The development was long and troubled, with organizational and managemental issues, including staff being moved to other CCP Games projects for months at a time, significantly slowing down progress and leading to work being abandoned and redone repeatedly.

[3][4][5] It was meant to take place at night and have a supernatural horror theme,[6][7] and was based on the World of Darkness series' setting – the shared fictional universe of several of White Wolf Publishing's tabletop role-playing games, including Vampire: The Masquerade.

[18] The game was eventually unveiled three years later along with a trailer and concept art at White Wolf's Grand Masquerade event in New Orleans in 2010, with a planned release date of 2012.

[3] The next year, CCP Games laid off 20% of its staff, about 120 people, as they had been stretching their resources too thin; they moved their focus to their MMORPG Eve Online, but did not cancel World of Darkness, instead letting its development continue with a significantly reduced development team;[19] by 2012, the game was still in its pre-production phase, with a team of 60 working full-time on it.

Because staff kept getting moved between World of Darkness and other projects, progress was significantly slowed down, and partially-finished features and systems ended up getting abandoned and re-started several times.

[9] Although GameSpot described World of Darkness as one of the most notable games to have been canceled in the last few years as of 2019,[1] other publications found it typical for the industry: The Guardian wrote that the "real scandal" was that job cuts like those are common in the video game industry,[2] Polygon described it as neither shocking nor unusual,[25] and Kotaku called it disappointing but unsurprising.

[26] Preview impressions of World of Darkness were positive, praising its visuals and how it felt new and experimental;[8][27] PCGamesN considered it one of the most interesting MMOs in development at the time, with a lot of potential,[8] and IGN described it as "super-stylish".