Project Zeta is a mashup of multiple live-service genres, but for developer Nirvanana, it’s best described as an “espresso MOBA.”
This four-teams-of-three ‘Tactical Hero Arena’ third-person action game is, essentially, a race involving as many teamfights as possible. The game actively encourages teams to fight each other, scrapping over objectives throughout each phase of a session. MOBAs typically focus combat down lanes, but in Project Zeta, around three minutes into each session, the focus becomes fighting over objectives. You have to seek out teamfights to win. This is not a game about hiding in bushes.
Each session is made up of seven phases. The first phase sees players defeat ordinary monsters to level up — all very MOBA. It’s a warmup phase meant to give players breathing room to develop a strategy. Generally, you’re on the hunt for prisms, which drop from prism bosses. Grab one then take it to one of the ballasts in the center of the map to score a point. The first team to score five points wins, exiting the game in first place.
“What we're aiming to deliver is a removal of the lane-ing in traditional MOBAs,” Nirvanana CEO Namseok Kim told me at gamescom 2026. “It's objective-driven with a lot of teamfights. So that compressed experience is what we're looking for. As fans of the MOBA genre, we believe that the fun of MOBAs comes from playing smart and winning the teamfights. And we need it so that you can enjoy an endless supply of that kind of experience in the compressed 20-minute time of a session. It's going to be a very dense experience. So we wanted to propose a new kind of MOBA.”
Another unique aspect of Project Zeta is its lack of a crosshair at the center of the screen, which you typically see in hero shooters and 3D MOBAs. This means basic attacks always land. More accurate aim does not factor into fights; instead, the idea is that success comes from your understanding of the each hero's abilities, mind games, and positioning. Combat is a sort of dance between dodging enemy attacks and making sure your attacks land.
Reducing downtime, players in eliminated teams are immediately revived with their cooldowns and HP restored. Battle royale MOBAs typically restrict players to a limited number of lives, so players play passively in order to survive. Project Zeta has a score race with unlimited respawns and a quick time-to-kill. The game wants players to take risks to eliminate other teams, and because everything is restored once a team is eliminated, the hope is that players won’t shy away from getting into scraps.
“We wanted the sessions to feel like a Formula 1 race,” Namseok Kim said. “Everyone is racing toward these objectives. That is what Project Zeta is.”
Like a racing game, Project Zeta displays a scoreboard on the top left that fluctuates as teams turn prisms in. “Everything needs to happen in 20 minutes,” Namseok Kim explained. “So everything that makes a MOBA fun is compressed into that short time. Yesterday, one journalist said that if other MOBAs are coffee, then Project Zeta could be like instant espresso. And we agreed, that was a great analogy. We had made up the term ‘multi-team tactical arena’ to describe Project Zeta, but personally I like ‘espresso MOBA’ better.”
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/the-developers-of-upcoming-espresso-moba-project-zeta-want-it-to-feel-like-a-formula-1-race
