City of Heroes had its servers shut down last November after NCSoft decided to close Paragon Studios and discontinue their superhero MMO. Fans rallied to save it but it wasn too late. They then set their sights on making their own game.
City of Titans is their creation and its on Kickstarter looking for just $320,000.
Pretty staggeringly, the team are working without pay until this game is complete. Usually this would be a sign of trouble (and I’m not entirely convinced that it isn’t here) but Missing Worlds Media has a team of more than a 100 developers working in what hours they have available to make this game happen. They’ve already been working on the game for a year and created prototype builds in the Unreal Engine.
The money they’re raising on Kickstarter is going on an engine and software licenses. Any extra money raised will go on more middleware to ease and speed up development.
MMOs on Kickstarter are always an interesting gambit. After all, with pledgers essentially preordering the game, how do they manage subscriptions following the game’s release? In this case, MWM want to release the game as ArenaNet did Guild Wars. You pay once for the game’s box cost and then you can play for free.
There will be a real money cash shop and premium player subscription for players who want extra gear but MWM promise they’re “going to hold very tightly to certain rules. 1: A good value for money. 2: No Pay To Win. 3: Something for Everyone. We’re going to want you to use it, but we’re going to want you to want to use it, too.”
It’s pretty daring as projects go. You can read more about it and back the project on its Kickstarter page.