Project Zeta CEO Explains Its Multi-Team Tactical Arena And Why It Nearly Got Cancelled

Published Sep 5, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Meg is an Executive Editor and Technical Lead for TheGamer, and has been working within the gaming industry since 2014. She was shortlisted as a finalist for the GameHers Journalist of the Year award in 2022 and was a juror for the BAFTA Games Awards 2026. Some of the games and genres that Meg is an expert in include RPGs, point-and-clicks, puzzle games, and life sims. She has a particular fondness for Yakuza/Like a Dragon and Final Fantasy, especially Final Fantasy 14 (for which she used to run a weekly community column). It feels like every competitive multiplayer game inevitably gets compared to something else. Is it a MOBA? A hero shooter? A battle royale? Project Zeta has bits that might feel familiar to fans of all those genres, but Nirvanana is deliberately attempting to carve out something entirely new with what it calls a Multi-team Tactical Arena. I caught up with Nirvanana CEO Namseok Kim at Gamescom to talk about exactly what that means, why the team wanted to move away from some of the more traditional elements of MOBAs, and how it hopes Project Zeta can deliver the satisfying strategy and team fights players love without making them wait half a match to get to the good stuff. Project Zeta Wants Shorter Matches Without Losing The Strategy Kim tells me that the biggest difference with Project Zeta is that he wanted “a very dense succession of team fights”. One of Kim’s main goals is the idea of “Dropping MOBA heroes straight into a Formula 1 racing car without waiting for the 15-minute setup. That way, four teams, zero braking, and constant high-stakes positions. That's what we are going to achieve for players. “In the past MOBA games, Penta kills were the maximum, but in multi-team environments, you can get 11 kills, 12 kills, and so on. I wanted to make that possible for controllers as well. And so, with the third-party action view, we built this multi-team arena. We wanted these people to enjoy that experience.” Project Zeta aims to offer “More frequent, denser, pure team fights around key objectives in shorter matches,” because a lot of players don’t have a lot of free time. They’re most used to short-form entertainment these days, and this led to Kim coming up with the idea that “one MOBA needs to be compressed into a shorter form”. That’s also part of the reason that Kim wanted to ensure that no matter what players use, whether that’s a controller or keyboard and mouse, it’s an even playing field so that anyone can pick up and play. “There are heroes where controllers are better, and heroes where keyboard and mouse are better,” Kim tells me, explaining that when he plays with a controller, he uses certain characters, and when he plays with a keyboard and mouse, he uses different characters. “If in the future, we get to have an esports event, then the players could have a keyboard and mouse on one side and a controller on one side, and they would enter the arena with these actions, and then depending on the hero that they selected, they would set a keyboard and mouse or controller. I'm imagining maybe that will happen.” This idea of the MOBA being easily adaptable and accessible for players regardless of their platform came from a console MOBA game that Kim once developed that was eventually cancelled. “It's like Zelda 3D, making it into 3D. That was the initial idea. Then, on console, it would translate, and you would be able to enjoy MOBAs as well. So with these goals of console-based action, we made a console MOBA.” Project Zeta's Latest Map Was Its Last Chance Carving out a new niche in the MOBA market means needing to convey to players what is different about Project Zeta. “It's a new kind of entertainment. We need to convey it in a familiar way. As I said, people don't have time. In the first match, they need to understand what this game is about. They need to know what this game is and have fun. And that's, I think, the most difficult part.” Kim tells me about when esports legend Faker, Lee Sang-hyeok, took Project Zeta for a test drive: “Faker is really popular because he's really smart. He tracks everyone's movements every split second. And he dodges all of the attacks and kills them. He's on top of everyone's heads, and that's what you should be seeing, and that's what's amazing. Dodging every wave. Getting all the kills and putting the team in the air, smashing them. And then the next team, you keep smashing them again and again. Talking about Deca kills. When you see that, that's actually fun. That's what we wanted to realise.” One of the biggest challenges for the team was finding a template that worked. “Zeta doesn't have references in the gaming space, so controls, combat, heroes, rulesets- there's no reference. We had to make one thing, make another thing, and put them together, and sometimes they don't fit. We have to iterate so many times to find a match that fits, and all of those pieces need to fit. Eventually, we have to keep doing this until we find it. For four years, it was all failure in finding the right match, and only now have we found something that comes together.” Kim tells me that Project Zeta has changed a lot if you compare it to earlier iterations. “The first map was ten times the size of what we have right now, and we have five teams, not four. We had wall climbing, we had a lot of features, you could swim.” However, the team found that, though they had all these features, the map wasn’t truly being explored, and because they wanted to provide an even playing field, the map kept shrinking. They changed the map last June and then changed it again right before the global test: “The visuals, art, narrative, everything changed.” Project Zeta came close to being scrapped. “If we didn't have a team fight that we wanted after changing the map, we were going to stop developing Zeta. Because for four years, we had failed so many times. If it doesn't work this time, after these two extensive changes to the map, this isn’t going to work. That was our last chance. But in the last map, that last test, we found a direction.” Perhaps the clearest indication of how difficult it is to make something genuinely new is just how close Project Zeta came to never making it out the door at all. Four years of experimenting, cutting features, shrinking maps, and trying to find the right combination eventually came down to one final attempt. Fortunately for Nirvanana, that last chance seems to have been the one it needed. Project Zeta is still doing something that will inevitably invite comparisons to MOBAs, hero shooters, and plenty of other competitive games, but after years of trying to find its identity, Project Zeta has finally become the game the team had been chasing all along.” Developer(s) Nirvanana Publisher(s) Krafton Multiplayer Online Multiplayer Number of Players Single-player Steam Deck Compatibility Unknown Genre(s) Action, MOBA, Multiplayer, Tactical