CCP Games, the developer of EVE Online, has announced that the work on the MMO shooter Project Nova has been officially discontinued. However, the foundation of the game is to be used to create a new shooter.
What happened? At Eve Vegas 2018, the developers showcased their new game Project Nova. It was a first-person shooter set in the EVE Online universe.
Project Nova was supposed to delve into the story of the previous shooter Dust 514, which was already discontinued in May 2016. But it never came to that. An alpha was originally scheduled for November 2018, but CCP Games beat that to the punch and announced that Project Nova would be put on hold.
On February 18, the Head of PR, Georg Kellion, announced on reddit that Project Nova has been completely canceled. Instead, the ideas and contents of the game would be used to create a new shooter.
Project Nova was too interchangeable
What caused Project Nova’s failure? CCP Games already announced in 2018 that the feedback from the first testers was unsatisfactory:
- Many complained at the time that Project Nova was a generic shooter like Call of Duty, without any real unique features.
- Moreover, there were no overlaps with the space experiences from EVE Online and Dust 514 that players had actually expected.
These apparently were not good conditions to further develop the shooter.
What happens now with Project Nova? As Kellion reports, the basic concept will be used to create a game that should be significantly better than Project Nova. Much will be further developed and go beyond what was originally planned for the MMO shooter.
Therefore, the new game will not be called Project Nova anymore, but will get a new name. However, this will not be revealed for now.
Furthermore, it will no longer be developed by the team in Reykjavik, but by the studio in London. Additionally, CCP Games will now discuss innovations and concepts more cautiously than before. In the company’s history, there have already been some games that did not make it to release.
Project Nova was not the first failure
How are CCP’s games performing? While EVE Online is still a big success after over 16 years, the other games from CCP Games have not performed as well.
Besides Dust 514, another shooter, namely Project Legion, also failed. This was presented at an EVE Fan Fest in 2014 but then disappeared into oblivion. World of Darkness Online, a planned MMORPG developed from 2006 to 2014, was never released.
It will be exciting to see what happens with the next shooter from the studio. However, they need to watch out for competition from within their own ranks. Since September 2018, CCP belongs to the Korean studio Pearl Abyss. They are currently developing their own shooter called Plan 8:
