An upcoming “survival experience” from the creators of Eve Online got its first trailer today, showing off spaceships against a backdrop of stars. Eve Frontier was previously known as Project Awakening and is set in a distant sector of the Eve universe. The developer calls it “a sandbox that focuses on autonomy, skill-based tactical gameplay, and third-party development.” Huh? Third-party development? Oh, I see. It’s got a bunch of blockchain cryptocurrency crap attached to it. Nice.
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We’ve known the game has been in development since it was announced last year, and it entered a closed beta a few months ago. But that’s when it got a real name. “In creating EVE Frontier, we wanted to create a new kind of survival game,” developers CCP explain in a press release, “by testing not only the survival of individual players, but also the survival of civilization itself in a sandbox simulation.”
Sounds good. I love surviving amidst the hellish collapse of interstellar civilization. What seems less appealing is the horrible soup of crypto chatter that ensues. There is mention of “L2 Blockchain,” “ERC-20 tokens,” and a programmable in-game building mechanic called “Smart Assemblies” that seems to allow players to create small shops that sell materials in-game, presumably to other blockchumps for various crypto doubloons.
“Players will be able to turn their assets (ships, items, resources), services (e.g. providing bodyguard services to another player, maintaining third-party development environments), and reputation (“as a renowned player, my members pay me to run their clan”) into real-world value through the in-game economy and in-game currencies.”
In other words, it’s the disgusting idea of ”playing to win” built into the EVE universe. I’ll pass, well done.
If blockchain bullshit isn’t shown in the trailer (or even mentioned in the video description), it’s probably because even those who engage in unreasonable speculation about cryptocurrencies must admit that they are often endlessly boring and immediately met with derision and skepticism from all but hardcore cryptobros. Unlike vague images of spaceships gliding through space to the sound of warbling music, they don’t make for exciting marketing material. Try reading this sentence, also included in the press release:
“With Solidity, players can code features through smart contracts (chain code) and connect the infrastructure to decentralized applications (DApps), programs through which you can modify the operation and behavior of this infrastructure.”
Is this a video game? What is this? Eve Online as an MMO can be a difficult game to get into for a new player, but at least it exists as an interesting landscape of cyber-scams and a complex simulation of ruthless economics. I have fond memories of rushing into battle as a poor frontline fighter of a larger fleet, trying to orbit and electronically disable a much larger and more deadly ship, like a buzzing fly trying to lasso a rhinoceros. I even have fond memories of manipulating space stock markets with in-game money.
But that’s the point: Eve Online’s ISK is play money that everyone treats as play money. Eve Frontier, on the other hand, feels like a failed attempt to pump $40 million of real money into a black hole.
But who knows. Maybe it’ll do better than the first-person shooter they’ve already made four times.
