How do you reconcile your lore-heavy, dark sci-fi MMO with mod tools that might let people get way too goofy? ‘Everything’s canon,’ say the developers of EVE Frontier

Two of the most interesting aspects of early access space survival MMO EVE Frontier always seemed to exist in opposition to me: Its striking, deliberately crafted vision of a dark future, and its uniquely freeform modding ecosystem. How are you supposed to get in the mood of the former if you’re at risk of stumbling across somebody’s particularly anarchic or memey mod?

When I spoke to some of Frontier’s dev team at this year’s EVE Fanfest, they had a surprising answer: It’s no big thing, that’s just what the inhabitants of Frontier’s galaxy are getting up to, god help them.

“I don’t want to say this is a problem, but this is an evergreen challenge, an evergreen balance to maintain,” said Frontier creative director Pavlo Savchuk. “We’re really careful about balancing how much we’re revealing to them, so that they have enough for role playing, for third party development, and so that they have strong anchors to art direct themselves, which is working surprisingly well.”

According to Savchuk, many modders have already gravitated toward Frontier’s design language of their own accord, picking fonts, colors, and UI elements that compliment the ones already in the game. And when push comes to shove, the team’s priority is making sure Frontier’s fiction encourages player expression, rather than disciplining that player base to fall in line with a set tone or aesthetic.

“I think we are striking that balance right now, between building out something intentional, but also leaving enough negative space for the players to step in and build out their own stuff,” said Savchuk. “The invisible part of this iceberg is structured in a way that, if worse comes to worse, it allows us to build it a little bit and adjust to evolve the world in a direction that the players are evolving, because eventually it’s going to be just on them. It’s an evergreen balance to be fighting for, but we’re very conscious about it.”

But what about that goofiness factor? EVE Frontier community developer Ben Sisson explained to me that it’s baked into the fiction of the game. Even more than OG EVE Online, Frontier is embracing themes of transhumanism and a sort of mind-body duality. Your consciousness haunts cloned bodies or “shells” that pilot your ships, and the shells are a piece of equipment to be traded, upgraded, or sacrificed as needed.

The origins of the inhabiting consciousnesses, though, are a key mystery of Frontier’s worldbuilding. Wherever they came from, Sisson posited, they had access to some corpus of human art and experience, the equivalent of a cached, offline copy of Wikipedia for the post-post-human set.

“There’s no life there, and yet the [modders] have created apps for their structures that have cats in them,” said Sisson. “Now, where in the world did that come from? Is that a memory that was left in there somewhere? Every bit of that comes from the question of where these souls come from before they got put into these bodies and woken up.

“It is an easy thing to do when you build the answer to the question into the lore of the game. All of that stuff exists because it came from the people inside the game.”

As we spoke, I was also struck by the parallel with EVE Online. It often gets left by the wayside in discussions of EVE’s impact, but its emergent player sagas are undergirded by a visually striking and well-fleshed out sci-fi fiction. EVE Online never had Frontier’s modding permissiveness, but it’s been balancing serious lore with players getting goofy for over 20 years.

“The game that we’re trying to build is one where we’re saying, ‘That all exists,'” said Frontier development director David Bowman. “Everything’s canon. If it exists in the game, it’s because somebody in that universe came up with it. Now, where they got those ideas, who knows?

“There probably aren’t any cats in the Frontier, if I was going to guess. And yet…”

EVE Frontier’s latest cycle went live on June 25, commencing an ambitious move toward fully modular ship building, rather than the set models of EVE Online. Cycle 6 also introduces an updated new player experience alongside a five-day free trial. Coupled with game-changing gamepad controls, it’s one of the best times yet to check out the in-progress survival MMO.