Once my team understood the basics, we were able to split up and each hold a control point solo without any trouble. The difficulty and the complexity comes from them all coming together."īut Project Nova is going to need a lot more interesting enemy types if it hopes to achieve that goal. "You see an enemy and he has a special behavior, and you're like, okay, I get this guy now. "We took ideas from tower defense games," Árnason says. The difficulty (and fun, supposedly) comes from how you respond to their layering of abilities. Instead, like Killing Floor 2 or Left 4 Dead, the idea is that there are different enemy types with their own approach to combat. Árnason tells me this is partially the point: The PvE mode isn't looking to replicate the hyper-aggressive playstyle of human players. I'd find some cover, and just pop in and out two dozen times as I picked each enemy off one by one. Even when I was outnumbered a dozen to one, I felt like I was in the world's most uninteresting shooting gallery. In greater numbers, they can be overwhelming-but that doesn't make them threatening or interesting to fight. Sometimes they have assault rifles and other times they have shotguns, and a more interesting variant can teleport short distances and rush you for a melee attack. For the most part, they drop onto the map and then slowly walk towards the nearest objective in a straight line, doing nothing to work together or avoid incoming fire. But that's not to the credit of the enemy, which are basically space-zombies: shambling proof that adding the word 'space' in front of things doesn't make them better. We didn't have a feel for how anything worked. The first time I played, my team was quickly slaughtered. To contest our control over these three points, waves of Sansha's Nation soldiers drop randomly around the map in waves.Įven when I was outnumbered a dozen to one, I felt like I was in the world's most uninteresting shooting gallery. PvE is basically your bog-standard control mode, with three points on the map to battle over, gradually earning each side points until they reach a certain threshold and win. These sound like the ingredients for an exciting shooter, but this early demo of Project Nova was disappointingly boring. They need a home, and I think Nova could be that home for those players." There's this roving barbarian horde of people that want something deeper than a triple-A game. "We hope the Dust 514 community will pick it up, and I hope the MAG community will pick it up too. "We want to provide an alternative that is for a hardcore community in the beginning," Árnason says. When I ask game director Snorri Árnason, he tells me that one thing that will set Project Nova apart is the fact that the game will be persistent "with no sequels and no resets" and that it will demand a high degree of cooperation. If Project Nova is successful, CCP Games has promised to look into connecting both games, but that feels like a pretty big 'if.' Maybe Dust 514 was always overly ambitious, but without the allure of a connected universe I just can't muster enthusiasm about another shooter in an already stuffed genre of excellent games sporting deep progression systems. Ties to EVE Online will be purely thematic. Instead, Project Nova will be a "hardcore" shooter melded with the usual progression systems you'd see in games like Warframe or Destiny 2. Named Project Nova, this PC-only shooter is taking another crack at the EVE Online FPS spin-off idea, only without the promise that both games will interact with each other.
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