– a developer on canned CCP MMO World of Darkness discusses why the online game never made it to release. EVE Online studio CCP Games cancelled its World of Darkness MMO in April and laid off dozens of staff, although the reasoning behind the move wasn’t exactly made known. Now an in-depth investigation from the Guardian has revealed that much of the reasoning was to do with poor upper management and lots of toing and froing between World of Darkness and EVE Online. The report contains numerous chats with named and anonymous former CCP devs, noting that the game actually reached alpha three times over, but was scrapped each time. “I tested it myself, on two different occasions out of those three,” noted Nick Blood, a former dev at CCP. “With the first playtest, I was amazed at how little of the core game was there – at this point the game had been in development for over half a decade. I mean, there was just nothing, literally nothing, for someone like me, a complete outsider to the WoD IP, to appreciate.” “The team just ended up building stuff and throwing it away, over and over again,” said another dev. “It’s something I saw on EVE and Dust as well – the teams would build a feature, then be told by management to make ‘small changes’ which necessitated a full, back-to-square-one rewrite.” Much of the issue came down to bad management, claim many of the sources. The CCP management didn’t really know what it wanted from World of Darkness and would consistently shift those people working on the MMO over to EVE Online DLC development. “When things started turning sour in 2010, it was categorically not the fault of management, executive or creative,” said an anonymous source. “The line employees were blamed.” “One email sent on the eve of the company’s 2010 team-building trip stated that all teams had to work through the weekend – and that this necessary overtime was the fault of the teams, that it was their failure to plan and scope their project accordingly. Never mind that management insisted on changing requirements and designs on a weekly basis, without pushing the schedule out to accommodate the changes.” There’s plenty more in the in-depth article to chew on — make sure you check it out.