First, let's get the obvious response to this post out of the way; volunteer group so can't put a date on anything. got it.
That shouldn't be a factor in at least having an open and honest update on what is left. What is the real status on all the different parts of the game that have to be finished to release this game. Please, let's not get into the 'well technically you can play today'. No. What's available is not enough to be considered a game, certainly not a released game. If what is out is what you guys are calling a game then I want my money back. You know what we mean when we talk about 'release'.
We are coming up on Q3 2023 and still the thought of a release date is as blurry as it was 5 years ago. I'm not asking for a release date...I'm asking for a honest assessment of what is left and the current manpower on the team to accomplish what is left. There are so many systems that are needed to bring an MMO together and there really is so little communication about most of it.
I think after 10+ years we should be able to have an honest discussion about where the project truly is at and what the real plan is going forward. It is so frustrating at this point in development that communication via official updates has decreased so dramatically. I know someone is going to respond with "go to discord"...I'm on it. 90%+ of the comments by devs is unrelated to CoT, even on the general discussion tab.
Let me give one example:
-December 30, 2021 Update "We closed 2021 with an update on combat that showed one completed power set that demonstrates what will be coming with many powersets that are on their way as we plan to make testing available to players in the first quarter of 2022."
-January 27, 2022 Update "Things are coming along. We’re trying to get the first set of powers in the offline playable chargen within Q1, and probably sooner"
-Oct 27, 2022 Update to UE5 "we now plan to release Alexandria, Old Bradford, Downtown, Victory Beach, and all of the built neighborhood areas as soon as we finish testing and applying new improvements available in UE5" and "we plan in our next update to show some progress on the combat front!" We never saw any update on combat.
-April 5, 2023 Update "Full power sets for players and foes are coming with a fully functional user interface replacing the current key functions. More travel powers are coming. Missions are coming. Multiplayer and chat are coming. And all of that in the context of Alexandria, Old Bradford, Downtown, North Eastern Research District and Victory Beach, our Titan City neighborhoods." None of that has even been talked about again.
-April 2023 Update "As soon as we finish the UE5 efficiency upgrades to this huge area of the game in the coming months, we will be providing access for players to explore it. And following that, we will be adding AI foes and combat as well." No more talk about efficiency upgrades status.
-June 28, 2023 Update "Now that we'll be able to bring you more of the city, be watching for more information about that in future updates." How far into the future does that apply? Normally when told to watch out for something its relatively soon...this feels like 'be watching out over the next year or so for updates we are alluding to now".
I can't find which update, or perhaps it was on discord, but I remember seeing AmiEvil respond to someone saying, to paraphrasse, "the move to UE5 definitely did not set us back" but from my pov its about 2 years at least. Things you were so sure were coming in Q1 of 2022 still seem no closer in Q4 2023, a few more months are were 2 years on with nothing the team keeps telling us to be on the lookout for. If UE5 made it more efficient, how is it that we're a year and a half into UE5 and you guys still haven't shown those efficiencies yet.
I'm just looking for an honest assessment, not a date. I wish someone on the team would track what you guys put in updates....there have been so many things over the years mentioned in updates for us to 'look out for' that were never mentioned again. So many 'nows a good time to start following the project, exciting things coming' and yet here we are at basically the same spot. I've invested financially and feel justified in making this post.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
So, as it would happen, last night we made a major break through that we have been working on for months now. We have a packaged version that players will be able to use soon to test the game. I'm not going to go into the details of why this took months to get this together (a lot of error fixing that took time), but the important point is that we now are just doing fine tuning small fixes before getting the launch area to players to start testing in the next week or two.
The status of where we are at in the short term is that as soon as we do fine tuning like distance fog, getting one or two applications that need fixing (like fountains and our ocean need some tweaking), getting the player start location exactly where we want it, and a few other minor fixes, we are going to start player testing of the city launch area, including all of the neighborhoods, Alexandria, Old Bradford, Downtown, Victory Beach, NRD, Aurora, Rhinehart Park and the airport.
