Yesterday the Web3/blockchain game under development by CCP Games reached an important milestone. That's right, Project Awakening received a real game name, EVE: Frontier. The Pearl Abyss-owned company issued a press release on its corporate website.
In EVE Frontier, CCP Games is creating a deep player-driven sandbox for a new era. Cast into a cruel and brutal cosmos, you have been lost to time and lost to light. To survive, you will need to explore, exploit and expand in the face of perpetual annihilation. The Frontier is a shattered region of space, warped by the presence of supermassive black holes gravitationally bound in a macabre dance. Rogue AI infests its depths; corrupting and consuming the remnants of what still stands.
With all players on one single-shard server, death and opportunity lurk in equal measure. Awareness is power: your skill as a pilot and strategic choices determine the outcome of every encounter, whether you favor hit-and-run tactics, stealth, or all-out warfare. Exploit the Frontier’s natural resources to upgrade your ship with vital technology and acquire new capabilities. Obtain fuel, the lifeblood of your journey, to power your travel as you overcome its dangers. A community-driven and dynamic economy allows you to create custom currencies, establish markets, and trade assets, services, and reputation in a truly open environment.
Rebuild civilization from its ashes by using Smart Assemblies, an open-ended platform, to construct and program infrastructure within space. Expand your influence through defenses, trading posts and multiple types of functionality, each imbued with a programmable layer that links the world of the Frontier to the real world outside of it. Develop your own ideas or address the needs of others: from mission systems to private economies, Smart Assemblies unlocks third-party development with a toolkit for creators to build beyond a virtual world.
“EVE Frontier redefines the survival genre by fusing intense space survival gameplay with the limitless emergent potential of a player-driven, persistent sandbox universe,” said CCP Games CEO, Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. “From exploiting space itself to shaping entire economies, every decision ripples across this dark and uncompromising expanse. We welcome you to join us in building this next step in our history; awake eternally.”
The next closed player test, Phase IV, runs from 27 September to 7 October and registration is currently open at the game's website. According to an FAQ supplied to the media as part of the press release's press kit, the test is the last closed invite-only test. I received an invite to the next test period since I participated in Phase III back in May and June. I'm not exactly sure how much more I can say about my experiences at this time, so I will err on the side of discretion.
I wrote a few posts about Web3/blockchain games back in May and June. In exploring the question, "Are blockchain games a good advertisement for blockchain games?" I came to the following conclusion:
As vehicles for entertainment, blockchain games don't sound very appealing. For those who want blockchain games to reach mainstream audiences the games can't concern themselves primarily with the mechanics of creating and distributing real world wealth. Instead of identifying themselves by the technology they contain, perhaps the developers and fans of the genre just make good video games that incidentally contain blockchain and other web3 technologies. Because after looking up 5 blockchain games I'm not interested in playing any blockchain game. The games I looked at just don't serve as a good advertisement for the entire genre.
CCP seems to think the same thing. In the corporate press release, the words "blockchain" and "Web3" do not appear once. In the first dev blog, blockchain was mentioned.
We have much more to share with you, but we also wanted to mention what has been on many of your minds over the past year as we head into the future together: yes, EVE Frontier uses blockchain technology and it is important for us to be transparent about this. If you’d like to learn more about this aspect of the game, please read the first iteration of our whitepaper. You can also join the conversation on Discord.
The media FAQ does go into greater detail.
Does EVE Frontier use blockchain technology?
Yes, players can edit aspects of the game world and server in real-time, giving the community the power to add their own functionality to the game through Smart Assemblies. This feature lets players program the infrastructure they deploy into space.
Smart Assemblies utilizes Redstone: https://redstone.xyz/, an L2 blockchain designed for permissionless and open software, and MUD: https://mud.dev/, a framework for building on-chain open applications.
Combined with Carbon, these tools are the foundation of our persistent and programmable game server at universe-scale: one server, one universe, evolving through players forever.
In addition, the economy of EVE Frontier is an open environment: any and all transactions are allowed, using in-game currency built on ERC-20 token standards.
These solutions are environmentally friendly: all technology used to develop and operate EVE Frontier has the same energy consumption as EVE Online’s infrastructure.
Now, over the years I've heard people claim EVE Online is not a sandbox game because players don't really have the ability to change their environment. Apparently building space stations and space highways isn't enough. According to the dev blog, players will have a greater ability to shape the world.
To rebuild civilization on the Frontier, we are giving you the ability to not only construct in-game infrastructure but fully configure it to your own needs. This means each structure has a programmable layer. We call this feature Smart Assemblies, and it includes defenses, trading posts, industrial units and a wide variety of other types of facilities to construct your own personal space complex. You can develop your own ideas or address the needs of others: from mission systems to private economies, Smart Assemblies will unlock third-party development with a powerful toolkit for creators to build beyond EVE Frontier’s virtual world.
I do need to address the issue of Smart Assemblies as at least one editor of a gaming publication has stated the use of the term Smart Assemblies is a sneaky way to mention blockchains without using the word blockchain. I'll even post the entire paragraph so the words are taken in context.
Indeed, today’s press release touts CCP’s transparency but mentions blockchain only once, the video doesn’t mention it at all, and the website uses phrases like “smart storage units” and “smart assemblies” as euphemisms for how creators will interface with the blockchain. But there’s no great secret here: This is just another explore-and-exploit sandbox.
At this point the developers have provided so much information I could easily go down several rabbit holes. But I'll just quote from the Builders' documentation about Smart Assemblies.
EVE Frontier is designed as an open environment - a sandbox with a heightened level of player agency. With a complete unlock of third-party development, the game world will evolve with the community - not just through their in-game actions, but by allowing it to be edited server-side by players in real-time. Through enhanced base-building (Smart Assemblies), players can code functionality into infrastructure placed in space such as turrets, trading posts, storage facilities, and more. Develop your own ideas or address the needs of others: from mission systems to private economies, Smart Assemblies unlocks third-party development with a powerful toolkit for anyone to build beyond a virtual world.
Smart Assemblies uses the Solidity programming language to configure in-game infrastructure. With Solidity, you can define the rules and behavior of decentralized applications (applications that can have no single owner, known as DApps) that exist within the programmable layer of Smart Assemblies infrastructure. Learn about Solidity and get started: https://soliditylang.org/
Smart refers to all the things that can be connected outside of the game through a programmable layer that links the virtual world of the Frontier to the material world outside of it.
And yes, Smart Assemblies do allow player developers to interact with the blockchain.
Using Solidity, players can code functionality through smart contracts (on-chain code) and connect infrastructure to decentralized applications (DApps), programs through which you can modify how that infrastructure functions and behaves.
I honestly didn't expect to write a nearly 1500 word essay on the topic. I will probably post several more articles about EVE: Frontier, if only as part of my coverage of Pearl Abyss' financial situation. But I do have the feeling some game studio will create a successful Web3/blockchain game one day. I would prefer if the game were a good game that happens to use Web3 technology instead of using the thought of blockchain riches to attract players. After all, games are supposed to let people escape reality for awhile, not become a paying job.
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