Food for the pyre: here are some screenshots from CCP’s cancelled World of Darkness MMO

Pentagrams: a dead giveaway.

How do you follow Eve Online? It turns out you don’t – not with a permadeath vampire MMO, anyway. CCP finally put World of Darkness to bed and affectionately nailed it to the mattress earlier this month – one of the “hardest decisions” CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has ever had to make.

56 staff at CCP’s Atlanta studio have been scattered to the winds, and the remainder put to work on one or another of the company’s Eve universe spinoffs. Which makes these leaked screenshots the last we’re ever likely to see of a game five-years-in-the-making.

The obvious and perhaps unhelpful reference point is Troika’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, the Deus Sexy RPG as often about seducing and suckering NPCs as it was sucking on them.

The dank World of Darkness these screenshots present us with seems more at home living on the peripheral: in alleyways, above alleyways, or summoning pentagons just outside alleyways.

It’s also a bit blocky, and conspicuously empty – but then, what pre-release MMO isn’t?

It’s tough to know how this MMO of undead light-shunners was going to work, precisely. You can’t have everybody living on the peripheral, or the streets will be deserted. Whose idea was this game anyway?

Thanks, MakingOfGames.