This update will not be focused on spawning villains and using powers yet, although I expect we will add a few patches of villains for players to use their powers, just as a demonstration that they are there and working. We just haven't had a chance to put villains spawned throughout the game area yet. That will take a bit of time and will be planned for a later update. Later updates will include more focus on powers, and things like chat / mmo and other features of our game that we will be able to focus on now that the environment is ready for players to enter. (We will also do more work on the environment with moving cars, blimps, planes, etc.). But very soon now you will be able to get into the game environment and have a much more tangible look at where the game is at.
We are all working very hard right now on getting these last final fixes done, so I am going to get back to work on that, but just wanted to take a minute to respond to you here - I certainly understand everyone's frustration with the wait. We are all on this end so ready for the game to get going too, and we are very excited about this release coming shortly to you all.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
This morning, at 3 AMish.
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/769075266575532112/1155457132171362406/image.png[/img]
we made a breakthrough.
It's been something we've been working on for a while, and it couldn't have been done before 5. But just because it could be done didn't mean it was ready.
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/769075266575532112/1155458945280917615/image.png?width=1339&height=160[/img]
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/769075266575532112/1155458945561939998/image.png[/img]
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/769075266575532112/1155458945838743673/image.png[/img]
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/769075266575532112/1155458946950234223/rn_image_picker_lib_temp_50838fac-9a44-48ed-b4e7-d7ad85656c1c.png?width=887&height=665[/img]
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/769075266575532112/1155458949848498256/image.png[/img]
Each try took 4+ hours. Each significant upload took three days.
This morning, at 3AM, we got this.
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/917511823035613265/1155547637374787684/found_you.jpg[/img]
It's not ready for you yet. There's no HLOD enabled, so if you fly up very far it chokes your ram and crashes, as it tries to fit the full LA basin into your RAM. We're fixing that.
Also, we lost the ocean for a bit. Then we found it again.
[img]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/917511823035613265/1155554320612343828/image.png[/img]
Got to figure that out.
Also I may have gotten it to build by deleting some things that were problems rather than fixing them.
But yeah. We're on our way. Then? Powersets, missions... and multiplayer, after we go to Unreal 5.3.
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
Dark Cleric really hit on all the points that I've been feeling some frustration within the past year or so. The semantics that're used regarding "release" and "is the game out/playable?" whenever a newcomer pops into the Discord asking about City of Titans has always struck me as bad PR since someone is going to wind up feeling deceived after donating to the Second Chance and finding that what they bought was a buggy/clippy character creator and an island with a couple of baddies and test powers.
I get that transparency is limited, but like Cleric said, something in regards to an update on where things are would be nice since we're nearing the end of the year at this point. With where things are its just so hard to discuss City of Titans since you got the doomsayer crowd calling it vaporware due to a variety of reasons at this point and so much about the game in general mostly feels like surface-level information with all the finer details buried beneath a sea of threads and comments either on here or on Discord.
"If I am to die in battle, Remember me for who I was and not what I've become..."
People have asked 'What do you mean lost the ocean.'
[img]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/633759145522102283/1155575233374326814/image.png?width=1183&height=665[/img]
That wasn't as surprising as finding it flooding half the city.
Edit: We've been working on getting the world out to you for a while - we had to get the launcher that could handle it first, and... it adds up.
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
-If you're confident enough to put a time period on this, that's great. I hope it materializes, but realize you put the time period on it. Don't get upset if a month goes by and I requote that.
-I'm not really worried about short term status; doesn't really help me see the larger picture but it's appreciated.
-This is more what I am asking about. I'd consider this a pretty major 'check box' since so much of this game is going to be running around the map fighting mobs in all different parts of the city, so it's at least something to know this is still planned for the future. Getting this right, meaning the right spawn locations, the right number of spawns, the right mix, the right areas, etc etc etc should take considerable time to be done right.
-I don't like how this is worded. While the city map is obviously a big ticket item in the overall scope of the game...getting a skeleton city actually doesn't give us a look at where the game is at (the use of the word 'skeleton' is not derogatory, it's just a description of basically a ghost town). The map might be to a state where you can let us run around but with virtually no systems in the game we can't tell where the game is at. Some systems might be in, like weather, current state of some travel powers, etc, but those aren't systems you can use to see where the game is at. It will be fun to run or fly around the city for a few minutes but with nothing to do, it'll likely be a one-time thing. It doesn't actually give us any better idea of where the game is at than watching any of the videos of a dev flying around the city.
