This week we're talking to Eve Online and Eve Vanguard executive producer Snorri Arnason about evolving the long-running sci-fi MMO, and how its connection to New Eden's second run at an FPS will simply create a larger Eve community.

Next, Alex Spencer speaks to the ex-BioShock developers of Blue Manchu about the studio's next game, Godzone 6, and discovers why relying on past glories is a rapidly disappearing comfort for any indie developer.

Crank up the air-con another notch and dig in. 

Snorri Arnason – known across the Eve Online community as FC Rattati – has spent the better part of a decade straddling two long-term projects: the New Eden shooter that was first attempted with Dust 514, and Eve Online, the 22-year-old space sandbox that may simply never die.

Now, as executive producer of Eve Online and incoming extraction shooter Eve Vanguard, he's finishing the first by building the second.

From Dust to Vanguard

Arnason's connection to the Eve universe began not with the MMO itself but with Dust 514, the PlayStation 3 shooter that briefly let players fight on the surface of Eve's planets.

"Dust was really Battlefield 2142 – that's kind of the inspiration," he says, speaking to us in Reykjavík, Iceland, the home of developer and publisher Fenris Creations.

"I fell completely for Dust because of this RPG progression element. I liked customising – actually fitting a little bit of an RPG fantasy. I moved to Shanghai from my other job to run that game."

The game's console exclusivity put paid to Dust's long-term aspirations, putting it out of reach of Eve's existing playerbase on PC. What did remain, though, was the company's persistence in creating an action game set on the surface of New Eden's planets.

"We tried to port it, we tried to move it, we tried to reinvent it. None of it worked," Arnason recalls. "We really just needed to start fresh with the memories, and figure it out." 

That fresh start is Eve Vanguard, now mid-alpha. "The lesson from Dust is that you cannot have an issue that people simply reject out of hand – low performance, low quality, something missing," Arnason says. "This alpha is about first impressions."

The playtest to which he's referring, Operation Avalon, will take place on July 7. While the alpha is designed to home Vanguard's shooter loop, it's the connection to Eve Online that'll give Vanguard its USP. The technical link between the two games – what Fenris calls the Quasar bridge – has been under construction for years.

"It's like a hanging bridge," Arnason says. "We've thrown one rope over, then another, then a third. Now, it's a stronger bridge. I have zero fear of not being able to connect the games technically. It's about finding compelling reasons to collaborate."

Cross-game campaigns and a contraband economy are already built, decoupled from Eve's internal economy: "There's no intrinsic exchange rate between the games. No risk to the economy – just interesting."

He stresses what he is not building: a funnel from Vanguard to Eve, and vice versa.

"I just want a bigger community; I just want two communities together," he says, rejecting the idea that Vanguard exists purely to feed players upward into the MMO. The ambition traces to his own taste as a player: "I'm an FPS player first, MMO player second… I think Warframe is the best example of a forever game. That's our inspiration."

Evolution by manifesto

Arnason's authority over both titles dates to 2022, when he returned to Europe from China. His priority was to assess and evolve Eve Online, Fenris' perennial MMO and cash cow. 

"I joined from Shanghai, and I was given carte blanche to figure this out," he says. What followed was, in his words, "a manifesto," an audit of Eve's problems, and a refusal to keep patching around them: "We'd been stirring the pot more than evolving. It was 'keep them happy, keep them happy,' [but] fundamentally, structurally, we're not evolving the game."

The framework that emerged from "an MIT design sprint" with the Fenris leadership applied one filtering question to every feature: does it create collaboration?

Arnason offers skin customisation as the clearest example: "We could have created a paint shop where we just sell colours. We decided we wanted to create an impactful career out of being an artist that needs to collect materials, and that creates jobs for people who go out in space. There's an artist that combines it, then sells it, and it's accessible to everyone on the market."

It's a more complicated pipeline, he admits, but the discipline has paid off: "If you do this consistently, the teams fall into, 'OK, that's the way we do features.' We build collaboration into the game."

The same thinking produced a more confident release cadence, with expansions for new systems plus separate "major updates" for tuning: "Fenris didn't want to commit beyond an expansion, because they didn't know they'd ship what they planned. That fear is gone now."

Onboarding, a well-documented problem in what Fenris CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson calls "the most complicated game ever made," has been a specific target for Arnason's troubleshooting. Eve's latest expansion – the newly released Cradle Of War, the first of a three-part arc called Theatres Of War – brings with it safe areas for training and better progression systems for new players.

