Update 250 city of titans

[Snarky]

Just got that in my email. So we should have another superhero mmorpg any year now

[Call Me Awesome]

1 hour ago, Snarky said:

Just got that in my email. So we should have another superhero mmorpg any year now

Maybe, it looks like there's still a TON of work yet to go before they have a functional game.  I'm not sure it'll actually launch unless they get a sponsor and are able to hire full time developers for it.  The last I looked it seemed like they were maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the way there after what, 7 years now?

 

Don't get me wrong I'd love for them to succeed, I tossed them a few bucks on the kickstarter when they started out.  I just think they drastically underestimated the amount of work required.

[Lines]

I want to like where they're going, but something about the world and the art style looks a bit... uncanny valley to me. I lost interest when they were showing those mogul buildings, some of them were really shoddy. Some straight up ugly. There's a tonal deadness and lack of depth that I'm finding really irksome in the images they've been showing. I can see a few very, very poorly scaled textures too, even in recent images. I realise that this is an independent development and that there's room to touch up, but that sort of thing really takes me out of the world. Looking back at that alpha demo of CoH that Solarverse dug up, Paragon City looked pretty dire too, so maybe I'm being too judgey too early. Even at this stage when they're showing things off, I think a bit of fog for atmospheric perspective would go a long way, even if it was just photoshopped in.

 

Maybe it will be different as an interactive experience.

[tidge]

9 hours ago, Snarky said:

Just got that in my email. So we should have another superhero mmorpg any year now

I also participated in the Kickstarter, but I've yet to be impressed by anything I've seen. Honestly at this point I'm more interested in the development narrative (project management and software development) than I am interested in the game.

[Redlynne]

Believing is hard.

Disbelieving is easy ... especially in a forum post.

 

I choose to believe.

I'll let others attempt to corner the market on crying DOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM!!!!!!!!!™

[MTeague]

I hope they finish and I hope it's a good game. 

Even more I hope they can stay clear of Microtransactions.  I will never ever ever ever buy a game with microtransactions ever again. It colors the development angle to "how can we motivate people to buy" instead of "what makes it fun".

 

I'm totally on board with a subscription fee if they need ongoing money. 

But not microtransactions.

[Clave Dark 5]

On 3/26/2020 at 11:47 PM, Call Me Awesome said:

 I just think they drastically underestimated the amount of work required.

Seems they didn't really make use of the legion of coders and etc. people who wanted to help, like they just banded together and only ran with the ones who stuck around, rather than trying to manage farming out work.

[Redlynne]

1 hour ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Seems they didn't really make use of the legion of coders and etc. people who wanted to help, like they just banded together and only ran with the ones who stuck around, rather than trying to manage farming out work.

To be fair, in ANY volunteer organization, you're going to have people who volunteer and then don't show up to do ACTUAL work ... while others volunteer and actually show up and actually DO the work.  After that, there tends to be an evolutionary self-selection process that results (go figure) where the people who stick around stick around, while those who don't ... don't ... (shocking, I know).

 

The simple fact of the matter is that actually MAKING a game isn't all that FUN.  It's a lot of blood, sweat and tears ... and for a group of volunteers trying to produce on a budget 1% (or less in this case) what a major publisher would be throwing at the effort, I'd say that the MWM team has a LOT to show for what they've done.  They keep getting closer and closer to a game that's WORTH PLAYING, and they've made sure that the foundational fundamentals of what they're doing are strong enough to survive for decades (since we know another game that didn't do that but is still around and being actively played and developed for even after shutdown).

 

 

 

And as I like to tell people ... Urban environments are DENSE ENVIRONMENTS that have more "stuff" per cubic meter of volume than any other kind of environment.  Wilderness is cheap and EASY by comparison!  Wilderness is relatively sparse in terms of assets and the variety of assets needed to populate the space, and everything tends to be more 2D than 3D in a Wilderness type of environment.  Not so with an Urban environment!  In an Urban environment there is STUFF ... EVERYWHERE ... and that takes a good bit longer to world build than the alternative of a Wilderness environment that can be generated by procedure, touched up by a developer and ready to go in a lot less time than an Urban environment can.  And as if that wasn't enough, the Urban environment doesn't just stick to ground level ... it goes UP ... WAY UP ... and all of that has to be accounted for in the World Building.

[Clave Dark 5]

On 3/28/2020 at 7:46 AM, Redlynne said:

To be fair, in ANY volunteer organization, you're going to have people who volunteer and then don't show up to do ACTUAL work ... while others volunteer and actually show up and actually DO the work.  After that, there tends to be an evolutionary self-selection process that results (go figure) where the people who stick around stick around, while those who don't ... don't ... (shocking, I know).

I probably shouldn't say anything else as I used to work with them, but yeah.

