Listen up — Operation Avalon for EVE Vanguard officially drops into a closed playtest today! Fenris Studios just rolled out their latest build, and I got to talk through it with game director Scott Davis and creative lead Jamie Stanton while they walked me through what's actually coming next. If everything stays on track, the big reveal is that Vanguard will be connecting live up to EVE Online 24/7 by the end of this year — a huge move for how their worlds will feed into each other. This isn't just another iteration; it's a full-scale UE5 FPS being built as free-to-play on PC through CCP, and you can tell from the latest footage that they've been refining the gunfeel for months.
The gameplay loop itself is pure extraction shooter at its core — which I know Fenris was originally weird about calling it out loud, but let me call it now: this is EVE-traction. You beam down onto a planet in an expendable clone body and have to grab as much loot as possible before getting annihilated by rival players or the NPC armies of Mordu's Legion — who guard the genuinely valuable gear and rare materials. There is no closing circle, no victory royale, and no meaningless battlefield; it's purely about risk versus reward where going deeper into contested zones means better rewards but higher lethality. They also reworked their squad system so you can share Intel between squads over a shared network — which is essentially the multiplayer map of what EVE Online will contribute to this title as they merge systems later.
Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/eve-vanguard-reinvented-its-gameplay-with-some-notes-from-battlefield-6-hands-on-preview
The gameplay loop itself is pure extraction shooter at its core — which I know Fenris was originally weird about calling it out loud, but let me call it now: this is EVE-traction. You beam down onto a planet in an expendable clone body and have to grab as much loot as possible before getting annihilated by rival players or the NPC armies of Mordu's Legion — who guard the genuinely valuable gear and rare materials. There is no closing circle, no victory royale, and no meaningless battlefield; it's purely about risk versus reward where going deeper into contested zones means better rewards but higher lethality. They also reworked their squad system so you can share Intel between squads over a shared network — which is essentially the multiplayer map of what EVE Online will contribute to this title as they merge systems later.
Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/eve-vanguard-reinvented-its-gameplay-with-some-notes-from-battlefield-6-hands-on-preview