-This I have never questioned.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Bit more than a week or so, from the errors I'm seeing and the difficulties we've been having moving the data around - the game is currently 32 gigs as an executable and half a terabyte as source files. Approximately.
[color=#ff0000]Project Lead[/color]
- the reason that I feel confident about this is we have our staff of non-technical volunteers running around in a test version of the project today. We are holding off on sharing testing with the players because we have a few large looking, but easy to fix things we need to do, like our ocean disappeared in this version, but that's an easy fix. And while select player testing (organized through Discord) I think will be very soon, I can't say how soon we will put out a big update to the world and let everyone come into the city. The reason we will do small player testing organized through discord first is you all might find some more things that are glaring we need to fix that we aren't seeing. But I hope that after players do some testing we will release an update for the entire player community fairly soon.
- The actual spawning is something that is very easy for us to do and I think that placing villains throughout the game area will be a very manageable task for us to do. When we do our next powers update, while AmiEvil is focused on getting more power sets ready, I will be working on getting the city spawning with characters. I suspect that will be our next update.
-the AI for villains, fighting and travel powers that are systems on the island will all be available in the big city area. We will be building on those systems in the coming updates. So the basic environment and fighting will be there in the game at this release, with more power sets and more spawned villains in the city coming soon.
There are definitely areas of the game and systems where we still have a lot of work in the coming year. Those include Missions, Chat, MMO... these are some of the big items that we will be focusing on after we make progress on the environment and combat. We will focus on planning for those things in the coming months. We already have some work and early plans on all of these, but serious planning and preparing (like we have done for the environment and combat) will get much more focus now that we are able to focus less on the large game environment.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Dark Cleric - I was thinking some more about your comments and about spawning. I wanted to follow-up on that.
Creating spawns will be a very easy thing for us to do. But your point is a good one that "Getting this right, meaning the right spawn locations, the right number of spawns, the right mix, the right areas, etc etc etc should take considerable time to be done right." This is a very good point that I think is worth players being very aware of.
We will be able to put spawned villains out very easily for players to fight throughout the neighborhoods/districts. However, we are still in the process of creating many of our factions with the character creator. We are very early in the process of mission development. Those tasks are going to impact how we will do spawning over time. So, while the function of spawning foes to fight will be pretty easy to implement, the content of the game is really going to grow in the next phase of our work as we move away from focusing on building the game environment and focus more on mission development and continuing the work that's been done with the character creator.
I wanted to point that out because while we may have villains for you all to fight throughout the city pretty soon, we will be improving the experience of enemy encounters as we focus more on mission work in the coming year.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
-Yea I figured that part would be easy...but throughout the entire map and getting it right will be both difficult and time-consuming.
-This is good to know. This is another big area critical to the game to get right.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Just to keep you all posted on this week's progress towards player testing in the neighborhoods...
As we mentioned last week, getting the large neighborhood project packaged, built and playable for players was the major hurdle we have been working at for months now. It was a major hurdle because the project has gotten so large, there was a lot of final fixing needed to get the build to work.
We mentioned last week that there were a few highly visible, but easy to fix issues. We have fixed most of those issues (oceans, rivers, light flare, etc.).
We have one issue remaining with the landscapes that we are continuing to work through. (There are a couple other issues we know we need to fix, but they won't hold up player testing).
When that landscape issue is resolved, we will start small group player testing on our discord server. There is already discussion happening in the "tester-channel" Discord thread if you are interested in engaging with player testing in the coming weeks.
We will keep people posted in this coming week as we work through the last issues before starting testing.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
You... you!!
Just kidding^^
I just want to tell you one thing Dark Cleric, which is no critic (I like much of what you usually write), it's just a point of view I wanna share with you.
Between yours and mine, one difference struck me like a lightning, the "money back" part.
I'm conscious from the very start that I gave that money with one thing in mind: "I don't care if they succeed or not, I give this cause it's the only hope to get a superhero mmorpg built with passion and from CoH-players, which is exactly what I want. I believe in this cause (the chances that tripleA publishers do it right are slim), it's probably the only chance I got and I'm a super-fan of the idea, if I don't do my part... who will?"
