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Why the makers of EVE Online couldn't keep 'World of Darkness' alive

Why the makers of EVE Online couldn't keep 'World of Darkness' alive

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Massively multiplayer game World of Darkness should have brought the intricate sandbox sensibilities of EVE Online to the incredibly popular White Wolf tabletop series, perhaps best known for Vampire: The Masquerade. But in April of 2014, the game was finally canceled after years of delays and uncertainty. The Guardian, talking to sources from inside the project, tells us why. Some of the problems — poor management, "small" changes that forced developers to start over again and again — have wrecked other studios, most recently BioShock Infinite developer Irrational. But the piece suggests that World of Darkness also had to deal with an increasingly uneasy and unfocused merger between White Wolf and CCP, as well as individual moments of surreality. "I once saw [a manager] looking over the shoulder of a programmer at some bit of User Interface the poor guy had hacked together," says one source. "He straightened up, put fingers to lips and said, ‘No, this isn't it at all. Make it more... psssshhhh."