At Gamescom 2025, NCSoft finally unveiled Cinder City, the open-world MMO shooter initially announced in late 2022 as Project LLL. The game is set in an alternate future version of Seoul that gets quarantined following an apocalyptic event. At the beginning of the game, nine months have passed, and the roads of the South Korean capital are roamed by 'bizarre lifeforms', making it a hazardous area.
Not so much for the Knights, a group of cybernetically enhanced soldiers that can clear the way for regular fighters. That's exactly the task given to Seven, one of those Knights, in the mission available at the German convention. After a cutscene where Seven theatrically drops out of the sky, Crysis-style, the gameplay begins. It's immediately apparent that Cinder City is a third-person cover-based shooter with much inspiration from Ubisoft Massive's Tom Clancy's The Division. Just like in that game, gear has loot rarity, owing to the MMO-like influences.
At least in this demo, though, enemies don't really feel like bullet sponges. Moreover, the shooting feels very punchy, with clear, booming hit sounds for powerful weapons like sniper rifles that create a satisfactory shooter experience for the player. Seven's exosuit allows him to sprint ahead or dodge to the sides, though that requires stamina. At least in the demo, stamina was consumed perhaps too quickly, though that may well change with gear and skill upgrades. Again, like in The Division, there are several equippable skills, like a personal energy shield and a salvo of missiles. These appear to have consumable charges.
Enemies are no cakewalk, either. This is an online-only PvE cooperative shooter, so you'll generally have the help of other players, although there is a narrative campaign that you could play solo if you want. While that wasn't shown in the demo, the full game will allow players to hijack and pilot mechs, ride and shoot in helicopters, and drive vehicles and command other combat vehicles.
More importantly, the demo was single player only, but as I said, this is an MMO-like shooter for which development studio BigFire Games is preparing a proper endgame and extensive post-launch support. I learned more about those features while speaking to BigFire Games CEO Jaehyun Bae. Cinder City is currently planned for a 2026 launch on PC (where the game will support NVIDIA DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation and ray tracing) and consoles.
NCSoft is historically known for its MMOs. To what extent can players expect to find MMO-like features in Cinder City? Will there be an endgame?
If you played the single player demo, it might be slightly misleading in that the campaign is not the primary content of the final product. The major part will be the open world online shooter where hundreds of players can play together simultaneously in the same field in a vast 7x7 kilometers wide city. The primary genre would be large scale MMO shooter.
Ok. Anything to share on the endgame part yet?
As for the endgame, it will revolve around PvE content, like boss fights, as you've glimpsed in the Gamescom 2025 Opening Night Live trailer, where tens of players surrounded a gigantic mech boss. A variety of boss fights will be provided as the endgame content. The second element would be instanced dungeons that require a certain number of players to join and matchmake and start. They'll try to strategize to break through instanced dungeons in the underground, subway areas, things like that. Those two, the instanced dungeons and the additional PvE boss fights, would probably be our endgame content for Cinder City players.
Are those instanced dungeons meant to be more challenging than the open world boss fights?
It wouldn't be tiered into different levels of difficulty. It's more about these bosses' differences, patterns, gimmicks, or characteristics. It's not that the instanced dungeon bosses would necessarily be stronger than the open world bosses.
Our aim when building bosses is that you have to strategize and outmaneuver them with tactics and different builds rather than just fire against some stationary bullet sponge bosses, so we are aiming to provide boss fights with a variety of patterns. One of the examples would be the one you just played against in the single player demo, the one with the big hammer. That's what we aim for when creating the bosses for Cinder City.
Will there be traditional MMO-like trinity roles, such as tank, DPS, and support, in your game?
We do have different roles for the characters you get to play as, but it's not like the traditional designated MMO roles, like you mentioned, the tank, healer, and DPS characters. It's rather about specific tactical weapons or skills that they are equipped with. We are trying to diverge from that traditional MMORPG formula, because it could have bound us to those conventional mechanics.
So, it is more about different skills that characters have, which is more in line with other shooter games and the sci-fi setting, too. For example, if an enemy sends a lot of projectiles towards you, you might counter that with a skill that hijacks them and diverts them to protect yourself and your allies, or you might turn on a barrier-like shield dome to safeguard those inside.
There will be a variety of skills of this kind, more in line with the shooter genre. Those skills and of course the gear will determine the character's role, rather than just giving them a predetermined role like DPS, tank, or healer
Will there be skill trees to specialize your character in various areas?
Yes, there will be skill trees. In the Gamescom 2025 demo, you could play as one character, but we are preparing several playable characters for Cinder City. Skills are considered to be tactical gear, and there is shared tactical gear that all characters can utilize, while some tactical gear is exclusive to specific characters. That way, players can kind of develop their own skill builds by selecting between those items.
Will there be any beta test events before launch, and if so, will they happen soon?
We have tests lined up internally, but between early next year and sometime in the middle of next year, we are planning to host an open beta for players outside NCSoft to try the game.
Is Cinder City going to be a simultaneous global launch?
Probably. It's not fully determined yet, but that is currently our idea.
Are you planning to adopt a free-to-play or premium business model?
With regards to that, it is still under discussion and hasn't been determined yet.
Since the game also includes a narrative-driven campaign, can you provide an estimate on how long that part of the game will last for the average player?
The story is definitely one of the most important parts of our game. There will be several types of storylines in our game, such as the epic storyline. It's like a golden path or main storyline, and it will probably take between ten and fifteen hours to complete, almost like playing a single player narrative-driven shooter. Then, there will also be a lot of smaller side stories for each character and/or for each region, so combining all of that, I'm assuming it will probably be around a hundred hours to complete all storylines. But I get the feeling that nowadays players prefer not to have a lot of smaller side quests or stories; they'd rather have large scale boss battles, that kind of content, so we are thinking on how to balance between the two.
Since the open world element is very important to Cinder City, will there be any dynamic events to spice up the players' experience?
There will definitely be dynamic events you can encounter while roaming in the open world. They might be triggered when you reach a specific point in the map. There will be a trade-off between side quests, side stories, and those dynamic events. If we populate the world with more dynamic events, we'll have fewer side stories. I think that's the part that we have to find a way to balance.
In terms of post-launch content, what can players look forward to? More dungeons, characters, and dynamic events? That sort of stuff?
We are definitely used to that MMO formula of having regular content updates. For our game, we will definitely add new dungeons and new characters.
Speaking of characters, can you share how many will be playable at launch?
There will be seven to nine characters available at launch.
They all have unique skills or perks, right?
Yes, that's correct. We even have one of the characters who wields a long blade and will use that as their Ultimate skill, distinguishing them from the others.
I assume the character's appearances will be customizable to a degree, correct?
Indeed, yes.
Do you have a transmog-like feature in Cinder City where you can modify the look of a certain gear piece while maintaining its stats?
Players nowadays care more about the looks anyway, so yes, there will be. But we don't know yet if it will be available at launch.
Thank you for your time.
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