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Back in 2013, EVE Online creator CCP Games attempted an ambitious FPS to tie in with its legendary galactic economics MMO. Dust 514 didn't end up having legs⁠—not the least because it was a PS3 exclusive⁠—but the developer, now known as Fenris Creations, didn't give up on the vision. palladian.co.za

Fenris' London office is carrying on the cherished (in certain circles) memory of Dust 514 with EVE Vanguard, whose developers hope to pair extraction gameplay with cross-game integration to make something special. Think the ongoing storytelling of Helldivers but powered by the perpetual motion machine of EVE's player corporations and alliances.

Game director Scott Davis knows they'll have to get it started with authored content, but the end goal is something self-sustaining. "The lead designers on EVE Online, they don't describe themselves as 'dungeon masters.' They describe themselves as 'caretakers,'" he told me at this year's EVE Fanfest. "What if everyone just decides to go and [enlist] with one empire? They completely snowball the campaign? We're like, that'd be fucking cool."

Vanguard's current alpha playtest, Operation Avalon, is taking the first furtive steps at that cross-game integration with a concurrent EVE Online event. It's still largely theoretical and in the future, but coming from a studio that's proven it can deliver on its unique, ambitious promises. What's far more concrete is that Vanguard is a good FPS: I enjoyed my time with it, and it surprised me with some sharp, interesting design choices that stand it up independent of its older sibling MMO.

Murderhobo Monday

One thing I loved right away about the playtest: It kinda just drops you right in the thick of it. I started playing Warhammer 40K: Darktide recently, and while I love it, god damn does it take a while to get to the action when you're first starting out. Vanguard loads into your "war barge" menu, and while you can futz around with all the sub-menus and merchants, the deployment button is right there.

This game has so many different kinds of upgrades and materials, the sort of stuff that usually gives me hives in multiplayer shooters, but it's almost like Vanguard is saying, "You know what? Forget about all this nerd shit. You can worry about that later." I hope it never loses that immediacy as it develops further.

The first objectives are to kill some guys and loot some boxes, which I like as a low pressure entry point to exploring the lone map in the playtest. Part of me wanted some more structure or direction to funnel me into the cooler encounters around the map, but it also felt particularly special when I stumbled on something cool, like a lucrative climb up a loot and enemy-filled tower. It's a balance that Fenris still has time to perfect, but I'll always prefer "go figure it out" to "have another waypoint, you thick-headed baby."

In my first deployment, I got bodied pretty quickly by another player and was stuck with the grey rarity, loaner, poop tier default assault rifle on my next few runs. The good news: Even the Scootie Puff Junior AR felt great to shoot with⁠. Its biggest handicap was a punishingly, hilariously glacial reload animation. All of the guns I've used in Frontier boast great sound, feedback, and models. My favorite so far was easily the Halo Covenant-looking laser sniper rifle you have to charge for each shot, but the shotgun's fun too.

Gun game

Over the course of a couple deployments, I really got it: The specifics of enemy spawn rates, economy, EVE Online integration, and tutorials can all be dialed in. The base layer of explore, shoot, run away here is just fun. I kept wanting to play more of it.

Davis told me this was his goal with the game's alpha, to have something where people would play it and want to come back. "We want to make things that people will miss if the game gets canceled," he said. "When you ask anyone about Dust [514], 'What do you miss about Dust?' It's not 'Oh, I just liked that it was a nine vs. nine team deathmatch game.

"They [say] 'I miss bombardments and I miss suit fitting' and all of that. It's just the little cool things that they added into that game that people miss, and I think we want more of that."

I dig the lone playtest map: It has a good variety of arenas and points of interest, while the look of it is very enticing as well. EVE Online has an underrated sci-fi aesthetic, and Vanguard does a good job of translating it to a human scale. It's a lot of grim, utilitarian, industrial structures strewn about a rugged, volcanic terrain draped in moss⁠—think Prometheus, Death Stranding, or, indeed, Fenris' native Iceland. The bright yellow, holographic livery of an interstellar industrial concern makes for a final visual flourish that really set Vanguard apart for me.

When you deploy to the map, there are a number of extraction sites that close one-by-one as a timer ticks down, while PvE mobs spawn in great numbers to hunt you down once there's just one left. It feels a little abrupt at the moment, the contrast between quiet for most of a match vs. how frantic it gets right at the end, but hoo boy, that final bit is pitch perfect.

My matches ended with mad dashes to the last extraction point, enemies hounding me across the map with a surprisingly dogged persistence. There's already a strong interplay between NPC mooks and rival players⁠—band together against the grunts, or use them as a distraction while you're on the hunt?—and that's only magnified in the final stretch as the remaining squads try to scramble for the last extraction. At this early stage, you're already getting the emergent player behavior that makes Tarkov and Arc Raiders sing.

This is my third time trying out Vanguard⁠—I played once before at last year's EVE Fanfest, and again at this year's⁠—and I've observed a marked improvement each time. "We had a shooter that was good enough, and that shooter needs to be great," Davis said of Vanguard's first playtest. "Pre-alpha is a weird development phase. You don't normally see it. [It normally] happens behind closed doors, sometimes before some games even get announced. But we were like, no, we're going to do things differently.

"This is the game looking and playing like we wanted to, and so come in, give it a shot if you were sitting on the fence waiting for something a bit more polished, because we got that a lot."

There has maybe never been a more uncertain time in the multiplayer shooter space, but Vanguard already feels worthy of consideration. And that's even before it can deploy its real ace in the hole, cross-game integration with EVE Online. You can check out EVE Vanguard via Fenris' official website or Steam, where you can also wishlist the game.