"We wanted to create the mindset of an academy," Arnason says. "You come in as a cadet. It's actually like [using] rubber bullets."

Eve's USP – total freedom on a single shard – is itself an obstacle to attracting new players: "It becomes hard for us to figure out where they veer off track because there's no structure, just infinite tracks. But there are paths that lead to a higher retention chance, and we're leaning into those."

Survey results point to a clear tendencies, with players preferring PvE, mining and resource gathering in the game's early stages. Anchoring that activity to a faction allegiance, Eve's answer to the binary that powered World Of Warcraft for so many years, is, in Arnason's telling, the missing context that turns idle mining into purposeful progression.

Overall, the strategy is clearly working: Eve just had a record-breaking month in terms of revenue, and its second-highest revenue quarter in 20 years.

Three wars, one universe

Committing to a multi-year roadmap in front of partners and platform holders is, for Arnason, a deliberate show of conviction. The trilogy is built around "a rags-to-riches story about a character", not strictly narrative-driven, but structured enough to give Fenris a defined endpoint rather than an indefinitely open sandbox.

That structure sits alongside, not on top of, Eve's existing factional warfare community, which Arnason describes as "a never-ending board game with rules". Cradle Of War's campaign missions act as connective tissue between the two: "The campaigns are really representing a bridge into factional warfare," giving structured-PvP players "a normal path" in, rather than disrupting an established player-run economy of rules and reputation.

Underpinning all of it is Quasar, the new technology powering Eve that will bring the MMO and shooter Vanguard into the same space.

"Eve in the beginning was one Excel file on one SQL database, and it just grew and grew," Arnason says. The migration to "microservices" has enabled new server architecture – such as grid-level "awareness bubbles" that handle the unique IDs of player-made ship skins in battles involving thousands of combatants – which Arnason holds up as proof that Eve's legacy code is an asset as much as a liability.

Asked how the studio balances two decades of player expectation against new design instincts, Arnason returns to first principles.

"The core philosophy isn't that it's supposed to be unfair to new players," he says. "The core philosophy is: death matters. That doesn't mean it has to be unfair without any instigation or understanding."

It is the same logic running through Vanguard, the new player academy, and the Theatres Of War series alike: structure in service of the sandbox, not in place of it.

The first studio Jonathan Chey set up was Irrational Games, co-founded with Ken Levine and Rob Fermier, where he worked on System Shock 2 and the original BioShock. When Chey came to set up his second, Blue Manchu, his reputation was enough to get the studio's games noticed.

It helped, of course, that the games were excellent. Card Hunter captured the joys of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering played around a kitchen table with friends, while Void Bastards took the immersive-sim FPS games on which Chey had made his name and applied an FTL-style Roguelike twist and gorgeous comic-book visuals courtesy of art director (and fellow Irrational vet) Ben Lee.

Blue Manchu's most recent game, 2024's Wild Bastards, was also excellent – and yet it went almost unnoticed.

"I haven't run the numbers precisely, but I would say Wild Bastards has done roughly half as well as Void Bastards," Chey tells us today. Looking ahead to the studio's next game, he adds: "If Godzone 6 did half as well again, we would be in trouble."

As for why that might have happened, Chey tells a tale that will be familiar to any game developer: "It's very, very hard to get noticed these days. It's not like it was even five or six years ago." Whereas once upon a time, the studio's pedigree would have guaranteed at least some eyeballs on its games, modern players "have a lot of things vying for their attention," Chey says. "They don't necessarily have any reason to pay attention to you just because you made something they liked in the past, or you worked on some famous game or whatever."

This difficult lesson is one Blue Manchu has taken "to heart," Chey says. "We really took the time to think about, like, who are we in this huge industry? What is it that we bring to the table? There are lots of people now who can make really good games. The tools are all there. It's no longer that hard to make a firstperson shooter – or even a pretty good firstperson shooter."

The studio needed to work out what its games offered that set them apart from all the pretty good firstperson shooters. In part, Ben Lee adds, that meant "embracing the fact that we've never made games that were actually aimed at the broad market. Because, A, we're not really that interested in that, but B, we're not really capable of it. We're a very small group of people."

It's not that Blue Manchu is actively seeking a niche audience, Lee clarifies. "It's just that we're accepting, from the outset, that this is not for everyone. There will be people who think it's too complicated or too hard or whatever – and that's absolutely fine, as long as the people who do like it really enjoy it. You've got a better shot at establishing a following and an online foothold by doing that than you do by trying to go completely broad and just slipping down the drain with everyone else."

