Hello,
CCP Collins here, Game Director of EVE Vanguard - currently listening to a Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross soundtrack as I type this up from home somewhere near London.
Right now, the development team is head down, hardening for the Operation Nemesis release - fixing bugs, polishing rough edges, validating new features, and playtesting the build daily to ensure the experience we want to deliver runs as smoothly as possible.
What is Operation Nemesis?
Operation Nemesis is the next battle for you, the Vanguard, with boots on the ground and a gun in your hand in this forever war throughout New Eden. It’s a free, limited-time event, running from 12:00 UTC, 16 September - 12:00 UTC, 2 October, for anyone to play through the EVE Launcher.
But this one - unlike our Groundbreak and Solstice events in 2024 - is a little different. This isn’t just a test, a bunch of ‘stuff’ we’ve added that we want you to hammer, break, and give feedback on (though we still want that, a lot). This is the start of us building towards the real Vanguard experience we want for our early access launch in 2026 - fleshing out the ways you grow in power, how you operate within this universe, the arsenal you get to use, and, most importantly, grounding this experience much more within New Eden.
In Operation Nemesis, the narrative of the Vanguard is truly starting - from your first steps as a Warclone in our freshly added New Player Experience, to interacting with characters through expanded voice lines, and unraveling the narratives of different factions and corporations as they vie for your help in acquiring information, resources, and power through the Expeditions system.
The Deathless are building something that could shake up the entire universe of New Eden - you can help them in their secret endeavors, work with other organizations to intercept this knowledge, stall this work, or even implant agents within the Deathless Circle itself. Rewards are always up for grabs, and who you work with - or how you work with them - is entirely up to you.
Why now? What’s in it for you?
Early Access is still some time away, in summer 2026, when the game will be live 24/7. We didn’t want to wait that long before we started getting parts of that experience out to you. We want your feedback: the parts you like, the things you don’t, what you want to see more of, and what you want less of. Your input will help shape Early Access into the best possible experience.
Our long-term approach has always been about making this game openly with you and our community. We’re still in pre-alpha, and even though we’ve had our heads down since last winter, we want to get you on board en masse and ask you how we’re doing.
What can you expect to get out of Operation Nemesis?
As you might know, games like EVE Vanguard live or die on keeping people playing - keeping players interested enough that they log back in another day, and another, and another. The focus for what we worked on first, for the stuff that went into Operation Nemesis, was around purely that - keeping players interested enough to keep playing in the early parts of their experience:
Creating a New Player Experience to onboard players into the narrative, different features, and the playgrounds of EVE Vanguard.
Developing the Expeditions system that adds structure to ‘what do I do’, engaging with the many different factions, alliances, and corporations that make up the EVE Online pantheon, taking on assignments, unravelling narratives, making choices about how you want to play, and earning some cool stuff along the way.
Adding new weapons and chipsets to allow you to experiment with how you want to play, how you want to blow up enemies.
Adding more enemies for you to shoot at and be shot by - no longer just placeholder blue, green, or yellow enemies - Mordu’s Legion are now in town, and they are packing a far more varied set of weapons and challenges.
Taking all of your new shiny weapons and chipsets you’ve worked hard for and fighting other Vanguard head-on in 9v9 Insurgencies - now with a new greybox-like map we’ve built up that we think is a MUCH better combat space than before.
We need feedback on all of those things, as well as data. Where do people drop off, lose interest, get stuck, or not understand things? What parts of the game or routes that players take make for a better experience?
All of this info is INSTRUMENTAL in making improvements to the game before Early Access next year.
So, is this like a finished game?
No.
We’re still in pre-alpha. We still have the development approach on getting features, maps, weapons, enemies in early - get you playing them - and then making the improvements.
So you’re going to see some maps with placeholder geometry, audio, and VFX. You’re going to see some enemies with some slightly rudimentary behaviors, animations, and suits. You’re going to encounter some bugs, sorry.
We want your opinion and feedback on how they feel, not so much how everything might look and how polished it is at this stage. That’s not saying there aren’t some BEAUTIFUL things in the game we’ve worked hard on making pretty for you - but were the enemies fun to fight? Did they provide enough challenge for you? Did you understand how to use the Fabricator to manufacture more weapons? Were the rewards juicy enough for you to want to chase them? Did that new shotgun feel great to fire? Was it satisfying enough to get a headshot with our new long-range rifle?
We care a bit more as to how things FEEL - which means we will need your help to look past some of the placeholder things in the game, and tell us whether you were having fun, whether you wanted to stick around… and look if you don’t want to tell us, your data will tell us a decent story too!
In closing…
The creative vision and foundation for Vanguard are that you, as a player, are an elite, ruthless warclone engaging in the deadly rhythm of premeditated and brutal combat within beautifully scarred environments on the knife-edge of all-out war. All while shaping the planetary borders, forging alliances, and feeding into a larger living universe.
Are we fully there yet? No, but we’re building towards that, and we hope Operation Nemesis can show you how close we’re getting to some of these anchors of what we want EVE Vanguard to feel like, what we want to do by building the large, persistent, sandbox shooter of our dreams existing within one of the coolest universes in sci-fi.
So what do I want from you?
Set the date, download the game (you can do this 24 hours in advance!), buddy up with some friends (especially those that haven’t played either Vanguard or even EVE before), and help us between 16 September and 2 October to get this right and make this f*cking awesome!
Cheers,
CCP Collins