The MOBA genre has a problem: too much time spent doing nothing. Project Zeta, a new action-focused MOBA from developer Nirvanana and publisher Krafton, wants to fix that by making every match a constant, relentless fight.
The game drops four teams of four players into a single maze of walls and NPC enemies, rather than individual lanes. There are no long laning phases, no quiet farming sessions. Instead, teams hunt down boss enemies for prisms, and those prisms are the key to winning. The design pushes players into PvP battles almost from the first second.
“Everyone wants immediate gratification, immediate fun,” Nirvanana CEO Namseok Kim told me at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.
A 12-minute fight with no downtime
The core loop of Project Zeta is simple: kill bosses, grab prisms, cash them in. Matches last about 12 minutes, and in the demo I saw, hardly 30 seconds passed within each match without some form of team-versus-team clash.
Prisms only spawn from larger boss enemies. That means teams have to fight over the map’s key objectives, much like contesting Baron Nashor in League of Legends. Project Zeta introduces these clashes almost immediately.
The match is split into short phases, each lasting a few minutes. The starting phase is relatively calm, with only one or two key PvE bosses on the map. As the phases progress, more bosses spawn, creating tense rushes to secure objectives. Once teams have their prisms, they must be cashed in at a single central location, which becomes another funnel point for fights.
Killing a team resets everything
Project Zeta’s systems are built to keep the action rolling. When two teams enter battle, the winning squad revives their fallen allies the moment they land the final blow. Once you wipe out an opposing team, all your skill cooldowns reset immediately.
That creates a chaotic chain reaction. During the demo’s most chaotic moments, team-wipes happened in quick succession. A squad that just won a fight can quickly recuperate, so other teams rushing in to snatch an easy prism from weakened players suddenly meet a fully refreshed squad ready to defend themselves.
This is an intentional effort to remove the frustration of “third-partying,” where a tense fight between two parties is descended upon by a third. It is a strategy Nirvanana knows well, given its previous work.
From battle royale to something new
Nirvanana’s last game was a battle royale MOBA. Kim said that experience shaped Project Zeta’s design in a direct way.
“The game we made before Project Zeta was a battle royale MOBA,” Kim said. “But with battle royales, the ultimate goal is to survive, so the longer the game was in service, the more passive it became. That’s why in Zeta we did away with the battle royale moveset and went for something new.”
Kim compared the feel of Project Zeta to a hairpin turn in Formula 1. The game seems almost allergic to calm.
A generational problem with MOBAs
Kim is a passionate MOBA fan, and he sees a generational gap in how the genre is received. He wants his daughter to experience the same thrill he got from the genre, but he believes the format has grown stagnant.
“I think entertainment for the modern audience is approaching short-form,” Kim explained. “MOBAs for ten-plus years have not changed in their format. I love the fun of MOBAs, the thrill they give you, and I want my daughter to feel the same. This is a generational thing, the fun of MOBAs. It should be passed down from generation to generation, but it feels like there was some stagnation there. So I wanted to drill through that.”
The biggest success stories in the MOBA space have remained largely the same for the past decade. Attempts to create something different have struggled to push the genre forward.
Smite, for example, has secured its own fierce audience but hasn’t changed the genre’s fundamentals. A MOBA today plays much the same as one you played years ago.
Looking to shooters for inspiration
Kim says the video game industry’s shooter genre has seen seismic changes in recent memory, and he wants MOBAs to follow suit.
“What I saw in the shooter realm is there were all sorts of innovations, like with Valorant and PUBG,” he said. “There was always something new happening in the genre, but that isn’t happening in MOBAs. Maybe there’s something that someone needs to do, needs to explore.”
“That’s why we wanted to keep the multi-team structure and compress the MOBA experience, to find out how it would work,” he said. “Someone has to do it.”
What the demo showed
The demo I saw was fast. Hardly 30 seconds passed within each match without some form of team-versus-team clash, meaning the skirmishing was constant from the opening moments. The map’s maze-like structure means you are never far from another team, and the constant spawn of bosses keeps everyone moving.
The action is fast, and the team-fight mechanics reward aggression. Winning a fight gives you immediate benefits, so there is little reason to hold back.
The 12-minute match length is a deliberate choice. Kim and his team believe that shorter matches will appeal to modern audiences who want immediate fun.
Whether Project Zeta can actually break the MOBA mold remains to be seen. The genre’s core appeal is its depth, and compressing that into 12-minute matches is a bold bet. But the design is clearly aimed at removing the frustration of long, passive games.
For Kim, the goal is personal. He wants his daughter to love MOBAs the way he does. That means the genre has to change.
“Everyone wants immediate gratification, immediate fun,” he said. Project Zeta is his attempt to deliver exactly that.
This preview is based on a presentation at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. Krafton provided flights and accommodation.
Key facts
- Developer: Nirvanana
- Publisher: Krafton
- Format: 4 teams of 4 players
- Match length: about 12 minutes
- Win condition: secure prisms from boss enemies and cash them in at a central location
- Previewed at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany
Source: eurogamer.net
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