Yesterday, as part of our coverage of Pearl Abyss’ Q4 2019 financial report, we broke the sad news that CCP Games’ Project Nova had been more than merely shelved indefinitely: It had been outright canceled. That investor call tidbit was later confirmed at length in the DUST 514 veterans’ Discord by Nova’s former game director, Snorri Árnason aka CCP Rattati.
At the time, we didn’t know whether a more formal announcement was coming, but now we have one, as VG247 noticed that CCP had indeed commented on our story on Reddit. George K aka CCP Grendel reiterates publicly what Árnason had already posted privately regarding the movement of the Nova team to other teams in Reykjavík and the continuation of development on the new shooter in the London offices. He elaborates, as well, explaining why Nova didn’t work and that the studio will (wisely) be avoiding going public too soon with its next EVE Online spinoffs. It also sounds as if parts of Nova will make it into the London game.
“We’re continuing to develop our sci-fi multiplayer shooter game concept, actively evolving it beyond the original scope for what was formerly codenamed Project Nova. Development efforts on this concept are now the full focus of CCP’s London studio. Project Nova team members based in Iceland have been moved onto other projects at our Reykjavík studio.
“This decision was taken because Project Nova’s gameplay experience as presented at EVE Vegas ’18 would not have achieved our ambitious goals for this concept. Moreover, it is very common for games in active development to evolve over time, often substantially. We remain committed to offering a rock-solid, action-oriented gameplay experience with stellar visuals, but due to significant changes in the scope and direction of our sci-fi multiplayer shooter game concept, it also made sense to update how we refer to this project internally. So, we are no longer using the codename Project Nova for this game concept.
“Furthermore, we are moving away from publicly announcing our internal project codenames and will wait until we’re ready for a full reveal. We want to show you rather than tell you how we have evolved this concept and we’re looking forward to doing so when the time comes to present this concept as a fully-fledged game.
MOP’s EVE Evolved columnist Brendan Drain has written at length about the problems Project Nova suffered during its first alpha run. For that matter, he’s also written at length about DUST 514, the shooter sunsetted before this one. Bit of a pattern there.
We’ve also covered the new titles CCP is working on, including the new MMORPG.
