost, and not simply a vessel to sell tokens to you.
There will be some crypto tokens created for use in Eve Frontier. The Eve Token will be a utility token that can be changed as a means of external value, with CCP already saying it will not restrict transactions outside the game itself.
However, the real interesting tech comes from the community creation options. Eve Frontier will utilize blockchain technology to give community members the chance to develop new experiences and features within the game, which could include their own crypto tokens if they so wish.
The goal seems to be that CCP will create a toolset that will then allow the community to continue to develop the game over the coming years, with the original devs remaining mostly hands-off. This could mean the game shifts significantly over time based on the community’s creations.
CCP is calling its blockchain tech approach “Smart Assemblies,” describing them as features that players can create via smart contracts—which hold the code that power decentralized applications—or other integrations within Eve Frontier.
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