Project Nova Canceled in Favor of Another EVE Online Shooter

Despite shutting Project Nova down, CCP presses ahead with a different shooter idea.

Here’s an interesting one: the developers behind EVE Online are shutting down production on Project Nova, a shooter spinoff to their massive online sci-fi game, only to announce that they are pressing ahead with a different shooter project that is also set in the EVE Online universe.

EVE Online originally launched way back in 2003, and it has since grown to offer players heaps of gorgeous locations, loads of big battles, and an array of awesome ships. And in recent years, the developers at CCP have been very clear about their desire to add a first-person shooter to the EVE Online experience. Their first attempt was Dust 514, a free-to-play multiplayer shooter that had some big ideas, which ran between 2013 and 2016.

Following on from Dust 514, CCP’s next attempt to fuse FPS gameplay into EVE Online was slated to be called Project Nova. CCP had a team in Reykjavík, Iceland, beavering away on the project. And they seemed to be getting quite far with it, to the point that press were given hands-on time with Project Nova in 2018. The game had some rough edges, as we reported at the time, and it showed a fair bit of promise too. But now, we’re hearing that CCP is winding down work on Project Nova and taking the responsibility for making a shooter spinoff away from the team in Reykjavík.

“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,” said CCP’s parent company in a statement that was shared on Reddit before being picked up by Massively. “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.”

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As for the reasons behind this move, the statement says this: “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.”

And that’s not all! The statement also says that CCP will be a bit more secretive about their internal projects going forward. The thinking behind this was spelled out like so: “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.”

It might be a while before we hear anything concrete about CCP’s latest attempt at making an FPS spinoff to EVE Online, then, but we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as any news does come to light.