08 | December | 2023 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

The EVE Vanguard First Strike event went live yesterday. From now until Monday the 11th you can give the first person shooter CCP has been working towards for nearly a decade… or longer, if you count DUST 514… a try.

EVE Vanguard – Coming Soon

Be warned, this an early development test, so set your expectations low as there isn’t a lot of “there” there. I would argue that you couldn’t charge money for the game in its current state… of if CCP did people would be pissed. This does bring up the question of how EVE Vanguard is ever going to pay for itself. I suspect it will always be a lamprey on the side of EVE Online.

CCP doesn’t seem to be promoting this test very obviously as some sort of pre-alpha development release. They have put it on the launcher and invited anybody subscribed to come and play their new shooter. In their dev blog they say it will be developed and expanded over time, but that is true of any online game, so I can’t tell if they’re being cagey or what. They have put out a feature roadmap with the current state as the foundation on which things will be built, which seems to imply a baseline of features has been achieved. But maybe they have been taking PR lessons from Chris Roberts.

The EVE Vanguard Roadmap

(You know it is an authentic sandbox experience when it says so right on the box… or the PowerPoint slide.)

But once you load the game you get a red banner warning you that this is not production grade software.

A work in progress

I feel like they made the whole thing sound a lot closer to being done than all of this back at Fanfest. It certainly seems like we’re a long way from it being “done” in any sense of the term.

Anyway, that aside, the event is under way. If you are a paid subscriber to EVE Online, which is to say that you have an Omega level account, you can download the EVE Vanguard client (with the new launcher, which you presumably have) and jump into the game.

The new launcher with EVE Vanguard shown

The download isn’t big… at least not in the scale of this day and age. There was a time when even a gigabyte would have been considered huge.

Install for a good time

Some people have reported problems with the install and the community has been there for them… to shout them down and remind them that this product is still in development so complaints are only allowed if you say “pretty please” and “thank you.” Again, echoes of Star Citizen.

As part of the lore around this event, a new episode of The Scope was released to set the story.

Mordu’s Legion lost some Bowhead freighters filled with troops and supplies for a ground campaign and The Deathless is sending in his new Vanguard clones… which I guess are the players… to fetch that technology. So you get to play for the pirate factions to further their insurgencies I guess. From the patch notes:

During the First Strike event players in Vanguard will add corruption to the Guristas insurgency that is centered in Hevrice whenever they complete contracts. Players logged into the EVE Online client can see the effect of the Vanguard on the corruption levels within this Guristas insurgency through the insurgency UI.

I hope at some future date it won’t be just about assisting the insurgencies. Or should I hope that? I don’t know.

I remain somewhat indifferent to the game itself. I have stated too many times that I am not a shooter guy, in part because I am bad at it, but also because the people who are good at it are so much better than I am that the whole thing turns into “spawn, move a bit, die” over and over, which is neither fun nor engaging game play. There is no way to improve if you die so fast you can’t really learn from the experience… or what you learn is that you should log off and play something else… and EVE Vanguard continues that tradition for me.

When you log in you are asked to join a three player squad, and if you don’t have a pre-made team then you can join with random players. Feel pity for the squad that got me.

Ready Squad One

However, I quickly figured out that I could just click “Ready” and get into the game by myself, thus removing the burden of having to carry me from some poor random players.

Once ready, in a squad or solo, you then get dumped into the game where you have to pick an objective contract and then figure out where that is and what you need to do, which is a level of competence I have yet to achieve. I am dead and done so quickly that I have yet to lay eyes on anything that is an objective.

There is also crafting in the game, and it is required. You need to craft ammo. You start with enough materials to craft another magazine of 30 rounds for your gun, but after that you need to collect items and go to the crafting screen.

Crafting some ammo

You also need to collect biomass to create a clone you can return to if you die. If you fail to do that because you’re dead already, you end up in spectator mode if you’re in a squad, or out of the match if you’re alone, because you are done.

Does crafting ammo rather than picking it up off of the field create a more engaging player experience? It seems a bit awkward to me and not something that makes me think this is a sandbox game. It feels very far from that.

The game play itself… the shooting bit, when you have ammo… feels fine. Movement and aiming was fluid and the scenery looked good on my 34″ monitor. Recoil on the one gun in the game is pretty heavy, so you want to fire in very short bursts at anything but knife range. Otherwise it feels like “just another shooter” and little about it made me think about EVE Online.

I can be dead like this in any number of titles

And that renews my concern about EVE Vanguard being so closely tied to EVE Online that they have to exist in the same launcher. Leaving aside the “don’t get your shooter in my spaceship game” that I previously expressed, the flip side is that unless you care about EVE Online you may not give EVE Vanguard a chance because it can’t exist as its own download and installer on Steam.

(Also, don’t launch the old installer once you install EVE Vanguard as it apparently purges key files. New installer only.)

You may well ask if I am this indifferent to EVE Vanguard, why did I even give it a try? Well, like most people, I can be bribed. I have a price. In this case, the promise of a shiny new pod SKIN in EVE Online was enough.

Try EVE Vanguard, get this pod in EVE Online

So I played for a bit then moved on.

CCP has been directing people to their Discord server to provide feedback on the event, which has led to several channels of chaos which seem so sub-optimal as a place to be heard such that I wouldn’t bother had I something to bring up… like the fact that the game refuses to recognize my audio input device. No point in throwing that into the maelstrom to be ignored or attacked. Their plan feels like a way to let players vent while ignoring them rather than any sort of serious feedback collection method.

But I often feel that way about giving feedback to CCP. They have a history of discounting any feedback that doesn’t agree with their plan. That is a very human thing to do, but not a very helpful thing when you’re trying to engage with your customer base.

Addendum: CCP has a four day Omega offer in the in-game store if you want to buy some PLEX in order to play EVE Vanguard.

You can pay to be in our test!

Interesting that they put this in after they removed the weekend fleet pack, the 3 days of Omega option, from the web store. But who knows what they are thinking.

Also, why 51 PLEX? I figured it had to be priced to make it a slightly less attractive deal, but that works out to 382 PLEX for 30 days… so, again, I don’t know. But if you buy it today you can get another 100K skill points from the Winter Nexus login rewards this weekend for your otherwise alpha account.

Addendum 2: It dawned on me later that you can buy as little as 50 PLEX from the web store, so I suspect this is CCP trying to sell more PLEX by making you go to the next size increment there… if you have somehow forgotten you can buy PLEX for ISK in the game. Anyway, oddball pricing like that is a red flag that they’re trying to take advantage.