Interview: How Fenris is Building EVE Frontier as a Massively Moddable Universe

For more than two decades, EVE Online has demonstrated how quickly a persistent virtual world can grow beyond its creators’ expectations. Players have formed governments, constructed economic empires, fought enormous wars, and discovered ways to use—or break—systems that their developers could not always predict. That experience has gradually changed how Fenris Creations (formerly known as CCP Games) approaches development: less as the author of a fixed experience and more as the steward of a world that must remain observable, adjustable, and resilient for years.

EVE Frontier applies those lessons from its foundations. Built around the pillars of grounded science, cruel survival, and rebuilding a broken world, the game gives players modular tools for constructing ships, factories, trading outposts, social structures, and other functional parts of its universe. Its “digital physics” are intended to provide understandable rules and meaningful boundaries while leaving enough freedom for modders and players to create systems with genuine consequences rather than merely cosmetic additions.

In this interview, Fenris Creations discusses designing for unpredictable player behavior, organizing cross-disciplinary feature teams, and deciding which parts of the universe should remain protected from modification. The team also explains what it learned from EVE Online’s extensive third-party development ecosystem, how the EVE Frontier × Sui hackathon tested its creator tools, and why telemetry, scalability, maintainability, and human oversight remain essential when building a single-shard world intended to persist for decades.

EVE Online has evolved for over two decades into one of the most complex player-driven ecosystems in games. How has CCP/Fenris’ approach to building large-scale systems changed over time?

Scott McCabe, Product Manager: In the early days, the focus was on building ambitious systems and watching how players used (or broke) them. The willingness to put powerful tools into our players' hands is very much part of the DNA at Fenris. After more than two decades of operating EVE, we have a deep appreciation for the responsibility that comes with that.

Today, when we build out large-scale systems, we think of longevity, observability, maintainability, and second-order effects.

One shift is that we now see ourselves less as authors of a fixed experience, and, instead, more as stewards of a world. The players will always find uses, loopholes, efficiencies, and stories that we did not predict.

Rather than over-controlling that, our goal is to create strong foundations with clear constraints in understandable digital physics. With enough flexibility for players to generate meaning through their own actions.

From a technical and production standpoint, what are the biggest lessons learned from maintaining and evolving a persistent universe like EVE Online?

Scott McCabe: From a production standpoint, we have learned the importance of building systems that can be observed, adjusted, and maintained over time. Players will always create behaviors and edge cases that we never anticipated. The challenge is not to _prevent_ this emergence, but to make sure the underlying systems are resilient enough to support it.

EVE Frontier introduces a new survival-focused experience within a similarly player-shaped galaxy. What were the core design pillars that differentiate it from EVE Online?

Scott McCabe: EVE Frontier is built around three core pillars: Grounded in Science, Cruel Survival, and Rebuild a Broken World. This gives it a very different starting point from EVE Online. Whereas EVE Online is a vast, mature civilization shaped by players over decades, Frontier begins in a harsher, more fragile state.

Grounded in Science means we want the world to feel physically believable and systemic, rather than arbitrary. Cruel Survival means players should experience vulnerability, scarcity, and consequence in their choices. And Rebuilding a Broken World is about giving players agency to shape the future of the galaxy through infrastructure, cooperation, conflict, and experimentation.

Frontier leans heavily into systemic gameplay, including clone-based progression and permanent loss mechanics. How are these systems structured to support meaningful player decision-making at scale?

Scott McCabe: We often start with the player behavior we want to enable rather than the feature idea in isolation. From there, we move through exploration, prototyping, iteration, and live testing during our Founder Access with the Founder community.

As we build out these systems, we are constantly tweaking and adjusting them as we observe and evaluate the expected behaviors vs reality. We are also heavily focused on moving the meaningful player decisions to the smallest scale. For example, rather than taking a ship with bonuses designed by us, we provide the community with modular building blocks to compose together into their own vision.

Can you walk us through your development pipeline when building large-scale, systemic features? How do design, engineering, and content teams collaborate and iterate?

Scott McCabe: We start by breaking up the design, engineering, and content silo model. Our features are assigned to cross-disciplinary teams with representation from production, art, programming, audio, blockchain, QA, and design.

The goal is resilience. We build systems with clear constraints, strong telemetry, and a data-driven approach to allow us to observe what is happening across the universe.

