What Is ‘Eve Frontier’? How to Start Playing CCP’s Survival Game on Ethereum

Legendary game developer CCP Games this week lifted the lid on Eve Frontier, a space survival game set in the Eve Online universe that features blockchain integration.

Initially referred to as Project Awakening, Eve Frontier appears to have a lot of similarities to the massive Eve Online game, but with more of a survival focus—and the ability to use crypto tokens and blockchain code to impact and reshape the game in new ways.

With such a prestigious development studio behind it, hopes are high that Eve Frontier could be one of the first truly triple-A blockchain games. And you’ll be able to start playing in a matter of days if you buy one of the Founder Access packs.

If the sound of that has piqued your interest, this is everything you need to know about the game.

What is Eve Frontier?

Eve Frontier is an upcoming video game being made by Icelandic developer CCP Games, the studio behind the deeply hardcore and long-running online space sim, Eve Online.

It’s being touted as a space survival simulation, where you awake from stasis as the last relic of humanity and are plunged into a world where drone swarms scour the landscape—and the remaining survivors fight for limited resources. What that means for players, it appears, is that they will need to collaborate and even create resources in the world to survive.

“In the beginning, the world is like a massive beast to be tamed. It’s angry, it’s primal, it’s evil—and it’s out to get you,” CCP Games founder and CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told Decrypt in March 2024. “The world of [Eve Frontier] literally wants to kill you.”

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So far no gameplay has been shown, and we have very limited info on what you’ll actually be doing in the world. But it’s a safe bet that at some point, or maybe for the entire game, you’ll be able to pilot a spaceship.

CCP Games raised $40 million in 2023 in a round led by VC giant Andreessen Horowitz to fuel its blockchain gaming ambitions. Pétursson has been actively involved in the crypto world for years, even speaking with Decrypt about the future of blockchain gaming back in 2020.

Is it the same as Eve Online?

If you’ve heard of Eve before, then it’s likely because of Eve Online, the gargantuan space MMO that has been going for over 20 years at this point.

It’s notoriously one of the most difficult games to get into, with layers of complexity from both the game itself and the extremely die-hard community that still inhabits the world. There are tons of things to get involved with, from politics to space wars, capitalism, and even accounting if you are so inclined.

Concept art from Eve Frontier. Image: CCP Games

However, Eve Frontier is not the same game as Eve Online. It’s a completely different game that will not be linked to the main MMO in any way, other than sharing a franchise name and likely the lore of the universe it is set in.

There has been some speculation that Frontier is designed to be the game that ultimately replaces Eve Online, but until we get a better look at the game, there is no way to tell if that’s going to happen.

How is crypto involved?

CCP has been keen to stress in the interviews it has done around Eve Frontier that this is a game that features blockchain technology, but is not billed as a “blockchain game.” That hopefully means that CCP is making a game first and foremost, and not simply a vessel to sell tokens to you.

There will be some crypto tokens created for use in Eve Frontier. The Eve Token will be a utility token that can be changed as a means of external value, with CCP already saying it will not restrict transactions outside the game itself.

However, the real interesting tech comes from the community creation options. Eve Frontier will utilize blockchain technology to give community members the chance to develop new experiences and features within the game, which could include their own crypto tokens if they so wish.

The goal seems to be that CCP will create a toolset that will then allow the community to continue to develop the game over the coming years, with the original devs remaining mostly hands-off. This could mean the game shifts significantly over time based on the community’s creations.

CCP is calling its blockchain tech approach “Smart Assemblies,” describing them as features that players can create via smart contracts—which hold the code that power decentralized applications—or other integrations within Eve Frontier.

Concept art from Eve Frontier. Image: CCP Games

“Players can construct infrastructure such as storage facilities, trading posts, defenses and more. Think of it as enhanced base-building,” an official FAQ explains. “Through each structure having a programmable layer, EVE Frontier allows for greater moddability and player expression on top of each ‘base item.’ Constructing infrastructure and deploying it on the Frontier does not require it to be programmed.”

“For example, a Smart Storage Unit (SSU) is a structure anchored in space, which acts as smart storage, holding and dispensing any form of inventory players choose to load it with (currencies, items etc.),” it continues. “With Smart Assemblies, this structure can be coded to serve as a marketplace, a quest giver, a bounty hunter system, an arcade machine etc.”

What is Eve Frontier built on?

All this tech is taking place on Ethereum, which makes sense for a game of this scale given the abundance of scaling networks and the fact that many prominent crypto tokens are built on it.

The crypto tokens within the game will be issued with the ERC-20 token standard, with the game itself being developed on Redstone, an Ethereum layer-2 network that is built on Optimism tech and designed specifically for autonomous game worlds.

When it comes to the actual game creation, that’s all taking place on CCP’s Carbon engine, which it plans to open source eventually. There’s also MUD, an on-chain engine from Lattice that was built in parallel with Redstone.

When is Eve Frontier coming out?

On December 5, CCP Games began selling Founder Access packs, which will unlock access to a closed alpha version of the game beginning on December 10.

The packs range in price between $30 and $90 and include other benefits, such as monthly livestreams from the developers, a “Founder” title in the game’s official Discord server, and premium play time in the eventual full version of the game.

Eve Frontier will eventually be a free-to-play game open to everyone, but this early access will let buyers start playing while it’s still in development and apparently get a boost once the game launches broadly to the public.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Editor’s note: This story was originally published on September 15, 2024 and last updated with new details on December 8.