poker-6

I would [[link]] say I did my time, several tours of duty on the front lines of "blockchain is bullshit, please stop emailing me press releases about MMO Kickstarters." I remain a skeptic and a luddite, about both crypto and its new tech fabulist little brother, generative AI.

I want to establish my hater bona fides straight up before I say that ⁠—no NFTs here, but a blockchain-based backend, and one ethereum-derived in-game currency alongside a non-crypto one.

There are a few reasons it has my attention: Its dev, CCP Games, has been doing digital economy stuff in the infamous sickos-only MMO, EVE Online, for 22 years, earning a certain benefit of the doubt⁠. The digital economy guys are doing something digital economy-y, checks out. I also feel a certain admiration for the studio sticking with the idea well after the gold rush has ended: Even though it remains boom times for shitcoins, blockchain gaming is already a bit of anachronism.

More persuasive, though, is that its devs are the only ones I've ever encountered with a coherent vision of what the tech could add to my experience as a player, and not just the "play to earn," have the same gun in Fortnite and Mario Party, cocaine-fueled hokum we all got so used to hearing about circa 2021-2022. Frontier's big sell is server-side modding at runtime, which is to say modding the game, for yourself and others, without leaving the game or it requiring active intervention or moderation from the developers.

If the pitch of base EVE is more Elder Scrolls⁠—find your role and build a second life in a fictional civilization⁠—Frontier is more Stalker or Fallout: Carve out and rebuild something amid a post-apocalypse, one that seems to have spanned an entire galaxy. To do so, you've got your ship(s), as well as a "Smart Assembly," a survival game chest/workbench that doubles as the primary point of entry for modding.

It can run Doom

Last month, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson , a near-universal indication of "we're off to the races" for DIY possibilities. Perhaps even more impressive is Game Engine Bridge, a tool for building games-within-games in Frontier, shown off at a recent CCP-hosted hackathon.

The author's sample project with the tool was a simple 4X strategy/management game created in Unity. "It generated a random type of planet that you could then prove you were the first to find," explained EVE Frontier game director Sæmundur Hermannsson. "Then you can then grow it and populate it and conquer it. It's like Pokémon Go."

Game Engine Bridge wasn't the only instance of players effectively recreating No Man's Sky within EVE Frontier. Another hackathon participant created a system to track and prove when a player is the first to discover a new star system in Frontier's .

This, coupled with Frontier's inherently dangerous, unexplored and underdeveloped universe, has the potential to give rise to an entirely exploration-based playstyle. Product manager Scott McCabe outlined how he believed players could find a niche as surveyors or cartographers in EVE Frontier, selling information to individuals or Frontier's eventual equivalent to EVE Online's player-run corporations.

Other modders have focused on new systems and game types for Frontier, creating bounty boards, NPC questgivers, and more. The hackathon's winner was Trinary Games Commission, a project that implemented fully automated PvP modes, with Smart Assemblies handling the rewards and rules enforcement for king of the hill, racing, and area control competitions.

How does that work?

This level of moddability can be seen in plenty of other games, but Roblox is the only instance of it in a live service ecosystem that I'm aware of. Crucially though, Roblox devs create distinct experiences that run out of the same launcher, rather than inserting user-made content into a live MMO.

CCP says it wants to just hand players the keys and let them go [[link]] nuts, with limitations baked into the game⁠—with that word I don't love, blockchain⁠—preventing players from giving themselves infinite ammo, god mode, or otherwise breaking things. This is also the only example I've ever seen of a live MMO letting players mod the game at runtime, with those mods immediately affecting other players.

I asked if this was at all possible with a more traditional MMO backend, and got a convincing response from Hermannsson.

"[The blockchain integration] helps with this read-write API out of the box," he said. "Instead of needing to worry about the read API and then putting writes and then worrying about too many reads like⁠—I'm sure you've seen⁠—. They had to close it down, because it was just blowing up their [Amazon Web Services] server bill, because third party devs just write bad code, inherently⁠—they're just hobby devs who spam your server, and that's what EVE Online has to deal with. But you just get a pretty slick solution out of the gate with this read-write API and everything."

in its Legion expansion, but this required a significant development lift to implement. "While with our previous setup, this freelance jobs thing, we have to program it into the game. With Frontier, we're giving them the tools to do a feature like this and whatever other features like this," said creative director Pavel Savchuck. "And sometimes we just don't know what features they want, like, they build strange things sometimes"

Foundational

EVE Frontier is currently playable in an early or "Founder's" access form, but the "full" game seems to be a long way off yet. When I checked out a playable build of Frontier at this year's EVE Fanfest, it still felt very much like a prototype, with some partially-textured ship models and technical hiccups during our hands-on.

The Frontier team has some plans for control overhauls that intrigue me, most-notably a camera rework that will include more close-up, cinematic angles and driving controls to appeal to shooter fans and dogfighters. Right now, though, combat and movement is still close to base EVE, feeling [[link]] like an RTS where you only control one unit.

We're talking early access, and that, coupled with the game's inherent complexity, makes it a tough sell to Joe Sixpack CallofDuty looking for a cool spaceship game, at least at the current stage. CCP has said it wants players to ultimately have as much or as little interaction with crypto wallets or programming in EVE Frontier, but right now the curious modder/developer, EVE Online diehard, or ideally both is who will get the most out of Frontier.

But much like your average gamer's spectator relationship to OG EVE, Frontier is already a fascinating game to follow. Much as it pains me to say, it's a one of a kind MMO modding experiment because of its blockchain tech, and not despite it. I'll continue to make an exception for Frontier because it doesn't just promise the moon, its devs keep offering specific, interesting use cases for the tech behind it.