Not funding would have been like "I hope that others will substitute me and create the future I hope for, while I watch and do nothing" and therefore, me specifically, not helping wouldn't have been the right thing to do.
Today's society gives far too much importance to competition and results. I believe in cooperation and justice instead.
The latter feels childish, but it's the right word to summarize the actions taken not cause you are certain of the result, but cause it's the right thing to do, cause it's your part, it was up to you, without regrets cause you did your best with the information you had at the time and then what has to happen happens.
Therefore, that money was me "acting", and I don't take back my actions when I think they were right for the time I decided to put them in place. And I think your post is you "acting" as well and doing your best, and I don't think you deserve any regrets.
I'm not against refunds, who would be. If you think that someone stole from you something (with lies) you have all the rights to ask for your things back. I just felt you may need another point of view in this specific matter, about crowdfunding in general probably cause I make sure that I won't have regrets before I act.
I can be robbed or cheated, but in this case I believe I received exactly what I wanted, a chance (and I still hope for more). How is it even possible that we didn't get a decent superhero mmorpg or rpg in this decade of exploding MCU? It's incredible that all developers didn't rush for it. The more I see this lack of action from the "AAA" world, the more I think that I was right in funding CoT so many years in advance, whatever happens in the end.
CoH is back and getting better features, but seems to get worse on the bugs' side personally, far too many powers skip animations (a superhero game with only half animations in each build? No thanks), the game is old unfortunately and it's showing, they are doing miracles with it but it won't be enough. We need something based on an engine up to the time we are now.
Firaxis decided for a cards-gameplay that threw me bodily out their game... I love Xcom and Firexis, I love comics... yet...
It's absurd in this era but I still don't see any hopes for a superhero based game (with a character creator possibly) on the horizon yet, and so I'm back here^^, hi all :D.
Update this week - we think we are close to fixing that last issue we are working through with the landscapes. It's been a tricky issue, but we think we are close to resolving it. We need at least a few more days to work on this until we are ready for player testing.
In the meantime, AmiEvil also built us a tool for players to screenshot a picture with coordinates of any errors they find. So, when player testing starts, players will be able to run through the game and help us find any smaller issues that they run into in the game, like collision missing, getting stuck in a wall at a certain location, etc. This is where players who sign up through Discord will be able to really help us get this finalized for releasing the environment to all of our players soon.
We will keep you posted as we get ready for player testing.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
One more quick update - we have fixed about half of the world's landscape area in the built project we are preparing for player testing. The good news is that we confirmed we know how to fix the issue and about half the city area is now fixed.
The fix is a bit time consuming and we still have half the city to fix, so it's going to be a few more days before we finish the fix for the whole city. But a few more days of fixing, and we think we should be ready to go for player testing...
Getting close...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
That's some good news. How would one go about signing up for player testing? Have the City of Titans Discord, but what steps after that one?
[center] [i] [color=blue] Unarmed combat best combat. Every media [/color] [/i] [/center]
There is a "Tester Channel" on the Discord, that's where the discussion is happening, so join the conversation there and let the team know that you would like to participate when player testing is available...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
I'm heading out of town for a long weekend and won't be back until late Monday, so not able to post tomorrow or over the weekend. But seems like we are very close to finished with working through that landscape issue. If people are interested in tuning in for player testing, I'd recommend you keep following our Discord "Tester Channel" thread to keep up with information on how to be a tester.
I'll be back online here early next week and will chime in if there are any updates I think should be made...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Bad news, I might be blind. I can't find the Tester Channel that you speak of. Is it only for a certain level of backer?
[center] [i] [color=blue] Unarmed combat best combat. Every media [/color] [/i] [/center]
It's by specific request in Discord, since it means testing things before they're even ready to be called alpha. Every now and then we put out a call for people that want to get in on a given test.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
I did not know this - I see the channel there and thought players could too.
So, I will check in with the team to see if we can do a request for testers before we launch the player testing. Warlocc, where would an announcement happen for that, in the General Thread?
