If you're anything like me, the merest mention of the word “blockchain” makes your eyes glaze over. Even in 2024, I still get all sorts of press releases in my inbox about this or that game promising to utilise the awesome power of the blockchain to do… something. Enrich its owners, usually, with everything else seeming like a distant afterthought.

So consider me profoundly surprised and a little hesitant to say that I've been chatting with EVE Online developer CCP Games about EVE Frontier —”not a blockchain game, a game that utilises blockchain”—and I've come away, well, cautiously intrigued? My eyes are unglazed for now, at the very least.

To hear CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson, product manager Scott McCabe, and creative director Pavel Savchuk tell it, EVE Frontier sounds like the culmination of EVE Online's player-led, chaos-generating philosophy: A huge social experiment in putting the course of a game in players' hands, letting them tinker with code, establish monetary policy, and generally extend their reach in ways that even ultra-libertarian EVE Online doesn't allow for.

Knowing EVE players, there's like an 80% chance it all goes Lord of the Flies. But so far as I'm concerned, even that would be fascinating to witness.

Off the chain

EVE Frontier is, at its core, a survival MMO on a single, shared server. Players find themselves in a hard-bitten, far-from-home region of space where they'll need to, you know, do survival MMO things to endure. That means harvesting a bunch of Crude Matter—the central resource and lifeblood of the game's universe—to power your ship, your exploration, your exploitation, and expansion.

But that is, frankly, the least interesting part. Alongside all that familiar stuff, CCP is boasting about a complete unlock of “third-party development.” Essentially, using blockchain tech to hand the development keys over to players. “We are introducing a bit of innovation,” says Pétursson, “which are called Smart Assemblies, which are basically structures in space that are governed by the sort of rules of the universe.

“Within [those] you can embed smart contracts, and you can also embed user interfaces in the form of HTML5.” Which is all a little bit technical, but in essence, Frontier lets players get into the coding guts of the structures they build to alter them at a fundamental level, writing their purpose using the Redstone blockchain and tech called MUD (tragically, not a return of the glorious Multi-User Dungeons of old, but a “framework for building on-chain open applications”) to decide exactly what they do themselves.

So it's the blockchain poking its head in, and I suspect for many people the sheer presence of that tech—with all its associations—could be off-putting all by itself. When I ask CCP about that, the devs accept that reality but say it couldn't be done otherwise. “Technology, in and of itself, cannot be bad or evil or whatever,” says Pétursson, “You can use powerful technology for bad and evil things, for sure, [but] we believe we're not doing that. I mean, we can't really give ourselves the health certificate. I just invite people to play and make up their own mind.” 

After all, notes Pétursson, once upon a time people mocked EVE Online for basing itself on database tech—which is just meant to be “for banks and accounting software”—before they realised what using that software could accomplish. CCP hopes to pull the same thing off with blockchain tech to the extent that the term fades into the background. “Nobody cares [about the technological foundation] really, apart from a couple of back-end developers,” says McCabe. “At the end of the day, they're just playing a game, and using the technology enables us to do some things that aren't possible without it.”

The studio is keen not to be associated with the myriad terrible products that have called themselves “blockchain games” over the years, though. It's here where Savchuk tells me that CCP thinks of Frontier—and would like others to think of Frontier—as “not a blockchain game, [but] a game that utilises blockchain.”

And I admit, I find the possibilities interesting. In playtests, CCP has given testers “a fairly limited subset of what the final product is going to have,” says McCabe. “And then within a week they were like, 'Behold! We have built our own fully functioning tournament system inside your game!'” Players had built up structures and, using CCP's tools, provided them with all the UI and technical gubbins necessary to create something akin to regular EVE Online's Alliance Tournament system.

“If people are already building such impressive features using this first iteration of the toolset,” says Pétursson, “that bodes extremely well for the future of this idea of creating an MMO which can be modded by players server-side, not just client-side.”

That's why they pay me the big bucks

It's not all Smart Assemblies, mind you. Perhaps the most interesting and unnerving possibility to me is the ability for players to spin up their own currencies. Where EVE Online revolves around its primary ISK currency, Frontier will have a couple of CCP-run mediums of exchange and no restriction at all on players and their alliances ginning up their own currencies alongside them, “a little bit like when a sovereign nation issues their own legal tender,” says Pétursson. Also a little bit like war bonds, which corporations in regular EVE use to finance their conflicts all the time. But rather than being stored in an Excel spreadsheet it's now “woven into the fabric of reality.”

