The upcoming “survival experience” from the makers of Eve Online got its first trailer today, showing off spaceships against star-studded backdrops. Eve Frontier was previously known as Project Awakening and is set in a remote sector of the Eve universe. The developer calls it a “sandbox focused on self-reliance, skill-based tactical gameplay, and third-party development.” Huh? Third-party development? Oh, I get it. A bunch of blockchain cryptocurrency nonsense thrown in. Great.
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We've known the game was in development since it was announced last year, with a closed beta test a few months ago. But this marks the moment when the game is being christened with a real name. “When creating EVE Frontier, we wanted to make a new kind of survival game,” developers CCP said in a press release, “testing not only the survival of individual players, but also the survival of civilization itself within a sandbox simulation.”
This sounds good. I like surviving amidst the hellish collapse of interstellar civilization. What’s less inviting is the awful soup of crypto chat that follows. There’s talk of the “L2 Blockchain,” “ERC-20 tokens,” and a programmable in-game building mechanic called “Smart Assemblies” that lets players build small shops that sell in-game supplies, presumably to other blockchains, in exchange for various crypto doubles.
“Players will be able to convert their assets (ships, items, resources), services (e.g. providing protection to another player, maintaining third-party development environments), and reputation (“as a famous player, my members pay me to lead their clans”) into real-world value through the in-game economy and in-game currencies.”
In other words, this is the dirty “play-to-win” idea that has permeated the EVE universe. I'll pass, cheers.
If the blockchain nonsense isn’t in the trailer (or isn’t even mentioned in the video description), it’s probably because even those who dabble in mindless cryptocurrency speculation have to admit that it’s often endlessly boring, and elicits immediate ridicule and skepticism from all quarters, except the cryptobro hardcore. It doesn’t make for exciting marketing material, unlike the vague images of spaceships flying nonchalantly through space to blaring music. Try reading this sentence from the press release:
“Using Solidity, players can code functionality through smart contracts (on-chain code) and connect the infrastructure to decentralized applications (DApps), changing how the infrastructure functions and behaves through these programs.”
Is this a video game? What's this? Eve Online, as an MMO, can be a tough game for a new player to approach, but it at least remains an interesting spectacle of cyber-fraud and a complex simulation of ruthless economics. I have memories of charging into battle as a very poor front-line fighter in a larger fleet, trying to bring a much larger, deadlier ship into orbit and electronically disable it, like a buzzing fly trying to lasso a rhino. I even have memories of manipulating space exchanges with in-game currency.
But here's the thing: Eve Online's ISK is a game currency that everyone agrees is a game currency. By contrast, Eve Frontier looks like an ill-fated attempt to pump $40 million worth of real-world money into a black hole.
But who knows. Maybe it'll do better than the first-person shooter they've made four times.