One of the many announcements at EVE Fanfest last month was about EVE Vanguard, CCP’s next attempt at an EVE Online based first person phooter.
EVE Vanguard – Coming Soon
I haven’t had a lot to say about EVE Vanguard for a few reasons.
The primary reason that I am not very interested in play a first person shooter. That is just a “me” thing. I enjoyed them at one point. I played most of NovaLogic’s Delta Force series back in the day, but I think the last FPS I bought anywhere close to launch was Battlefield Vietnam, and that is coming up on 20 years ago. But since then I have not found them to be all that interesting, largely because my meager abilities were already degrading with middle-age after that.
Part of that was also that I found them fun for a week or a month, then went and player something else because they get old fast for me.
My mild disinterest in FPS titles is compounded by the fact that I have not seen anything that makes me think CCP has somehow unearthed the secret to making a fun and successful FPS over the last 15 years of trying.
It isn’t just that CCP hasn’t managed to ship another successful video game since the launch of EVE Online just over 20 years ago. (NetEase made EVE Echoes, so it doesn’t count.) It is that every failure has a safe, conventional wisdom excuse that explains the failure while absolving CCP of any blame.
Their VR titles, for example, were all shut down last year with the excuse being that the market for VR just isn’t there yet. And it is certainly true that the market for VR has not met the overly optimistic projections that analysts we presenting a few years back.
But other titles have succeeded and made money in the VR sector.
And even the favorable reviews of EVE Valkyrie tended to point out that the game lacked much in the way of depth. It made for a good demo. I was impressed playing five minutes of it at EVE Vegas one year. But a title has to persist through that initial burst of excitement and deliver an experience a player enjoys. EVE Valkyrie, not so much… and even the release of a non-VR version of it did not move the needle.
All of which is a warm up for DUST 514, where the conventional wisdom is 99% behind the idea that its problem was being released on the PlayStation 3. Not only was the EVE Online player base all on PC, but the game launched six months before the PlayStation 4. Of course it didn’t succeed!
I have not seen any discourse over whether or not DUST 514 was a good game… at the time I heard that its controls were not optimal and it wasn’t making headlines past launch… nor any comparison with titles that launched in that pre-PlayStation 4 window when it came to success.
And so, with the coming of EVE Vanguard, we have CCP Rattati out on the PR circuit giving interviews to sites like PC Gamer placing the blame for failure entirely on the platform.
That does not give me any sense that there was much self-reflection on the quality of DUST 514 itself… and that interview just confirms to many of us that CCP Rattati isn’t interested in the spaceship side of EVE Online. His goal has been to build another FPS and now, as game director for EVE, he is making the FPS part of EVE Online itself.
This, for me, is the most disturbing part of the whole EVE Vanguard story, that it is not going to be a separate client, that it is going to be integrated into the one successful title that CCP has produced.
Superficially that seems like a bad idea for multiple reasons. First, it ties the shooter to a 20 year old title about which many have already made up their mind. It practically limits the title to just the current EVE Online player base which is neither as large as it once was nor as universally dedicated to the concept of a New Eden FPS as the EVE Vanguard team seems to believe.
Second, it makes every EVE Vanguard problem an EVE Online problem. CCP has consistently demonstrated that they are not as on top of their game… literally and metaphorically… with things like the chat server in game coming unglued now and then, long after all problems were declared address.
I guess congratulations to CCP Rattati. He has managed to get the game he wanted integrated into the game he is supposed to be in charge of. He has achieved his dream of having a FPS. But as somebody who has no interest in an FPS and has seen how much CCP can delude itself over the years, I am not very comfortable with this being folded into EVE Online and made a problem for the game I actually to pay to play.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 