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
You could use ... Forums > Test Server > [url=https://cityoftitans.com/forums/announcements-0][b]Announcements[/b][/url] ... over here for that.
Not everyone lives on Discord.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
What I'm likely to do is put out an announcement on both the forums and Discord together, with instructions on how to request the Tester role in Discord and what it'll entail, which are details we're still working out.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
So... we non-tech volunteers are learning as we go here...
Our entire group of volunteers have been running around testing the project since this last weekend. I had understood that players would be able to download and run around the project in the same way any day now. BUT, our tech staff wants to make sure that players use our launcher in testing, because it protects the code etc. And the last bit of work we need to do for getting this into player hands (after we finish the last couple fixes we need to do) is get the project integrated with our launcher. Integrating with the launcher will take a little time. (like a week, maybe two if there are issues...).
What this means is that our game volunteers are all doing the testing we need right now and we are going to push hard and fast just to get the game to players as quickly as possible without creating a separate player testing system. We will be sharing pictures and information from our volunteers that are doing the testing now, and keep you updated on these final finishes we are doing to get the game into all of your hands.
We are looking to launch this for all the players around Halloween and will share pictures and accounts of the testing we are doing right now with you all as we go.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
So, if I'm reading this all correcty, the testing that was originally planned for a select group of players to stress test and find any potential bugs to report back to the devs is instead being done by the developers themselves. However, in exchange for this and depending on how things play out, everyone will be able to play and get to experience the starting districts of CoT?
"If I am to die in battle, Remember me for who I was and not what I've become..."
We have been planning for all of the players to have access to the neighborhood game environment hopefully by Halloween. The PR team had also hoped to set up outreach to do some targeted player testing maybe in the next few days. We realized we can't do player testing in the next few days, but our plans for releasing the game to players is still happening we hope by Halloween.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
I've been trying to give status updates on Friday about what's going on with our work for the upcoming release... here's where things are at.
Our volunteers went running around the launch area last week and took screen shots of any spots where we had floating trees, missing doors, anything that looked off. I spent all day yesterday running around making all of those little fixes that need to be done.
Meanwhile, AmiEvil, our Senior Engineer, has been finishing work on the big landscape issue we have been fixing, and also he found the answer to one of the remaining big issues we need resolved before players can get in there, a sound issue that was really annoying, but kind of a small issue. (There was ocean noise happening everywhere you went in the game, but it didn't match any of the sound cues that I had placed in the game... it took a while to find that our ocean itself in the game had a setting that could override other sounds with the ocean noise... so AmiEvil fixed that). We have a little bit of landscape left to fix, and an invisible wall that we need to remove that got placed by the airport, and then all of the errors we have identified will be fixed.
After those couple of errors are fixed, we put the project over to 'mangle' with our launcher. This sets the project up so that anyone can play the game, but they don't download the code and features that would make the game vulnerable to pirating etc. The mangle process for a project as massive as ours will take a little time. That will be the only work we need to do (that we can think of now) before it gets into player hands. We hope to have the mangle work done in time to release the game for Halloween - but we will see. I'm told the mangle work is going to be a bit of a project on its own. But if not Halloween, should be close afterwards.
We are very excited with the progress - I spent a lot of time flying around the city the last couple days trying to find any last-chance fixes, and I have to say, it's incredibly fun to just explore this massive, beautiful environment we have created. I cannot wait for you all to experience it!
We will keep you posted as things move along,
-Red
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
The updates are being read and appreciated.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Hey everyone - I know some people here aren't on Discord but I wanted to let you all know something we have started doing on Discord because it has a function that makes it very easy for us to make happen right now. Discord allows us to do basically a video call with players where we can easily livestream with players. So we have started doing livestreams of our volunteers running through the game environment. Discussion of these livestreams is being facilitated on our Discord General channel, so you can find out about when one of our volunteers is doing another stream each day until we are ready to release the update. (We are still encouraged that the release can happen hopefully within this week...).
Recording these livestreams would involve some additional applications we haven't set up yet, so we aren't recording the livestreams, but for now, if you are interested in seeing some live streaming of volunteers exploring the city game environment, hop on over to our discord and feel free to join the live channel.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Friday update - things are humming along.
