Early this morning we reported on the restructuring of NeoPle, the studio behind The First Berserker: Khazan, and how the vast majority of its team had been reassigned to another group within Nexon called Team R. It turns out this wasn't the only change the parent company has made to its development division.
According to the Korean media outlet MTN, with the recent appointment of the company's new CEO, Patrick Söderlund (founder of Embark Studios and the recent hit ARC Raiders), a comprehensive review of the company's project portfolio is underway, and the decision has been taken to cancel Project EL, which had been in active development for two years within Nexon Korea's Big Games Division.
Project EL was a major undertaking. The limited information available suggests it was a large-scale open-world sandbox adventure, something akin to a 'fantasy GTA', which was part of the EF (Prasia Electric) development group within the Live Publishing Division, but was transferred to the Big Games Division in 2024 to begin full-scale development and was led by Sim Ki-hoon, who previously directed mobile MMORPGs such as "AxE" and "TalesWeaver: Second Run".
Apparently, Söderlund emphasised the need for a comprehensive review of Nexon's development projects and announced plans to implement the production management system used by Embark Studios. Although no redundancies have been reported as yet, the outlet reports "tension" within the teams and fears that their projects may be cancelled. We will update this story if there are any new developments in the coming hours.