EVE Vanguard News

[h3]Between now and November, we will be sharing content in the form of Themes. These Themes will cover multiple topics from art, lore, weapons and more to provide you insight into our development journey. Lets look at our seventh theme, EVOLUTION OF COMBAT. [/h3]

Weapons
Before designing any weapon in Vanguard, we ask the same three core questions: Who made it? What does it do? How will it be used? These principles form the foundation of our design philosophy, ensuring that every weapon feels like an authentic part of the world.

Who made it?
Every weapon in Vanguard has been manufactured by a faction or empire within New Eden, each with its own distinct culture and technological signature. Whether a weapon is sleek and precise or heavy and brutal, its origins will influence its visual style and the materials used in its construction.

What does it do?
Weapons are designed with a specific purpose in mind, whether it’s delivering precision strikes or providing heavy firepower in chaotic battle scenarios. Once we understand the function of the weapon, we assign it to an appropriate world manufacturer. Just as in the real world, different corporations specialize in different methods of construction, and this is reflected in both the look and feel of the weapons.

How will it be used?
Weapon design goes beyond aesthetics—ergonomics and player experience are critical. Elements like the positioning of charging handles or magazine placement must align with how players will handle the weapon in combat. Our 3D, concept, and animation teams collaborate to ensure each weapon not only looks incredible but feels amazing to use in action.

From concept to the battlefield, every detail of a weapon is carefully crafted to ensure it delivers a unique combat experience for the players of Vanguard.



Drones
Drones in Vanguard are autonomous robots that fulfil a variety of roles and tasks. Not all drones are designed for combat, and many do not pose significant threats to Vanguard or NPCs. Their modular nature allows for extensive customization, enabling them to serve different functions depending on the variant.

Most drones are airborne, manoeuvring easily in 3D space, which presents a unique challenge for players, especially when engaging small and agile drones. The diversity of drone sizes and shapes also means that combat strategies must adapt accordingly—sometimes evading drones is just as critical as engaging them.

Goals & Strategy
Each drone variant in Vanguard is built for a unique purpose, requiring players to adapt their strategies when encountering them. Whether drones are scouting for targets, protecting key assets, or deploying reinforcements, players must always consider their role and threat level.

Intended Player Experience
Drones in Vanguard offer a range of challenges, from their aerial mobility to their varied capabilities. Players must take a different approach depending on the drone’s vertical positioning and modular design. Drones also evoke different emotional responses depending on whether they are aligned with, against, or agnostic toward the player.



Militia
The Militia are an organized group of survivors native to Solstice and other habitable planets. They act as a resistance force, primarily using ambush tactics to combat occupying forces. Despite being low-tech compared to other factions, they use scavenged weaponry and resources to become a significant threat to Vanguard and other AI-controlled enemies.

Player Experience
Players should expect sudden ambushes from Militia, which create reactionary combat scenarios. The ambushes slow players down and force them to become more methodical in navigating the map, being mindful of Militia traps or squads lurking nearby.

Militia combat should feel unpredictable but not entirely without warning. Players can detect the presence of Militia through subtle environmental cues like chatter, clicks, and whistles. This gives players some control over avoiding traps while still keeping the pressure on.

Encounters
Militia ambushes come in various forms, surprising and disorienting players with traps or sudden attacks. Some common ambush types include:

• Trap Ambush: Exclusively targets Vanguard players with tripwire traps. Once triggered, Militia squads quickly appear to engage the player.
  
• Roaming Ambush: Militia squads roam the map, attacking both players and NPC squads.
  
• Camp Ambush: Militia lie in wait at strategic locations, initiating scripted set-piece encounters.
  
• Trapdoor Ambush: Triggered by players or objects like grenades. These ambushes send Rogues (a Militia variant) to spring a high-damage melee attack.
  

Post-Combat: If Militia wins a fight, they might be seen looting deathboxes in the area before retreating. Militia who successfully loot items will drop them upon death if killed later.

Militia variant ideas:

• Warrior: Standard enemy wielding stolen Core80s. Uses knives in close proximity.
  
• Watcher: Tracks targets with low fire-rate rifles and maintains a safe distance.
  
• Rogue: Fast-moving melee attackers who charge recklessly toward players.
  
• Grenadier: Throws explosives from behind cover, advancing on pinned targets.
  

Situational Awareness (Player's perspective vs Militia)
Players need to rely on subtle cues to detect Militia presence. These include:

• Militia Presence Ambience: Whispers, clicks, and subtle sounds warn players of nearby Militia.
  
• Militia War Cry: Loud war cries signal an impending attack, giving players a final moment to react.
  
• Unique Footsteps: Militia have a distinctive sound profile, making them identifiable even when out of sight.
  

Loot Drops
Militia often drop munitions components and scrap. More valuable resources can be found as uncommon loot, but players may also recover items looted by Militia during their ambushes.



Until next time,
o7

[h3]Between now and November, we will be sharing content in the form of Themes. These Themes will cover multiple topics from art, lore, weapons and more to provide you insight into our development journey. Lets look at our sixth theme, MINING. [/h3]

Goodbye banana, hello Cutting Tool!
A versatile, equippable tool designed to interact with specific targets in the game world. Though it functions similarly to a weapon, the cutting tool is built to handle precision tasks, like cutting open mineral deposits, wreckage panels, or other materials that block access to valuable resources. It’s designed specifically for mining and exploration purposes, allowing you to retrieve resources or unlock containers and doors.

How the Cutting Tool works:

• Emits a beam that damages mining targets, allowing you to extract resources or access hidden areas.
  
• Used to mine mineral deposits, cut open wreckage for salvage, and unlock containers or covered switches.
  
• Designed to damage targets that respond to frequencies generated by the cutting tool laser, such as ore-rich deposits or latches on wreckage.
  

Cutting Tool Design:
The cutting tool itself is a tough, rugged piece of kit designed to survive the harshest conditions. Its construction allows it to withstand extended use in unforgiving environments. Additionally, it’s designed to be easily disassembled, ensuring that players can maintain and repair it with minimal effort when needed, making it a reliable companion in exploration and mining operations.

The cutting tool is essential for players exploring hostile environments where quick access to resources or locked areas can mean the difference between success and failure. It’s not just a weapon or a tool, but a key piece of gear for exploration, salvage, and even survival.



Customizing your Cutting Tool
The cutting tool uses mining crystals, each tuned to specific frequencies that are most effective for cutting certain materials. Players need to experiment with these crystals through trial and error to find the right one for the job.

Switching Crystals:

• Switching between crystal types is like swapping ammunition in a weapon. You can cycle through them to see which crystal works best for a particular material.
  
• Using the wrong crystal slows the process but the correct crystal will allow for faster, more efficient cutting.
  
• Crystals have limited durability, and once depleted, they must be replaced. Crystals cannot be repaired.
  

Mining Minigame:
The cutting tool introduces a simple, strategic element to mining: crafting the correct crystal to use for each material. Using the right crystal rewards players with faster cutting, while using the wrong one results in slower progress and may incur potential penalties.



Node Layers and Visual Feedback:
When mining resource nodes, players must cut through layers of material using the correct crystal type to speed up the process. Visual feedback, such as cracks or heat effects, will show how well the crystal is working. However, the process is more about experimenting with different crystals. If the wrong crystal is used, the cutting will take longer, encouraging players to switch crystals until they find the right one.

Chipsets and Customization (concept):
Chipsets can be added to the cutting tool to improve its efficiency, regardless of which crystal is being used. These chipsets provide benefits such as:

• Durability: Each crystal has a limited lifespan, but using the wrong one simply slows progress rather than depleting it faster. Crystals must be replaced when depleted.
  
• Yield: Enhances the amount of resources collected from nodes.
  
• Speed: Shortens the cutting time, helping players mine resources faster.
  

The idea is that these customizations offer the player flexibility depending on their playstyle—whether they prefer efficient resource gathering, faster gameplay, or a balance of both.



Combat Feedback:
Although the cutting tool is not designed for combat, it can deal minor damage to characters. However, for the upcoming release, the feedback for damaging characters might be rudimentary. Expect a more developed combat feedback system in future updates.

Until next time,
o7

[h3]Between now and November, we will be sharing content in the form of Themes. These Themes will cover multiple topics from art, lore, weapons and more to provide you insight into our development journey. Lets look at our fifth theme, CONNECTIONS TO EVE. [/h3]

On May 6th, 2003 (or YC105), New Eden came to life for the first time. In the more than two decades since, this living universe has steadily grown hand-in-hand with a community unlike any other – evolving through DUST 514, EVE Valkyrie, EVE Gunjack, and striving toward an even brighter future in EVE Vanguard.

When a story must exist in the context of a broader world, the worry that it might constrain its own future to a narrow path for fear of breaking what came before—or worse, deliberately disregard that history—is all too often proven justified. On the infinite horizons of New Eden, however, precedent becomes potential. Rather than prescribing lines that must be carefully coloured within, EVE’s twenty-one years of established story and community provide a palette from which a truly limitless future can be painted. The Vanguard is this idea manifest, resolving elements at the very roots of EVE, DUST, and Valkyrie into a foundation for a new era of Elysian independence.

In Vanguard infomorphs, the remnant Sleeper origins of warclone technology have been unified with those empowered by it in a very literal sense by the Arkombine mercenary group’s “Lifegiver” – lighting a path to harmony at last for the first generation within the inner virtual world of the Fulcrum and to self-realization together with second gens through compatibility with a new kind of warclone blank.

In Vanguard clones, the history, technology, and biology of the ever-factious Jove weave together with the vision and innovations of the Deathless Circle’s “Quartermaster” to form a body whose brain and implants are capable of coupling with the Fulcrum’s onboard virtuality at a distance, as if they were Sleepers coupled physically to their crumbling enclaves.

• Lifegiver brings the technology and population of DUST to a long-hoped resolution.
• Quartermaster innovates paths of pragmatism and progress from the core tech of Valkyrie.
• The Deathless and the Fulcrum drag ancient Jovian lore and technology to the surface in EVE Online.



More than simply sharing roots in deep lore, the stories of Vanguard and EVE have interacted directly in the games themselves, and this confluence will only grow as time goes on:

In December YC125 (2023), the First Strike deployment saw the Vanguard make their first appearance on the planet Hevrice III, launching from a Forward Operating Base cast into orbit and descending upon the crashed remains of a Mordu’s Legion Bowhead outfitted with an onboard clone fabrication chamber. This vessel and others like it were evidently designed to provide tactical deployment of an also-previously-unseen mass-production warclone type to the battlefields of Angel and Guristas Insurgencies.

A “second strike” several months later in March YC126 brought deeper investigations into the contents of these ships and Mordu’s new toys at the request of Lifegiver and Quartermaster. It quickly became clear that the Legion had found new uses for technology they had acquired more than a decade prior from partnered Guristas-Thukker covert research facilities host to Quartermaster’s involvements at the time.

The Solstice deployment—by far the largest to date—took place shortly after the Upwell Consortium’s launch of their Equinox product line in June YC126 on the planet Auviken VI, which had become the host of Upwell’s prototype Skyhook and a wealth of research infrastructure. Suspected by many to have burned a longstanding zero-day vulnerability in the system’s cynosural jamming network to bring assets into the system, the Deathless Circle provided low-atmosphere launchpoints from several vessels cloaked in low orbit. Vanguard at the target location—a crash site that, like the rumoured insertion, is broadly considered unrepeatable—observed the Skyhook prototype’s near-ground launch zone in the distance.



Though the backends of EVE Vanguard and EVE Online have been developed independently, they share a lot of common DNA. Most notably the adoption of an Event Driven Architecture (EDA), and some common tech choices in the use of Golang, Protobuf and gRPC.

EDAs produce highly flexible and decoupled systems that can grow organically while maintaining scalability and resilience. In an EDA, all state changes are captured as “events” and published onto a central message bus. An example event might describe a character undocking from a station, what ship they undocked in, and what modules were fitted to that ship.

Once an event type is being published onto the message bus, consumers can choose to subscribe and react to that event. The publisher of the event is unconcerned with the event's consumers, and so new system behaviour can be built independently of existing behaviour.



To link into EVE Online, the Vanguard Backend was setup as a trusted publisher of events into Quasar (EVE Online's backend), and used this connection to publish events about contracts completed in Vanguard. Insurgency services in Quasar listen out for these events, ascribe active insurgency information to them, and aggregate them into the insurgency totals for the appropriate solar systems.

When it came to building this connection between Vanguard and Eve Online, the initial challenges were technical. To become a trusted source of events, a publisher must connect to Quasar's internal gRPC gateway service; and to connect to that, the publisher must be within the same private network as the gateway, and be authenticated using CCP's Private Key Infrastructure (PKI) to acquire an mTLS client certificate.



In the run-up to First Strike, the Vanguard backend team re-deployed both our development and production environments into new subnets that could be connected into the wider CCP network without address conflicts. We were then able to connect to CCP's PKI services to sign our client certificate and use that to connect to the Quasar internal gateway! Fortunately a Golang client SDK already existed for interacting with the Gateway, so we were able to integrate that into the Vanguard Backend without too much difficulty.



Now that we've proven out the technical aspects of this inter-game communication, we want to next look at maturing our integration by simplifying the client SDK to bypass the need for a PKI Agent, and building support for bi-directional communication so that the Vanguard backend can react to events coming from EVE Online.



A bi-directional link into Quasar would allow for Vanguard’s game systems to react to events that happen in Eve Online in realtime. This opens up all kind of possibilities for inter-game gameplay and we’d love to hear your ideas for how we could use this!

Until next time,
o7

[h3]Between now and November, we will be sharing content in the form of Themes. These Themes will cover multiple topics from art, lore, weapons and more to provide you insight into our development journey. Lets look at our fourth theme, MANUFACTURING. [/h3]

Before we dive into our next theme, we want to express that this is a mock-up and you should take it with a heavy hand of salt. We do, however, want to show you a sneak peek at a possible new feature that is all about manufacturing and blueprints.



The idea is to change how we collect and use items in the game. Instead of just picking up full items, you'll gather 'fragments', little pieces of a recipe that you could put together to create blueprints. These blueprints could let you craft items multiple times, which means you can hold onto your favourite gear a bit longer and not worry so much about losing it right away.

What's cool about this?

Blueprints & Fragments: Think of fragments as puzzle pieces. You collect them during your deployment, and once you have enough, you can trade them in to make blueprints. These blueprints are like your personal recipe cards, letting you craft items again and again, so you get the exact item and hoping it doesn't get lost.

Customization: These blueprints are customizable, allowing you to create unique items tailored to your play style. Whether you want something that suits your stealth approach or a heavy-hitting weapon, it could all be made possible.

This system is designed to give you more control over your gear and make the whole process of collecting and crafting more strategic and rewarding. It's a fresh take on item progression that draws inspiration from the mechanics of EVE Online, and looks like it could be a lot of fun to explore.



Once you've collected enough shards to create a blueprint, you'll need to gather specific materials to craft your items. This is where your strategy comes into play. Different maps and enemies could drop different resources, so you'll need to plan your deployments accordingly.

What's important here?

