According to Massively, CCP owner Pearl Abyss formally announced Nova’s cancellation in their Q4 earnings report. CCP took to Reddit to elaborate, noting that the dream of an EVE Online FPS isn’t quite dead - it had simply grown beyond what Nova was meant to be. A “sci-fi multiplayer shooter” is still in development at CCP London, mind. In fact, that office has been moved over entirely to developing and exploring that concept. But the spaceship-maker’s home in Reykjavik is no longer involved, moving back onto other projects. As an aside, CCP are also gonna stop posting publically whenever they get really excited about a pet project. “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.” As a fellow creative, I get it. It’s real easy to get pumped up about something you’re working on, zealously oversharing cool screens before the whole thing fizzles out. It’s a bad feeling, and while this probably means we won’t see so many musings come out of the Icelandic developers, what we do see is more likely to have legs. For what it’s worth, Project Nova wasn’t exactly shaping up to be an all-time great. Steven Messner warped out to Fanfest 2016 to give it a shot, but found little more than “another generic sci-fi shooter”. It wasn’t even much of a shake against the last EVE shooter, Dust 514. That game might’ve been janky, technically flawed, and a PlayStation exclusive - but at least us PC lot could rock up to a match with a nation-sized warship. As it should be, really.
