Eve Frontier is a survival game spin-off of Eve Online and, yup, it's full of blockchain bullshit

An upcoming "survival experience" from the makers of Eve Online got its first trailer today, teasing spaceships against stellar backdrops. Eve Frontier was previously known as Project Awakening and is set in a faraway sector of the Eve universe. The developer calls it "a sandbox which focuses on self-reliance, skill-based tactical gameplay and third-party development". Huh? Third party development? Oh, I see. It has a bunch of blockchain cryptocurrency horseshit attached to it. Great.

We've known the game was in development since its announcement last year, and it saw a closed beta test a few months ago. But this marks the moment it has been christened with a real name. "In creating EVE Frontier, we wanted to make a new type of survival game," say developers CCP in a press release, "testing not just the individual survival of players, but the survival of civilization itself within a sandbox simulation."

That sounds fine. I love to survive amid the hellish collapse of interstellar civilisation. What sounds less inviting is the horrendous soup of cryptochatter that follows. There is mention of "L2 Blockchain", "ERC-20 tokens", and a programmable in-game building mechanic called "Smart Assemblies" which seems to let players make little shops that sell in-game materials, presumably to fellow blockchumps for various crypto doubloons.

"Players will be able to turn their assets (ships, items, resources), their services (e.g. providing bodyguard services to a fellow player, maintaining third-party development environments), and their reputation (“as a renowned player, my members pay me to lead their clan”) into real-world value through the in-game economy and in-game currencies."

In other words, it's the grubby "play-to-earn" idea baked into the EVE universe. I'll pass, cheers.

Several previous blockchain games, dead and lifeless in a void. | Image credit: CCP Games

If the blockchain bullshittery is not featured in the trailer (or even mentioned in the video's description), it is likely because even those who indulge in unwise cryptocurrency speculation have to concede it is often interminably boring and invites immediate derision and skepticism from all quarters, save the cryptobro hardcore. Unlike vague images of spaceships flying coolly through space to warbling music, it does not make for exciting marketing material. Try to read this sentence, also included in the press release:

"Using Solidity, players can code functionality through smart contracts (on-chain code) and connect infrastructure to decentralized applications (DApps), programs through which you can modify how that infrastructure functions and behaves."

Is this a video game? What is this? Eve Online as an MMO can be a difficult game to approach as a new player, but at least it exists as an interesting landscape of cyber-skulduggery and a complex simulation of cutthroat economics. I have fond memories of rushing into battle as a dirt poor frontline fighter in a larger fleet, trying to orbit and electronically disable a much bigger, deadlier ship, like a buzzing fly trying to lasso an rhinoceros. I even have fond memories of manipulating the space stock markets with play money.

But that is the key thing: the ISK of Eve Online is play money that everyone agrees is play money. By contrast, Eve Frontier looks like an ill-fated attempt to pump $40 million dollars of real world money into a black hole.

But who knows. Maybe it will do better than the first-person shooter they have made four times.