AmiEvil fixed the landscape (there might be a small hole or two somewhere people might find, but nothing we can find now). He also fixed the invisible wall that had been blocking movement around the airport. Everything is ready for players to enter the game.
We are just working on the 'mangle' for our launcher, getting it so players can get into the expanded environment of the game from the launcher. That may take a little while, but still possible we may have the update ready for Halloween. If not, maybe Thursday... If we run into some random hurdle, I'll let you all know what's up next Friday.
Things are looking really good for you all to experience the city this week!
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
So, that random hurdle I talked about in the last post... this week was feeling so close, but that hurdle has unfortunately come up...
It's a roughly two week hurdle (maybe two weeks is worst case, maybe we need a little more than two weeks).
The hurdle is this - the launcher needs some recoding to work with our much bigger project that the launcher will now be using. It also will allow access not just to the new project (all the city neighborhoods), but also the old project (the island). There is nothing difficult about this coding or a problem for us to figure out, it's just time consuming. And our volunteer who needs to do the coding can't do it all tomorrow and goes out of town on Wednesday for almost a week before he can get back to do further needed coding.
The reality of working with volunteers - this is some of our mayhem.
Once again, our apologies for the delay and we hope you all continue watching our live streams over the next couple weeks on Discord as we get this last bit of work done on our launcher.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Hey all - it's Friday, quick update on where we are...
Our volunteer who is doing the coding for the launcher is back from being out of town and is working on the launcher. It's possible things could be finalized this week, but he is feeling more comfortable with saying it will be ready in the week of Thanksgiving. In the meantime while he works on that, the rest of us have been working on other aspects of the game. AmiEvil did a lot of fixing earlier on landscapes, but the fixes left a lot of grass showing in streets all over the city, so I spent the last week cleaning up grass growing in our streets... just a final bit of tidying up to get the environment ready.
So, not much to report except to let you guys know that things are still moving along as we had discussed when I last posted here.
I'll keep you all posted.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Hey everyone - quick Friday update...
The launcher work has been done and we have testers testing it now to see if everything was done correctly... If all continues to go well, we are hoping to launch the update on Monday...
Hoping to get this out early in the week so that we can get the word out to everyone and players can run around the city over Thanksgiving holiday!
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
👍
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Hey all,
Quick note - Our tech team got everything working on the launcher, did all of their testing and things are working great!
The update is happening, here's how it's going to roll out (assuming we don't have any last, last, very last minute issues): Sometime today the tech team will be setting up the launcher for players to be able to download the updated game. This might not happen until late tonight after work. And then tomorrow morning we will send out the PR update on our website here with details about what people will be able to access with this new update. So you won't see anything happening today until maybe late tonight. Tomorrow morning we will be putting the PR update out. In that PR update we will be explaining things like you need 50gb of space to download the expanded project. So we encourage people to wait until the PR update comes out before trying to download the project so you can read those kinds of details.
We are very excited for you all to start exploring Titan City!
-Red
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
So now that we are 6 month post city launch...are we any closer to knowing what the next steps are? Some sort of information update would be nice.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Good talk.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
I have had some medical issues come up - I won't be able to follow-up on this for a while, but hoping someone from PR can at some point soon. Lots of work going on in the background but I'm not sure what we feel like we can talk about here...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
I still don't get the secrecy, the project has been going on so long and still has so long to go I cant believe it's to build suspense for the game or keep things as a surprise. If it's something you aren't actually sure that will 100% be in the game...maybe that makes sense but then again with such limited resources I hope the team isn't spending much time on things that may not reach the game. We are now in Q3 of 2024, are we going to get any kind of update this quarter?
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
There's two things going on.
Whenever we show something incomplete nobody understands what they're looking at and gets upset. Feedback ranges from confusion to full on insulting. I don't have to tell you, I know you've seen it. It means more work for PR explaining things, which we don't often have time to do- remember, we all have day jobs, this is volunteer stuff.
This causes the devs working on things to play stuff very close to the vest because they're the ones that read those insults. We've lost more than one volunteer to the abuse in the past.
