Current Forum Moderator: Minotaur
Best means of contact: contact-at-missingworldsmedia.com
Current projected Beta release date (subject to change): FALL 2018
If you can't find the answer to your question here, email it to our contact email listed above. If we're asked often enough, we'll probably add it to this list. Regardless, we'll answer you.
1.What is City of Titans?
2.Who are Missing Worlds Media?
3.When are you going into beta?
4.Will this game be Free to Play or Subscription based?
5.Should it really be taking so long?
6.Can we give you money? Money would help right?
7.Do you need more volunteers? I want to help!
8.About Hijinx, City of Titan's First Official Webcomic
9.What engine are you using?
10.Will City of Titans run on Macs?
11.Will I need an expensive computer to run City of Titans?
12.What about Playstation/Xbox or other consoles?
13.Can I use my Sentinel+ saved characters in your game?
14. Is this the same thing as Heroes and Villains or Valiance Online?
15.Are you Associated with the Titan Network?
16.Are you former City of Heroes Developers?
17.How can I tell you my awesome idea for something that should be in the game?
18.I'm a journalist or blogger or podcaster, can I interview you?
19.What's all this about your President trying to talk NCSoft into releasing the City of Heroes IP?
20.If the deal succeeds, or City of Heroes comes back some other way, what will you do?
1. What is City of Titans?
City of Titans is the title of a new Superhero MMO in development, inspired by the late MMO City of Heroes and being designed as a spiritual successor. It is being developed by Missing Worlds Media, a game studio formed of volunteers from the City of Heroes community.
2. Who are Missing Worlds Media?
Missing Worlds Media is a virtual studio of volunteers who have come together to create a new superhero MMO, taking the principles of what made City of Heroes special and using them as a springboard to create a brand new game that learns from City of Heroes' successes and failures, and takes full advantage of all the advances technology has made since City of Heroes' release.
3. When are you going into Beta?
Not for some time. Thanks to the way we were founded, the project has been publicly known since someone first had the idea, but most games are only announced after years and years of development has already been made. This also means all dates are soft goals, as predicting what will happen and how long things will take at this stage is very difficult. This is normal for game development – how often has the release date on some AAA title you were waiting for been pushed off? The date listed below will be kept updated. The date will be preceded by alpha and beta testing for Kickstarter backers.
Current Estimated Beta release: Fall 2018.
4. Will this game be Free to Play or Subscription based?
Yes.
More seriously, our plan is something of a hybrid. You will have to 'buy the box' for an upfront fee equal to three months subscription, but that purchase will give you both lifelong access and three months VIP status, all perks included (like the hefty cash shop allowance). Subscribing after those three months expire will be optional, and of course there will be a cash shop for all kinds of micro-transactions. We promise that 'no pay to win' is high on our list of conditions for cash shop items.
HOWEVER – if you donated 50 dollars or more to the Kickstarter, you already own the box, and the game will be effectively Free to Play to you. We're basically treating your donation as a form of advanced purchase (25 dollars or more gets you beta access).
5. Should it really be taking so long? Your videos don't even look like a game yet!
Yes, it really should. Again, a studio usually doesn't admit the existence of a game until it has already been in production for years, whereas our community has known about us since someone first suggested we make a spiritual successor of our own if the Save CoH campaign failed. It simply takes a lot of time to develop a game to the point where we can produce strong videos that look like a polished game. Most of game production is actually very dry stuff, not to mention technical, and it's hard to find ways to share it that you all can understand and appreciate. The color and animations and effects you're used to are usually applied late in the process. As far as genuine production goes, we are doing fine.
6. Can we give you money? Money would help right?
Thanks to our amazing community, our Kickstarter campaign succeeded beyond our expectations last year, netting us more than double the goal we'd set. We're still planning a slacker backer, but if you want to help, you can go visit our official City of Titans webcomic, Hijinx, and contribute via Patreon. All proceeds not for the artist and writer go to support development.
