At this year’s EVE Fanfest, the developers of EVE Online sister game Frontier were touting its new driving controls and gamepad support—features that have already resulted in a vastly different game than Fenris Creations’ (formerly CCP Games) original MMO.
As a big Steam Deck sicko, I was naturally curious whether Frontier’s gamepad support opened up any portable PC possibilities, and it turns out some members of the team have been on a “side quest” to make it happen, to quote game director Sæmundur Hermannsson.
Frontier product manager Scott McCabe has been personally experimenting with the game on Valve’s handheld. “I wanted to get on the Steam Deck,” said McCabe. “I have one at my desk, and we’re just kind of testing it out, dipping our toes in the water.”
“Anything that runs on [Linux compatibility layer] Proton can basically be squeaked onto a Steam Deck,” McCabe said, pointing out that, at that point, there’s little separating the Deck from a normal PC aside from power and performance considerations.
The original EVE Online, by contrast, has been playable on Steam Deck for some time, but is a much less obvious fit for handheld play with its more mouse and keyboard-centric control scheme. “As soon as you start having a control system that works with a game pad,” said McCabe, “There’s absolutely no reason you can’t put it onto these types of devices.”
McCabe cautioned that Steam Deck support was not on any official development roadmaps, but that “it makes such obvious sense with the manual controls now.” Hermannsson was even more bullish on the prospect when I asked him about it the following day.
“It’s a no-brainer,” the game director said, joking that “I don’t know if the marketing people will punch us or whatever” for over-promising. Hermannsson echoed McCabe’s point that making Frontier gamepad-friendly in the first place was a far bigger challenge than anything specific to the Deck.
“We already have experiments running on Steam Deck,” said Hermannsson. “We just couldn’t get it in time—we want to focus on the gamepad stuff instead. The biggest problem we ran into was actually the launcher. It’s not the game itself, it was just like some config files.”
A number of high-profile multiplayer games are unplayable on Deck due to their anticheat being incompatible with Linux, but EVE Frontier sidesteps this issue by eschewing traditional anticheat altogether. Frontier is being built to be highly moddable—eventually open source—but with guardrails baked into the game to prevent cheats or exploits, something the team at Fenris refers to as “digital physics.”
Hermannsson said he was less personally invested in Deck compatibility as he wasn’t much of a handheld PC gamer, but he sees it as a way of broadening the appeal of the complex, experimental game as much as possible. Frontier development director David Bowman put it succinctly when I asked him about Deck support: “Our goal is to get this to as many players as possible.”
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