In CCP’s continuing effort to throw away resources, the latest investor relations call with Pearl Abyss revealed Project Nova is officially shelved. Along with that announcement is the promise of a new and improved, more immersive Project Dust 514 Project Nova FPS of some sort. In the call, CCP said “Project Nova’s gameplay experience as presented at EVE Vegas ’18 would not have achieved our ambitious goals for this concept.” PC Gamer was a bit more blunt, calling it “boring and unambitious” long before CCP realized this feature. It was ambitiously confirmed that the new game may or may not interact with EVE Online. Even though CCP continues to ambitiously ignore the many, much better titles out there, and has gotten it wrong twice, they countered with no less ambition: “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.”
In case those on the call didn’t hear the nails being firmly seated into the coffin, we were told “Project Nova team members based in Iceland have been moved onto other projects at our Reykjavík studio.” What wasn’t clear was whether any of the “other projects” were EVE Online. We asked for clarification after the phone call and, although the details are not clear, the direction was crystal. Please note that we were given a CSM-like NDA, which means we can ignore it. CCP Smokescreen then filled us in, “We are always accused of not caring about EVE Online; however, this is not the case. Let me explain:
“Consider the titles we have released or almost released to date such as DUST, Valkyrie, Nova, EVE Echoes, as well as all the ones unrelated to EVE. These all represent a two-pronged Low Bar Strategy approach to managing expectations with EVE Online.
First, by announcing resources are being diverted from EVE Online, we can keep the bar low on expectations for the only thing we have actually released: EVE Online itself. We want to appear very busy without actually doing anything material. Quite frankly, we’ve run out of ideas with what to do with EVE and I think it shows. So we need to keep expectations really low.
Secondly, we are distracting you by hyping up other efforts and hoping you’ll project that enthusiasm to EVE until it suffers its own heat death. We’ll even throw out some demos, screenshots, videos, and so on to make it seem real. You’ll be all wired up, but you can’t actually play it so you’ll go fire up EVE now that you’ve been reminded of it!
When we first introduced this strategy we weren’t sure how it would work out, but I think you’ll agree it has been extremely successful. It was what closed the deal with Pearl Abyss. The media claims this is yet another failure, but here at CCP we consider this another resounding success!”
Unfortunately, it looks like CCP is going to be closed-lipped about future “successes”. EVE Onion wondered if CCP seems to have realized just how embarrassing this is since they announced during the call, “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.”
CCP Smokescreen confirmed during our covert call that this is actually simply the next phase of the Low Bar Strategy. “Now that you are all conditioned to expect very little, there is no need to waste resources on campaigns to hype up the next thing that won’t be released. We will be going full Blackout and let the Chaos reign for a while.”