So at this point it's become almost universally decided that we wait for each thing to be in a decent place before we show it off.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
I'm not asking you to show anything...is talking about what is being worked on really worse than going 7+ months of silence and having people question if the project is even still being worked on?
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
There hasn't been seven months of silence- we've said in a number of updates to join Discord for the ongoing conversation. Updates are just for updates, not for "yes we're still working on things".
Health issues and home issues were mentioned there, as well as direct conversations with other devs.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
Just to add my two cents here, I think one of the main issues is that the Discord is driving traffic away from the website/forums which is usually a person's first go-to location to check the status of anything, especially if it pertains to a game. This can, quite frankly, be seen as counterproductive as its makes the forums seem abandoned (which they technically are in a community sense) and that production or interest in City of Titans has been lost, even more-so now that the Homecoming servers became officially licensed and the game CoT was meant to be a spiritual successor to has since come back with full approval from its original studio.
I'll be frank, while the Discord has ongoing conversations and you're more likely to get a prompt response from a dev on there than here, the problem is that some people avoid Discord like the plague for a variety of reasons like already being apart of multiple servers or personal experiences that have made the application unusable for them. Its rather silent there most of the time and other times its filled with the occasional conversation thats unrelated to City of Titans which leaves reason for people to mute and forget about it until the next announcement/update is made. Whenever a new face does show up there, its the same question of "Is the game playable?" or "Is there a beta slated for this game yet?" to which the response is the same answer we've gotten for years about the game being a volunteer effort, that everyone has day jobs, and so on and so forth.
"If I am to die in battle, Remember me for who I was and not what I've become..."
The good news is, this did prompt me to do some poking internally and one of the replies when I asked for some statuses was "Multiplayer is one of my next projects. Actually it's been an ongoing one." and that he's working on getting it going with UE 5.4
So, that's kind of promising.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
Isn't getting multiplayer working and mmo backend setup one the largest pieces of an mmo?
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Are we going to get any kind of status update this year on the general progress of the game? Or should I come back next year
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
If you're not already, check out the Sneak Peek channel in our Discord. We're not able to make the content into an official update, but it shows some of what's been going on.
https://discord.gg/city-of-titans-official-633757967899951105
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
I don't see a Sneak Peek channel
I'll send you a message on Discord with a direct link to click, see if we can't get it sorted out. Definitely some kind of glitch, you're missing a ton of channels there.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
Very weird. Your DM did get unlock that channel, though.
Cleric, might be time to change that sig block.
Why is that? Its still true
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
It's disconcerting that we are going into 2025 with no clearer of a picture of the path to beta testing, let alone release, than we had 5 years ago. I remain floored at how bad the communication is here compared to where it used to be. You'd think there would be an increase in communication the closer you get to something like beta than a decrease in any meaningful discussion about the game.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Agreed. I actually recently asked in an ArtStrong livestream over on YouTube about getting any additional updates or announcements before 2025 and I believe the response was yes and that they working on integrating the combat system, but it was "fighting" them. Though again, this is another situation in where communication channels are scattered all over the place.
"If I am to die in battle, Remember me for who I was and not what I've become..."
I would really hope that any information like that isn't relegated to a livestream that 99.99% of followers will miss...
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
True.
Reminds me of this:
[center][img]https://despair.com/cdn/shop/products/apathydemotivator.jpeg?v=1403275888[/img][/center]
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
If it makes anybody feel any better, I've got the devs paying attention to this thread and pushing them to give us something we can share with you.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
I'm going to try loading up the game this week and see what all is new, been out of the loop for a while. I hope we can hear some good new soon
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I've basically given up on CoT ever happening.
It'll be great if it ever does anything, but it's disheartening to go a year without an update to the launcher.
It sucks, because i was looking forward to creating an NPC, but that still can't happen because the costume creator is still so limited.
Please prove me wrong.
Until after now...
So at this time we're planning a large update and game patch for Christmas. No guarantee there of course, but it looks extremely promising.
What we can do in the mean time is again encourage people to join the Discord. We've got a channel there where we're showing off a ton of the incomplete work being done that's not quite pretty enough or complete enough to be a real update or go into the game, but gives a great idea of what's going on currently.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]