This article was originally published on June 26, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

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.

This article was originally published on June 26, 2026 - read the full issue