There are three EVE games on PC these days, and I regularly see people mixing up the two new ones. Fair enough, they're both from the same studio, both unreleased in the traditional sense, and both called EVE something. So here's the untangling, from someone who plays EVE Frontier daily and will be honest up front about the limits of my Vanguard knowledge: I signed up for playtest access ages ago and have still never actually played it, because Frontier keeps me too busy. What follows is a Frontier player's map of the territory, with the Vanguard facts sourced from official material rather than my own hands.
The three games in one table
| EVE Online | EVE Frontier | EVE Vanguard | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Spaceship MMO | Survival MMO | Extraction shooter (FPS) |
| Setting | New Eden | A separate, darker universe | New Eden, on foot |
| Released | 2003 | Founder access alpha, no launch date | Not released, free alpha playtests |
| Pacing | Slow, menu-driven | Middle: action flight, survival tension | Fast, twitch shooting |
| Blockchain | No | Yes, Sui | No |
| Where to get it | Steam or launcher | evefrontier.com launcher only | Steam and EVE launcher during playtests |
The setting detail matters more than it looks: EVE Online and EVE Vanguard share the New Eden universe and are designed to connect to each other, while EVE Frontier is deliberately somewhere else entirely, a separate universe with its own map of 24,000 star systems and no link to the other two games' world.
What EVE Vanguard actually is
Vanguard is a sci-fi extraction shooter built in Unreal Engine 5 by the studio's London team, played on foot on the planets of New Eden. It was revealed at Fanfest 2023, and it's the studio's second run at an EVE shooter after DUST 514 on PS3 a decade ago. As I understand it you need an EVE Online account to log in, though not a paid subscription, and the design intent is that Vanguard and EVE Online feed each other, with things happening in one showing up in the other. PC only, no console version announced.
Status as of August 2026: not released. It was aiming for Steam Early Access in Summer 2026, and in February the studio announced that was slipping, with the stated reason being more time to deliver a stronger experience. Since then it's run free time-limited playtests, the most recent being Operation Avalon across two weeks in July on Steam and the EVE launcher, and an always-on 24/7 alpha through the EVE launcher is slated for November 2026. Pricing for the eventual release hasn't been announced, and notably for one question I see asked a lot: Vanguard has no blockchain component at all. That's purely Frontier's department.
What EVE Frontier is, for the Vanguard-curious
Frontier is a single-shard survival MMO where you fly one ship in a hostile dark universe, scavenge and build everything, and can be killed by anyone anywhere. It's in paid founder access with a five-day free trial, it wipes and restarts in cycles while being developed in public, and its world state lives on the Sui blockchain, which mostly matters because it makes the whole game database public and lets players like me build tools against it. If that sounds interesting, the full explanation is here and my honest review is here.
The pacing line
Here's the comparison I actually give people, and I don't know if the studio would thank me for it. EVE Online is the slow one, the game you can play with a spreadsheet open, decisions measured in minutes and consequences in months. Vanguard is the fast one, a proper twitch shooter where your aim and reactions decide things in milliseconds. And EVE Frontier sits right in the middle: real-time flying and manually aimed weapons, so it's far more physical than EVE Online, but the tempo is closer to a hunt than a firefight, and nothing about it needs young reflexes. I wrote in the multibox article about how Frontier raised the clicks per minute compared to EVE Online, but it's in no danger of becoming a twitch shooter, and I say that with relief, because I'm getting too old and too slow for the genre Vanguard lives in. If you want slow, EVE Online. If you want fast, Vanguard. If you want something in between that a middle-aged nervous system can still be excited by, that's Frontier, and I mean that as a compliment.
Which one should you actually play?
If you want a shooter, the answer is easy: wishlist Vanguard and jump into its next free playtest, since those cost nothing. If you want a persistent world you can live in, it's between the other two. EVE Online is mature, fully launched, enormous and 23 years deep. Frontier is unfinished, raw and being built in the open, with a free trial to see whether that rawness reads as promise or as missing content to you. I've made my choice obvious by building a year of tooling for it.
For what it's worth, my honest framing of the family: EVE Online is the studio's history, a database game that was genuinely groundbreaking 23 years ago. EVE Frontier, I'd like to think, is its future, a blockchain game trying to be groundbreaking at whatever point it launches. Vanguard I simply don't know well enough to place, so all I'll say is that I hope it comes along for the ride, because the more successful this studio's games are, the better for every one of them, mine included. My tribe barely talks about Vanguard and the Frontier Discord hardly mentions it, which says less about Vanguard's quality and more about how little the two audiences currently overlap. Maybe the July playtest changed some minds. I wouldn't know. I was busy in Frontier, which is rather the point.
Related Posts
- What is EVE Frontier? A Player's Answer - the survival MMO side of this comparison, in full
- EVE Online vs EVE Frontier - the other, deeper family comparison
- Who Makes EVE Frontier? CCP Games, Now Fenris Creations - the studio behind all three games
- My EVE Frontier Review After 18 Months - what living in Frontier actually feels like