In the wake of video game publisher NCSoft Corp. shutting down the popular MMORPG City of Heroes a number of fans have found themselves in limbo—primarily because for a very long time, CoH has been the pinnacle-best of superhero-themed MMOs in the video game market. As a result, the fans have been aching for a replacement that the market simply hasn’t delivered or at least a spiritual successor.

The end of City of Heroes was heartfelt and numbed the community to a tremendous extent. The final few hours were recorded by MMO Anthropology (among others) on YouTube in long series talking about the experience of playing an MMO for almost a decade. NCSoft and Cryptic Studios formed the vanguard of one of the first few MMOs to make huge popularity amidst EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and others and has been one of the first to see a shutdown lead to a mass diaspora of players.

To deliver on this need, Missing Worlds Media has started The Phoenix Project: an organized collective of developers, designers, graphics artists, and others seeking to work together to produce exactly that spiritual successor to City of Heroes. Plans are currently in motion to launch a Kickstarter campaign on September 8^th to fund the project, feed the developers, and potentially breathe new life into a disconnected community looking for a new home. To talk about The Phoenix Project, I reached out to Missing Worlds and asked about their development process and developer team.

The Missing Worlds development team

To get to know what Missing Worlds has to work with, I asked Nate Downes, technical director, Missing Worlds Media, what kind of team they’ve assembled.

“The team is made up of people with a wide diversity of backgrounds,” said Downes. “We have RPG designers, server gurus, people who have built and run MUDs; at times we see who has the most unusual history. It is fascinating how diverse a crew have gathered, and a testament to the drawing power of our inspiration.”

Needless to say, programmers, artists, and sysadmins all play games and many of them played City of Heroes and joined with the community. So far, The Phoenix Project promises to have not just an extremely diverse group from a variety of backgrounds who all presumably have

The development team does not currently have a central office—as the group brought together is spread all over the world and uses telepresence, conference calls, e-mail, and the Internet to gather their thoughts. Perhaps this will change after the Kickstarter funds the project and Missing Worlds has seed money to choose to go a more traditional route with a development studio or maybe we’ll see the emergence of an entirely new breed of development process.

As for what the servers and infrastructure will work like? It’s hard to say at this stage but Downes gave some hints that the team intends to stray away from a monolithic data center server cluster and instead go with a distributed node approach.

“It’s not commonly used in MMORPG’s, but it is not unheard of either, being the server design used by World of Tanks and the upcoming Wildstar,” explained Downes, “where there is no single server, but multiple server daemons working together. We are not yet ready to declare where we will be running our servers.”

As for the team’s mood right now, things seem to be on pace for the Kickstarter, and when asked how things were going David Bolack, code lead, Missing worlds Media, reminded me of exactly what it’s like to be part of a development team.

“Panic–Conceive a Cunning Plan!” he said. “Panic! Code!  That sums it up pretty typically, I think.”

“Meetings, lots and lots of meetings,” added Downes.

The code, the vision, and beyond

It’s been told a few times that The Phoenix Project will use Unreal Engine and that the SDK and engine is being licensed for free currently to the development staff at Missing Worlds Media with the expectation that it’ll be paid for as the game gets funding. Another purpose of the Kickstarter.

According to Downes, this isn’t an uncommon process for development teams and engine software.

“Technically yes, but this is nothing unusual. Epic works through a royalty system, you can check out their licensing details on the UDK website. Part of the funding raised through the Kickstarter will go to paying this royalty to Epic. This is one of the reasons why Epic’s Unreal Engine has been so popular over the years, they make it easily available to independent developers.”

As for the tools the development team will use to bring City of Heroes back it’s a fairly familiar set of suites that are common across the industry.

“Unreal itself is coded through a language called UnrealScript. It can also take dynamically loaded libraries, which can themselves be coded in just about anything,” Downes explains. “Beyond that, the engine already supports everything we need for the number of players. Our primary modeling software has been Maya paired with ZBrush, with a few copies of 3DS Max and Lightwave 3D for some tasks.”

With these tools in mind and the modern MMO being a virtual world containing vast tracts of virtual space while accommodating sometimes millions of people what Missing Worlds Media intends to build is a huge curiosity. So I asked Bolack to weigh in as code lead.

“We have pretty large environments in mind,” he said, “but the degree of seamlessness between regions and the size of those regions is still something we’re sorting out against the desired minimum capabilities of the end user’s PC. Ultimately, we don’t know — it’ll bear out in later testing.”

One thing that many players will recall from City of Heroes is that sections of the city were barricaded off with loading screens and War Walls — tall, shimmering fields of force that rose up to the sky to segment the city apart into boroughs or neighborhoods. This is a common facet of MMOs who want to lower server load; but games such as World of Warcraft did away with this early by producing seamless, large regions without loading between.

Hopefully, the Phoenix Project can find a happy medium, but it’s good to hear that wide spaces filled with interesting views are planned for the players.

The Kickstarter

Keep in mind, the Kickstarter campaign will begin this year on September 8. So, just to see if I couldn’t bring some hints to the City of Heroes community as to what they can expect.

“Our stretch goals are simple, more at launch,” says Downes. “So, one of the earlier stretch goals is Mac support for the launch, for instance, while a larger goal is to have side-switching, from hero to villain and back, at launch. What we’ve done is figure out how much content we can guarantee at the various levels of support, and made those our stretch goals. We’ve gone for stretch goals going out to over 10x the initial Kickstarter goal.”

Essentially: the more money, the better. It’s hard to go wrong with that sort of approach.

What to feed the developers?

Finally, I just had to ask: Pizza or Chinese takeout?

Downes scoffed at the choice: “Oh, how cruel to have to pick one!”

While Bolack settled for more local faire, “This is Texas. Brisket.”

That’s all for now, keep your eyes here for more news about The Phoenix Project, and perhaps another view of a very interesting crew of developers. The Kickstarter commencement no doubt will stir things up a great deal.

Image: NCSoft