That's interesting because adding the ability for every player organisation to become its own central bank adds a layer of potential chaos to EVE's already mostly player-run economy that I can't wait to see play out. “I'm really looking forward to a boiling financial hellscape,” says Savchuk, with “many, many currencies.” Will we see players establish interest rates, monetary policy, some kind of MMO Bretton Woods system? Will an alliance become so powerful that its currency becomes the de facto medium of exchange for the entire galaxy, US-dollar style? It's all possible.

But it's unnerving because, well, this is literally cryptocurrency we're talking about, isn't it? CCP is being characteristically libertarian about the whole thing, and says it won't regulate transactions between players inside or outside of the game. Want to buy a new car using your alliance's funbucks? Pétursson won't stop you. Perhaps it's just the acrid taste left in my mouth from so many iffy crypto projects over the years, but it's not hard to imagine this all going awry. For instance, what if the US government decides it's not so keen on some rinky-dink MMO letting a hundred financial flowers bloom, and decides to put legal restrictions on citizens' rights to handle its myriad currencies?

CCP's position is that, yep, that's a possibility. “In the world, there exists a lack of clarity on many things,” says Pétursson, who refuses to guess at what governments around the world will do in regards to EVE Frontier specifically and blockchain/cryptocurrency tech in general. “But we fortunately live in a world where consenting adults can do dangerous things.”

Dangerous things like, you know, playing a game that's spinning up literal cryptocurrencies for which the devs won't (and perhaps can't) limit out-of-game transactions. “You will have to compare climbing Mount Everest and joining Frontier in terms of what you are exposed to,” says Pétursson. “We believe in a world where that is allowed, but we will make it abundantly clear what people are signing themselves up for.” Play at your own risk, folks. And hey, at least if a major government does decide it doesn't want to compete with a virtual universe filled with bizarre, spaceship-based central banks, it'll make for an interesting series of news posts on PC Gamer dot com.

This is also where, for me, the biggest caveat on my interest in Frontier crops up: CCP isn't talking about monetisation yet. “It's too early. I mean, we have lots of ideas,” says Pétursson, “but it's just too early to talk to that in any detail.”

Which is a shame, because it's probably what I want to hear about more than anything, and will likely be the final word on whether I keep track of EVE Frontier's progress with curiosity or disdain. Still Pétursson does say “we're generally fans of optional subscriptions” like EVE Online's Omega game time system. That's a promising statement, at least, but the proof will be in the pudding.

Look to the future

But regardless of how it all shakes out, I won't be able to resist keeping tabs on EVE Frontier in much the same way I've kept track of the unhinged chaos that EVE Online has spat out over its 21-year existence.

In the long-term, CCP wants EVE Frontier to be decentralised and (close to) eternal. A game that—by virtue of all being written to a magical series of distributed ledgers—could easily be spun up again if a meteor happens to hit its servers. “We want to have a clear path to a decentralised system,” says Pétursson, where “we, CCP, just have the same access to the system as anyone really building on the system.” Where players are effectively co-developers, in other words.

But that's somewhere down the road. For EVE Frontier's upcoming playtests and first steps into the wider world, CCP will “maintain some exclusive privileges in the beginning,” where the developers can access and alter the game's fundamental laws of physics to make tweaks and changes that let the game fit their vision. “You have to allow both the world and its social system to have the built-in feature of having revolutions and regeneration. So if we're seeing it crystallise into a too-opinionated, rigid pattern too early, we will probably introduce ways to dislodge that, or tools for people to dislodge that,” says Pétursson.

But the plan, ultimately, is for CCP to become “just another service provider” in a galaxy full of them. Which I have to say sounds cool to me, and certainly more interesting than what most other MMOs are doing in 2024. The studio doesn't think EVE Frontier will just become a tyranny of coders, either. “It's just one aspect of the world,” says McCabe, “You're going to have to make some friends in the game to protect [your bases and alliance], build it, keep it running, etcetera, etcetera.”

“It's usually people with social skills that rule the world,” notes Pétursson. After all, “Our own world is made out of computers, but it's not coders that rule the world.”

Frontier spirit

So yes, almost in spite of myself, I'm fascinated by CCP's vision for EVE Frontier. If the company makes good on its stated vision, I suspect this game could become the pinnacle of EVE Online's ludicrous, player-dominated ethos. Even if it doesn't come together, it'll probably be interesting to watch. To hear CCP tell it, EVE Frontier is one part game, one part social experiment, and the kind of thing that could only come from the slightly unhinged studio that gave us EVE Online. I'm not ready to go all in on it just yet, but I'm very eager to hear more.

You can keep tabs on EVE Frontier, and register for the upcoming phase 4 playtest that kicks off September 27, on its official website.