Project Zeta has a lot stacked against it. The MOBA genre is not exactly one that’s wanting for competition, with many well-established competitors already throwing hands in the arena that Korean developer Nirvanana seeks to enter. Your average League of Legends or DOTA player isn’t usually one to venture too far out of their comfort zones, and to the uninitiated, the genre as a whole has a huge barrier to entry that wouldn’t necessarily attract new players.
But that hasn’t shaken Nirvanana’s ambitions for Project Zeta. Sitting down with executive producer Namseok Kim to try the game at Gamescom 2026, I’m told that Project Zeta isn’t just a MOBA in the strictest sense. Rather, Nirvanana has crafted a MOBA-battle royale hybrid, with elements of hero shooter thrown in for good measure.
Chaos reigns
In Project Zeta, gameplay revolves around battling multiple four-player teams across a map, completing objectives on the road to victory. While the core bones do seem all too familiar for any fan of the best shooters, Project Zeta seems to be more about the journey than the destination.
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Nirvanana is laser-focused on player satisfaction, whether or not you win the game, as well as moment-to-moment gameplay and, most importantly, kills. I’m shown footage of Twitch streamers celebrating with glee as they mow down the opposition, only to be blindsided by another team and forced to try again. The satisfaction of the pure chaos overshadowed the disappointment of defeat, as they charged back in to rejoin the fray.
These large multi-team skirmishes are the foundation that Project Zeta is built upon, and Kim reflects on seeing this gameplay pillar in action. “A large number of players were gathered together, [and] kills would just erupt – 11 kills, 12 kills at a time,” he says. This differs from the highest multi-kill available in a traditional MOBA, the five-kill pentakill. “When I saw that, I felt an enormous thrill myself, and I thought, ‘this is the future of some new form of MOBA game’.”
Every puzzle piece clicked into place at once…
Namseok Kim
But reaching this point hasn’t been easy. During multiple public game tests, Nirvanana learned many lessons and iterated upon Project ZETA’s gameplay. The practice continues even now – “we keep meeting players, hearing their feedback, and taking plenty of heat,” says Kim
“We reworked every character, and we changed the terrain once more: [..] We changed the map itself as well. And because players said they wanted to know intuitively where they are at any given moment, we changed the concept and narrative of each area of the map.”
Hopefully, this approach of listening to players and crafting a game around their wants will pay off for Nirvanana. The gaming community can be a fickle bunch, and sometimes only the loudest voice prevails. But with each iteration, it seems the game has come closer to achieving Nirvanana’s goals.
Witnessing players successfully rack up these gargantuan multi-kills marked an important moment for Kim. “That’s when every puzzle piece clicked into place at once – combat, controls, heroes, systems, UI, UX, all of it,” especially when players pulled off “a deca-kill – ten kills. [It’s] the joy of development, I suppose; I felt it very intensely.”
Global playtests are now open for sign-ups on Steam if you want to be a part of Nirvanana’s iterative process and, maybe, rack up some deca-kills of your own.