7. Do you need more volunteers? I want to help!
We always need more help somewhere, and if we don't need your particular skills today, we might need them tomorrow. So everyone who wants to help is encouraged to send an email to to the Contacts address listed at the top of the page, with the details of what you have to offer. If you are applying for 2D or 3D art positions, you must include a portfolio, work samples, or links to online equivalents, to be considered. This is not elitism on our part, it's just that we can't create a quality game if we don't hire quality people.
Current most needed positions: 3D artists of all breeds, 2D artists, Coders and Programmers
8. About Hijinx, City of Titan's first Official Webcomic
Hijinx is what we hope to be the first of many diverse webcomics based in the City of Titans universe. Like most webcomics these days it is Patreon funded. And yes, proceeds that don't go to the artists and writers who make it will go towards game development, so this is also a great way to support City of Titans and Missing Worlds Media. It's better than a donation - it's a genuine business model with returns for your money. To cover a few of the most likely questions about this new business venture:
8a. What's it about?
It's the story of a teenager who gets pretty great powers and doesn't really give a flip about responsibility. Not a bad kid, just... well, hey, if you had crazy luck powers, wouldn't you go have a little fun?
8b. Why make it? And don't you need these guys for developing City of Titans?
We’ve got a lot of talented writers, and a lot of talented artists. Some of the most talented, though, need a little money in their lives - they’re willing to work for us, but they need the dough. Since we always wanted to produce CoT related comics, we decided to have Dale 'Black Gold' Yaddow (artist) and Tom 'Kid Dynamo' Stillwell (writer) spearhead an attempt to launch one.
Even better, the constraints of telling the comic’s story will help us design the city better - what parts look right, what parts don’t. Basically, everything you see is concept art for us.
8c. What happens if Hijinx succeeds?
The artists and writers get a nice salary to keep producing it full time, MWM gets the money it needs to ensure City of Titans keeps getting developed, and we launch another one that we are considering calling 'Breakout'. It's on the darker side and heavily inspired by Secret Six. And if that succeeds? Then new webcomics may well become a regular feature. We'd love for that to happen.
9. What engine are you using?
Unreal Engine 4. We originally wanted Cryengine, and then switched to Unreal 3 due to licensing issues. We developed the game in Unreal 3 up until the Kickstarter. During our Kickstarter, Epic made us an offer: early entry into Unreal 4 development. We accepted.
These engine shifts have had an impact on our progress, but nothing we can't overcome. Unreal 4 is bleeding edge and holds incredible potential, but its early status means we are in many ways beta testing it, which has created many temporary setbacks and delays. In the long run, we expect the change to bring great benefits and much, much faster and more flexible game design.
10. Will City of Titans run on Macs?
Yes. Unreal 4 supports it natively, so there's no extra development time involved – we just export the game client for Macs as well as Windows. There's some tweaking for the changes in controls (different keyboards), and it'll need to be bug tested separately, but that's about it.
11. Will I need an expensive/high end computer to run City of Titans?
Nope. Our goal is to be lower end computer friendly. While it's far too soon for us to be able to provide exact specs, I can tell you the specs of the two machines our tech lead and current president, Nathaniel Downes, uses when developing the game. One is a Mac Mini Core 2 Duo with 4 gigs of ram – that's for Mac testing. The other is an HP Dv7 laptop with an AMD A6 quad core processor with 4 gig of ram. Both are running on integrated graphics cards. The HP was chosen by Nate walking into a Best Buy well before the Kickstarter and asking for their best selling 500 dollar laptop, following the logic that what was the best selling mid-range laptop then, would be a reasonable lower end build when the game was released several years later.
12. What about Playstation/Xbox/other consoles?
Probably not, certainly not at launch. We can make an alternate UI for game controllers, and plan to, but adapting an MMO for consoles involves a lot more than that. Trying to make an MMORPG work on both PCs and consoles is not only very expensive, but a very difficult task design wise, and what few examples in the industry have tried so far have usually ended up compromising the game's playability on one or both platforms. As such, we don't currently plan to try. But as time goes on new options may surface, new approaches may be found by enterprising studios, and we may reconsider the question.
13. Can I use my Sentinel+ saved characters in your game?
Yes and no. We are not replicating City of Heroes – we have created a more diverse range of archetypes, made some changes to how powers work, and altered costume modularity, in order to provide new levels of control for whole new worlds of character creation, one of City of Heroes' most legendary aspects. Because of this, a clean import is not possible, whether for powers or costumes. However, third parties have vowed to do their utmost to provide an import program, and we intend to cooperate with those efforts. The end results of this program, should they succeed in developing it, can only be an approximation, but it should bear a strong resemblance if we've made our system as flexible as we want to.
And no matter how imports work, you're starting at level one :P
14. Is this the same thing as Heroes and Villains/Valiance Online?
No, but they are also successor projects. Heroes and Villains was formed by a splinter faction of former MWM members in our early development days who simply had very strong and opposing views on how things should be done. We wish them the best.
Valiance Online is being made by a pre-existing indie game studio. Their team happened to consist of many CoH veterans and was already using CoH as inspiration to some extent in their ongoing projects. Hearing about the push to create a CoH successor, they decided to make one of their own. Their existing game code and heavily modified engine have been adapted to give their efforts a powerful head start. They are well worth following.
We did seriously discuss merging with Valiance Online at one point, but eventually decided it wouldn't work. Mutual support has been the rule though – we each promoted the other's Kickstarter, for instance. Our teams get along well and have no problem sharing the internet :)
15. Are you associated with the Titan Network?
Only to the extent that all former CoH players, and all CoH related efforts, are. Which, admittedly, is a lot. Most of MWM's staff, and all of its core founding members, were there for the Save CoH campaign, and first conceived of Missing Worlds Media there. These days we're well established on our own sites, servers, and forums, but our ties with Tony and the Network are still strong.
16. Are you former COH developers?
No, we are not. While having former developers would have been great, there were many legal issues with hiring them when MWM was being formed (if you've heard about Valiance hiring one, don't worry – it should be safe now). We are, for the most part, former players, often veterans from Beta onward. We all have a wealth of experience in our respective fields, but we were never involved in the creation or maintenance of COH. We simply played it. A lot.
17. How can I tell you my awesome idea for something that should be in the game?
The forum right here on this site is the best place – social media posts will get shoved down, out of sight and out of mind, but we can find a forum post anytime.
18. I'm a journalist/blogger/podcaster - can I interview you? How about some art assets?
Of course you can. Send an email to the contact@ address listed at the top of the page, and we'll be happy to arrange something.
19.What's all this about your president trying to talk NCSoft into releasing the IP for City of Heroes?
On September 1, 2014, Nate Downes said that he was part of the negotiating team who had been in touch with NCSoft about a POSSIBLE deal which COULD see the City of Heroes IP made available for licensing, and City of Heroes lore available to the successor projects. A legacy server deal may also be possible, but not the recovery of character data.
While there are a few members of Missing Worlds Media who have been involved in the discussions, this is not a Missing Worlds Media project, per se.
Early on, it was decided not to involve MWM directly in the negotiations, in case the discussions or the deal itself went wrong and negatively impacted the project. It also freed up our team to keep on working on City of Titans. Perhaps more importantly, if this should work out, it would be incredibly unfair for only one segment of the community to benefit, particularly when there are a number of 'spiritual successor' projects underway.
The negotiating team is still discussing terms, ideas and limits and people are being asked to remain cautiously optimistic - the whole thing may fall apart and nothing is guaranteed, although negotiations are continuing in good faith.
You can read the full announcements, and the many, many pages of discussion it sparked at: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,10284.0.html
20. If the deal succeeds, or CoH comes back some other way, what will you do?
Keep right on going. CoH was a ten year old game, and while it was a wonderful place, it wasn't perfect: there are plenty of lessons to be learned from it to make the next game better. Not to mention all the wonderful possibilities ten years of tech advancement offer. City of Titans is meant to be strong enough to stand beside its predecessor.