Resource Management: You'll have to collect specific materials, depending on what you want to make. Some items could be harder to get and require more effort, but the payoff could be worth it.

Crafting Mechanics: Just like in EVE Online, crafting takes real time. You can set your items to be made and then go back to playing while they're cooking in the background. It's all about balancing your time and resources to get the most out of what you find.

We're wrapping up with something special, CHIPSETS!

Like upgrades for your weapons, chipsets could potentially be special items you could create with your blueprints. There could be different types and tiers, so you can customize your setup to fit your playstyle. Whether you want better accuracy, reduced recoil, or something else. This is where you can really make your gear your own!

Why should you care? Chipsets allow you to tweak your blueprints for even more specific results. Want a weapon that fires faster? There could be a chipset for that. Looking for something with higher durability? Potentially...



This system is designed to give you more control over your items and make your game play experience more enjoyable and personalized.

We want to make sure this system feels rewarding and fun. Your input on how easy it is to understand, how effective the upgrades feel, and what other options you’d like to see will shape how this potential feature evolves. Let us know your thoughts in the discussion!

Until next time,
o7

[h3]Between now and November, we will be sharing content in the form of Themes. These Themes will cover multiple topics from art, lore, weapons and more to provide you insight into our development journey. Lets look at our third theme, DEPLOYMENT. [/h3]

Deployment is meaningful, strategic, tactic and immersive.

Let's look at the Deployment Map & UI from an art treatment standpoint. This image is an early exploration of how to present a planet, a good example that shows some of our influences and key ideas we have.



We have been looking at multiple points of reference for what we want to achieve from an aesthetic point of view. These are based on a few key points:

• EVE Online - EVE Vanguard is part of the same universe, of course.
  
• Clear information - Removal of waste and clutter.
  
• Strong screen composition - It works in isolation, but can flow into other areas of Deployment.
  

We have quite a few real world influences, but there are a couple that are more important and constant for us.

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese visual and sound artist and coincidentally (or not) he released some of his sine tone minimal Techno on another one of our major influences, the German music label Raster Noton - specifically their early releases in the late 90's and early 00's. Both produce music and art that could be labelled minimal or post-minimal. The important thing for us is that both aren't trying to be minimal for the sake of it - they are presenting information clearly, cutting out any unnecessary waste and retaining a strong sense of composition that work in isolation but also as a whole.



Next up, an early exploration of Deploying down to a map.

We were investigating a few things here. Risk and Reward being one of them. We were thinking about Hi, Low and Null Sec spaces, and looking at varying difficulty levels within a map. The more difficult the area is to deploy to, the higher the rewards will be.

We were also investigating telling you where your friends are. Should you deploy close them if they are in Hi Sec, so you can go and help them out? Or maybe you have other things you want or need to do for your own progression.

This screen also shows the potential of displaying other kinds of information. Equipping yourself for the challenge ahead is important, especially where we introduce dangerous elements to the map, in terms of natural and synthetic weather. We will inform you about the situation you are about to enter, so you can prepare accordingly.

This is the future for Vanguard - meaningful, strategic and tactical decisions you can make before dropping onto a surface.



One of the many advantages we have as the EVE Vanguard team, is that we have a wealth of things we can use and draw on. On top of that, there are things we don't need to invent. One of these being New Eden.

For the next release, we want to put you in New Eden --literally-- by using the Star Map.

We have a few mantras and one of those is 'As Above, So Below' and what better way to bring that to life than by using the map of New Eden.

We have some ambitious goals for the Star map. One of those goals is to pull data from a variety of sources so we can reflect what is happening in EVE Online and use that for game play on the ground.

Exciting!

As a bit of an aside: we also used 'As Above, So Below' as the theme when we designed our logo, which is basically and arrow pointing up and an arrow pointing down, as well as being V for Vanguard and a Diamond, which you may have noticed is used throughout both EVE Online and EVE Vanguard.

See you next time!
o7