The result is a weird game, in the best possible way. Like the Bastards games before it, Godzone 6 is an immersive-sim FPS in a Roguelike format, but one where you play as an alien – a werewolf-type creature, perhaps, or a humanoid bluebottle – who mutates between every level. Your werewolf's skin might turn to crystal, or they might shrink, or sprout suckers on their legs allowing them to walk up walls and across ceilings. Or all of the above. 

It's a killer hook, something Chey acknowledges that Wild Bastards lacked. "I'm very proud of it," he says of the game. "But I think it probably could have benefited from a bit more sunlight while it was being developed." And so the developer is opening the shutters much sooner. Godzone 6's Steam page appeared back in April, before the studio even had key art prepared; for our preview in Edge 425, we played an earlier, less-finessed build than the development team would usually be comfortable with sharing. This has all been done in hopes of not only building anticipation but also testing the concept. "If it's a resounding kind of lack of interest or negative feedback, maybe we just don't keep going," Chey says. "But, I mean, that would be pretty sad at this stage."

The studio is able to make these decisions, in part, because for the first time since its debut, Blue Manchu will be self-publishing the game. (Having originally launched as a free-to-play browser game, Card Hunter didn't need to go through traditional channels.) 

Void Bastards was put out by Humble Bundle's then-nascent, now-defunct publishing operation, and Wild Bastards by Maximum Entertainment. Blue Manchu's approach to date hasn't followed the usual methods, however. "We have always had an unusual relationship with publishers," Chey explains, "as we are privileged enough to be able to self-fund our projects." That means the studio has only signed its games with publishers "late in the dev cycle," and relied on these partners primarily to help promote them to potential customers. 

"Like a lot of developers," Chey says, "we like developing – but marketing, not so much." That makes the idea "that a separate team can just swoop in and sell your product" extremely appealing. After Wild Bastards' struggles, however, Chey and his team have accepted that this "is clearly just a fantasy now."

So the only solution, as Chey sees it? "We have to suck it up and start doing that work for ourselves. Which means making dev diaries, talking to the community, doing public tests, posting on social media, etc, etc. Because we are the only people who are really capable of identifying what is special about our game and why people should care about it. If we can't do that for ourselves, how is a publisher – to whom you are just another part of a big portfolio of products – going to do it?"

It's a conclusion Blue Manchu has reached after a lot of soul-searching, but is yet to actually put to the test. "This is our theory," Chey acknowledges. "We will see how it works out."

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

"As a starting point, we wanted to move on from the pure stealth gameplay," says David Dedeine, head of Studio Asobo and creative director of Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. "What we have tried to do is really shift into something more action-driven."

Given Asobo's success with 2019's A Plague Tale: Innocence and sequel A Plague Tale: Requiem, it's a bold move to sideline a signature characteristic in this way, but then Resonance isn't following directly in the footsteps of those games. Rather, it's a spinoff, putting players in control of Sophia, one of the companion characters from A Plague Tale: Requiem, and setting the action some 15 years prior to the events of the previous games. In Edge 425, on sale now, we visit Asobo's Bordeaux HQ to discover how it's pushing in a new direction – and why that doesn't involve screens full of teeming rodents. 

In this issue's other lead features, we talk to Metroidvania masters including Billy Basso and Thomas Happ to sift through the complexities of the ever-growing genre, and meet with composers such as Jesper Kyd, Nainita Desai and Richard Jacques to discover the craft behind the modern videogame soundtrack. In The Making Of…, we chart the difficult process of reinventing Solium Infernum with League Of Geeks, and visit UK developer Jagex for Studio Profile to dig into its ongoing journey with RuneScape. 

With 007 First Light headlining this issue's reviews, we continue the Bond theme by revisiting From Russia With Love in Time Extend, while in Hype we preview forthcoming releases such as End Of Abyss, Ace Combat 8: Wings Of Theve, Godzone 6 and The Sinking City 2. In Knowledge, we report from BitSummit 2026 and also interview Game Freak's Kota Furushima about breaking away from Pokémon, with Day 4 Night Studios co-founders Christian Cantamessa and Davide Soliani joining us for our Profile slot to discuss the origins of Bradley The Badger.  

If you don't yet have an Edge subscription, there's still time to take advantage of our introductory offer, allowing you to pick up your first three issues for just £5.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.