Edited July 31, 2020 by Clave Dark 5
long-time spelling error

[Wilky]

update 250 ? is that a joke ...lol

[drew1000]

These so called successor projects have been spinning their wheels going nowhere for years now and will continue doing the same for decades to come until we all die of old age, but sure go ahead believing that maybe one day they'll finish and we can all play their game that has been superceded twenty years before it was even released...

Edited July 31, 2020 by drew1000

[Coyotedancer]

'Still wish them luck.

'Still expect... well... pretty much nothing but perpetual "updates" ultimately resulting in nothing.

[ZacKing]

City of Titans is vaporware. 

[Ashington]

please notify me when they reach 350 so i can make the south park joke

 

[WanderingAries]

On ‎8‎/‎6‎/‎2020 at 4:10 AM, Ashington said:

please notify me when they reach 350 so i can make the south park joke

 

I give it about a tree-fiddy chance of happening.

[Kyksie]

Like I mentioned in the other thread, City of Titans is the only spiritual successor who aren't scammers or morons. They really do want to give us a finished game. However, I strongly doubt their ability to actually do it.

[JJDrakken]

-shakes head-

Edited September 10, 2020 by JJDrakken

[Sovera]

Hasn't this been going on for ten years or so? When it finally comes out we will be using VR sets and threadmills.

[Ohsirus]

On 4/5/2021 at 5:18 AM, Sovera said:

Hasn't this been going on for ten years or so? When it finally comes out we will be using VR sets and threadmills.

 

Naw, the heroes will be playable in Star Citizen.

[Faultline]

City of Titans opened a Kickstarter and raised almost 700K with just a few pieces of concept art. Eight years later they have not been able to deliver on things they promised for 2015.

 

Regardless of how pure and true their intentions may have been, they are a classic example of Kickstarter vaporware, taking advantage of a specific event to raise funds and then being completely over their heads. Their entire campaign was just a payday to Epic, Autodesk and Adobe, assuming they spent the money in the things they said they would.

[Kyksie]

I'm 100% confident that they're not scammers, in the sense that they really did spend the money on what they said they did, and not hookers and blow.

 

However, I'm also 98% confident that they will not deliver unless they bite the bullet, do another Kickstarter for ~250K, and spend the money on full time coders.

[rookery.]

On ‎4‎/‎7‎/‎2021 at 5:42 PM, Faultline said:

City of Titans opened a Kickstarter and raised almost 700K with just a few pieces of concept art. Eight years later they have not been able to deliver on things they promised for 2015.

 

Regardless of how pure and true their intentions may have been, they are a classic example of Kickstarter vaporware, taking advantage of a specific event to raise funds and then being completely over their heads. Their entire campaign was just a payday to Epic, Autodesk and Adobe, assuming they spent the money in the things they said they would.

 

And I an good with that.. well I am and I am not.

 

I am not in that there isn't another cool supers game which has shinier graphics and some cool ideas that couldn't be added to COH and cant now for code reasons, manpower reasons, etc.

 

I AM in the sense that Kickstarter is venture capitalism. They put out a pitch, people liked it enough, they made the effort, they either are faltering or have failed.

 

As long as there was a good faith effort to produce something, then it was not fraud, just failure and that happens. It is...what it is. Kickstarter isn't a store to buy something in, it's a place to invest in an idea, maybe it works out, more than likely in the case of MMOS, it doesn't.

 

I wish them well. Still hope they make it.

[tidge]

It was a long time ago, before the CoX was released into the wild, that I gave up reading the emails from the City of Titans Kickstarter. The Fanfic/Lore was a real turn-off, costuming is important but secondary to game play (for me, YMMV), and the map design seemed way too complicated for a first pass.

[Clave Dark 5]

Yeah, I only sporadically check the email account their stuff goes to, and I still don't think I've seen anything about/with actual game play.

[Steampunkette]

 

 

When it launches, it will be dramatically Unreal. As in the Unreal Engine.

 

For all the good and the bad that that entails.

 

Here's a Procedurally Generated Office Mission Map.

 

 

It is clearly something they're still working on, but they undershot their production schedule estimates by an incredible margin.

 

MMORPGs are not something that takes even a full time Studio 2-3 years of effort to put out, unless it's going to be Shovelware. Amazon, owner of so much money it isn't funny, -announced- that they were working on New World in 2016. That game had already most likely been in production for a couple of years by that point, judging by the presented materials.

 

 

It won't be released until August of this year.

 

CoT is probably going to reach release. And it's probably going to look like an Indy game, no matter how many years the team puts into it. But no one had any understanding of just how -long- an MMORPG takes to create when they started. Much less as a purely Volunteer studio of people putting in passion-efforts in their spare time.