The final session of day 2 of EVE Fanfest was the EVE Keynote. I won't do a comprehensive breakdown of the session, but enough notable items were identified to warrant pointing them out for players of CCP Games' many games.
First on stage was CCP Games' Chief Executive Officer Hilmar Veigar Pétursson. After presenting a history of EVE Fanfest, Hilmar noted that EVE was becoming a platform with two games, EVE Online and the currently under development first person shooter EVE Vanguard. He urged people to visit Steam and put Vanguard on their wish list to help with the algorithm. CCP has even created a campaign similar to Kickstarter's stretch goals.
Hilmar then announced a big event called Nemesis occurring on 16 September 2025.
Hilmar proceeded to talk about the other game under development, EVE Frontier. Not really a lot of news about the game except the project has progressed to the point the team was at Fanfest discussing the game. The news about Frontier Hilmar made were the gaming shows Frontier would appear on this summer.
Hilmar did confirm that Frontier is in effect working as a test platform for both the upgrade of the Carbon engine to Python 3 and the conversion of the engine to be open source. For those paying attention to the strings of dev blogs, the work on Frontier filters into EVE Online through the EVE Evolved technical track.
CCP Orca followed Hilmar to discuss the happenings on the publishing side of EVE. Now, the swords for the active alliances that have reached 10 years of existence and the Alliance Tournament trophy are nice stories, but CCP Orca did announce some news. First, Galaxy Conquest has reached 680 thousand installs. Perhaps not great for a mobile game but solid numbers for Pearl Abyss. The next season begins at the end of May.
Of note are plans to expand the tournament scene. The tournament tools will receive an upgrade and released to players so they can hold their own tournaments.
Titan Forge Games and CCP Games are releasing the EVE: War For New Eden board game, with the first tournament being held at Fanfest. The pair are going to develop a dice game, details to be released soon.
Next up were EVE Online Game Director CCP Rattati and Creative Director CCP Berger. CCP Rattati outlined a new approach to onboarding new players, one advocated by major null sec alliances for at least a decade. Get out of the way, give players the tools, and let other players teach new players how to play. Despite the existence of organizations like EVE University, the desire is to give a major role to the major null sec alliances. Given the success, or the lack thereof, of CCP's efforts throughout the years, perhaps the shift is for the best. Just don't expect career agents to be fixed now.
CCP Rattati then proceeded to make the major updates seen in the Equinox and Revenant expansions an official part of the development cycle. I did see where some EVE players have described the move as a de facto return to the old quarter system. However, the move to me seems more like the Final Fantasy XIV development schedule of a major .X point patch every 4 months with a minor .X5 patch every two months. CCP Rattati confirmed plans for a third major patch for the summer expansion during the third quarter of 2025.
CCP Berger came back on-stage and introduced the next EVE Online expansion, Legion. The expansion will launch on 27 May 2025. I was a little surprised at the timing as the last two summer expansions, Viridian (2013) and Equinox (2014), both launched in June.
CCP Okami and his team provided further information about Legion. Features planned are map upgrades, freelance jobs (a form of corporation project), ESI updates to support freelance jobs, corp palletes for the SKINNR system and updates to the corporation logo editor. The Equinox sovereignty system will also see the addition of three new categories of sovereignty upgrades. One of the upgrades will allow generating system effects similar to those found in wormholes. Finally, attacking entities in null sec warfare will have the ability to capture skyhooks instead of going through the experience of destroying the structures and the building and installing their own.
Well, not quite finally. No EVE expansion is complete without new ships. Legion will see the introduction of two. First is a Triglavian marauder, the Babaroga. The other is the long awaited Angel Cartel dreadnaught, the Sarathiel. The Angel dreadnaught will have the unique ability to use capital micro-jump drives even while sieged.
Up next was CCP Collins to talk about EVE Vanguard. The big news he announced was a Steam early access launch date of summer of 2026. Players will also have access to the game through the EVE launcher. The early access is the point players will have 24/7 access to the game servers.
And of course, the presentation ended with a trailer.
The EVE keynote served as the introduction to the other keynotes given on Saturday so this piece is just focused on what I consider major, or at least noteworthy, news. Was I excited as I left the main hall of Harpa? Not really. Nothing really blew my socks off except the 2D map option coming to EVE Online. But as the company's leadership made crystal clear back in 2019, I'm not the target audience CCP is looking for. We'll have to look at places like Eve-Offline and various metrics in the game to find out how the message from the EVE keynote was really received.
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