Scalability is similar; we have to assume players will coordinate at a scale that exceeds our expectations. Whether economically, socially, or technically. So, we design foundations that can absorb that behavior while still preserving the freedom that makes these worlds interesting in the first place.

We are also constantly iterating; what was a correct decision at one point may no longer be as the game evolves.

Player-driven economies and systems are a hallmark of CCP/Fenris’ games. How do you ensure stability and scalability when so much of the experience is emergent?

David Bowman, Development Director: We try to work from first principles at the beginning of each feature. What are the objectives of the feature? What are the interdependencies with existing features and systems? What are a wide variety of user stories we are trying to support with this feature?  Even when anticipating the ramifications of player actions at scale, always being ready to respond to the unknown unknowns. Designing the systems to be flexible and adaptable.

The Sui x EVE Frontier Global Hackathon invites developers to build mods that interact with the game. What made /Fenris open up the ecosystem in this way?

Scott McCabe: Ever since we introduced the API for EVE Online, we’ve seen third-party development flourish. Today, there are more than 2400 ESI applications making 350,000 requests per minute to the ESI. Entire gameplay avenues have been unlocked through these third-party developers and the creative things they make.

The API/ESI in Eve was added after, and there are some limitations around it. When we started EVE Frontier, we knew we wanted to embrace that open development model from the start. We wanted to empower the players who choose to spend their time in the world to help shape and craft that world in a meaningful way.

How do you approach balancing creative freedom for modders with the need to maintain stability, security, and consistency in a live game environment?

Scott McCabe: The key is to give modders meaningful power, but within clear digital physics and boundaries. Creative freedom works best when the rules of the sandbox are understandable. Within EVE Frontier, we are exposing systems in a way that lets developers build real functionality rather than cosmetic additions.

By building out a robust digital physics layer, we can allow the very physics of the world itself to act to maintain the sanctity of the world.

Ultimately, we do not want to control every idea that players and developers bring into the world. We want to create a world where experimentation is possible, but the integrity of basic physical rules is preserved.

Do you see this kind of developer-driven ecosystem becoming a core pillar of EVE Frontier moving forward?

David Bowman: Yes. We are actively planning on it.

With initiatives like the hackathon, how do you envision the relationship between players, creators, and the core development team evolving?

David Bowman: Many of the Riders in Frontier will be there to be entertained, but a large number will be there to express themselves. To create and shape the civilizations using the tools that are exposed. Some will be able to do that within the full interior context of the virtual world. Designing ships, factories, trading outposts, and social structures, all within the context of the universe.

Others will extend that with their own logical creations that bridge between the world around us and the virtual world that is Frontier. We’re already seeing this from the builder community, and it will expand as we link up more and more of the digital physics and game systems.

Looking at both EVE Online and EVE Frontier, how does /Fenris approach building tools and pipelines that can support such large-scale, long-term development?

David Bowman: Our developers are also players. We are dedicated to the virtual worlds we are building, not only as professionals, but also because we spend time inside of them. We are continually looking for new user stories to support. It’s straightforward to support a power fantasy in a single player session-based environment, but when you know you want to support millions of people with conflicting desires for decades you must go to the basics of what are the building blocks of self-expression and self-determination.

We form the rules that the virtual world follows, what we call digital physics, and then we give the players the tools to build using those rules. We monitor, adjust, and respond to what they are doing, and together we tell an ongoing, evolving story written by that collaboration.

What are the biggest technical challenges in simulating and maintaining a persistent, player-driven universe at this scale?

David Bowman: This is where the business model and technology intersect. There is the need to have the client run in a performant, responsive way on as wide a variety of potential user configurations as possible, which all video games must address. In a single-shard virtual world with millions of players, that client must also deal with unpredictable demands as players decide where and when to come together.

Then there is the server stack tasked with processing the inputs from all those players, adjudicating the universe's response to those actions, and sending the results back to all the players scattered around the world, over a wide variety of bandwidth and local network configurations.

Also, for every new Rider that joins the Frontier, there is data to store about their experience. This needs hardware to store the data, and in Frontier, we also use the blockchain to guarantee that significant information about the game state is stored outside of Fenris’ systems for all to be able to verify independently.

The costs of continually adding new players, adding hardware access to support the increasing demands of adding each new player, and maintaining their experience mean the business model has to be designed in alignment so that the universe can persist for as long as there are players in the Frontier universe.

I lightly touched on the server-side requirements of the simulation itself, but that is worthy of a textbook description.

Fenris Creations, Developers of EVE Frontier