Two years of work, a GTA-inspired fantasy open world, a director with mobile MMORPG pedigree. Gone.
Nexon has quietly shut down development on an internal project codenamed Project EL. The game was described as a fantasy-style GTA open-world experience, and while almost nothing was publicly known about it, that description alone was enough to make the cancellation sting.
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What Project EL actually was
Details on Project EL are scarce. The project was led by director Shim Ki-hoon, who previously helmed mobile MMORPGs including Alliance X Empire. The game was conceived as an open-world adventure with GTA-style mechanics set in a fantasy world, which is a genuinely interesting creative direction that doesn't get tried often enough.
Development ran for approximately two years before Nexon pulled the plug. That's a meaningful chunk of time and resources, and it means a team of developers is now waiting on internal reassignment while the studio figures out next steps.
The timing and what it signals for Nexon
This cancellation lands at a particularly turbulent moment for Nexon. The company recently appointed Patrick Söderlund, CEO of Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios, as executive chairman. Söderlund has been vocal about pushing AI into the development process, describing it as "redesigning game development" entirely. Whether Project EL's cancellation connects directly to that leadership shift isn't confirmed, but the timing is hard to ignore.
Nexon has also had a rough stretch with its other projects. The First Descendant launched to a strong player count but accumulated over 110,000 mixed Steam reviews and was bluntly categorized by Nexon itself as a game that "did not work." The First Berserker: Khazan saw its development team dissolved despite solid critical reception, citing disappointing sales. Project EL's cancellation fits an uncomfortable pattern.
A concept worth mourning
The premise deserved a real shot. GTA's open-world formula, that mix of systemic freedom, mission-driven narrative, and a living city that reacts to your actions, has rarely been applied to a fantasy setting at serious scale. The closest points of comparison would be something like Crimson Desert's ambitions crossed with the moment-to-moment chaos that makes Rockstar's games so memorable.
Shim Ki-hoon's background in mobile MMORPGs suggests the team had experience building large-scale worlds with ongoing player engagement in mind, which could have been genuinely useful for the kind of reactive open world the concept implied. What most players miss when a game like this gets canceled is that the design work, the prototypes, the systems that actually ran don't disappear. They just stop becoming a game.
Where Nexon goes from here
Nexon hasn't officially commented on Project EL's cancellation, so the full picture remains incomplete. The studio still has active projects in various stages, and Söderlund's appointment suggests the company is actively reshaping its development priorities rather than simply cutting costs.
For players keeping tabs on Nexon's output, the most concrete thing to watch is how the studio handles its existing live games and whether any of the developers reassigned from Project EL surface on announced titles. You'll want to keep an eye on gaming news as Nexon's restructuring continues to take shape.
Two years of fantasy open-world work, shelved before anyone outside Nexon got to see it. For a genre that rarely takes that kind of creative swing, that's a real loss. Make sure to check out more:
