LOS ANGELES, Calif. July 24 - Developers of MMO City of Heroes, Paragon Studios, felt the hardship of competing in the MMO space last summer as the company closed its doors and shutdown its superhero game. The closure was due to a "realignment of company focus and publishing support" at parent company NCSoft. Players, still adamant about the MMO played until its final days and Paragon even attempted to purchase the game from NCSoft to save it, alas they were unable.
City of Heroes however, may be able to live on... well, at least in spirit. Missing Worlds Media, a studio comprised of City of Heroes programmers, designers and fans will be launching a Kickstarter campaign for The Phoenix Project, the spiritual successor to City of Heroes.
Missing Worlds definitely needs financial assistance as the studio is being purely ran off of volunteers, 136 of them to be exact, Technical director Nate Downes told Polygon in an interview published today. The project is currently about one quarter to one third complete with 20 percent of the game's code finished. Although these figures are "being optimistic", Downes said.
The project is running off of Epic Games' Unreal Engine, which Epic is sort of lending to Missing Worlds with promise of repayment once the Kickstarter campaign closes.
In terms of design, Missing Worlds promises a high level of focus on character building, an element that Johnson believes is integral in City of Heroes.
"The most popular thing from City of Heroes was the flexible avatar creator," he said. "The way characters looked rarely if ever had any direct impact on the game, but players wanted to make their characters as super hero-y or villainous as they wanted. We want to produce our own avatar builder so people can start playing like that again.
"[The avatar creator] has more of our attention on it, more than any other aspects [of the game] because it's something we can put out there relatively soon," he added, noting the company hopes to launch the creator by next summer, as well as an app version for mobile devices shortly after. "The avatar builder goes towards that high level of customization you want: you build your character and get to play the game you want to play."
Downes cites that many MMO gamers' complaints are directed at player customization.
"It's the number one complaint we hear from people playing other games: you can either make your character look the way you want or behave the way you want," he said. "Like in in World of Warcraft, you get the perfect armor for how you want your character to look, but to make them perform just the right way you have to wear the same suit of armor everyone else in the game has." The assertion regarding World of Warcraft however, is inaccurate. The game's transmogification feature allows players to modify their gear's appearance to another of the same type, as long as they have the item they'd like to "Transmogify" to in their possession.
Missing world aims to have a "more mature Avengers tone rather than that of a Saturday morning cartoon".
Venturing away from the traditional pick up a quest from a NPC, The Phoenix Project will have a more organic questing system that invloves players locating clues to discover a deeper mission and a bigger incentive to pursue a quest's completion.
"It doesn't necessarily change much, but it gives a powerful feeling to payers in that they're not feeling like someone's errand boy," Johnson said.
If funded, the game will release on Windows PC first, with a Mac port coming later. The Kicktstare campaign will launch on September 8 with the project aimed to release for consumers by the end of 2015.
SOURCE:
Polygon
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