EVE Vanguard, the latest attempt by Fenris 'I Can’t Believe It’s Not CCP Games' Creations at crafting a first-person shooter counterpart to EVE Online, continues to gestate within Iceland’s best-funded spinoff vats. Nearly three years after being revealed as a Shoot, Loot 'n' Scoot extraction game, it’s running its first alpha playtest – titled Operation Avalon – from July 7th-20th, with Fenris staff promising attendees of last week’s EVE FanFest event that it will dutifully tighten up the gunplay that players of previous 'pre-alpha' tests criticised as loose and floaty.
More intriguing, however, is what the company calls an "economic bridge" between EVEs Vanguard and Online: the ability to conduct on-foot Vanguard raids into ship graveyards, containing parts salvaged from real player-owned ships that were destroyed in the MMO’s space dogfights, before putting those parts up for sale back inside EVE Online itself. Thus opening a potential lifeline for defeated ship captains desperate to reclaim their stuff – or, perhaps more likely, the EVE universe’s biggest new hardware ransoming operation.