By Patrick Garratt

Of all the projects you might expect to encounter when bouncing between Gamescom 2026 meetings, Cinder City is not one of them. In a big-budget development and publishing climate firmly ensconced in calamity mode, the showcase of a new triple-A IP attempting to create a fresh blend of MMO and shooter is an oddity. Fortunately, it's an impressive one that's sure to raise interest among those still smarting from the cessation of development on Bungie's Destiny 2. 

First announced as Project LLL in 2022 and officially branded as Cinder City at Gamescom last year, the game, the very first non-MMORPG original IP from publisher NC, is being produced by South Korean studio BigFire Games under the tutelage of CEO James Bae, a lead developer on Lineage II and Blade & Soul. While it seems unlikely to hit a previously projected release date of 2026, everyone in the room for our demo is relaxed. Bae laughs when we ask if Cinder City was a tough pitch. 

"There have been yearly hurdles that we always go through as a dev team, but we have been managing to convince [NC] yearly and continuing the development," he tells Knowledge. 

The reasoning behind making a major play on a project objectively alien to NC's normal output came from Bae's conviction that the straight MMO has passed its peak. 

"The way I convinced them was [by saying that] the MMO genre itself was kind of sitting down," he says. "It was, like, being downsized a little compared to its prime time. I'm personally a big fan of shooters, and I saw real value in delivering a really high-quality MMO shooter. Globally, there have been some attempts in that genre, but I think delivering one of the great games in that genre is definitely valuable."

Genre anxiety 

While there may well be an opportunity in the beloved MMO shooter space, especially since the decline of franchises such as The Division and Destiny alongside the rise of the more frenetic extraction shooter, it's clear that Cinder City, a cyber-soldier affair set in a near-future Seoul after an apocalyptic event, is creating a messaging issue thanks to its attempt to innovate. The game is described at the beginning of a video-based demo as "a narrative-driven first-person shooter" that "has strong co-op and open world elements" with "the open world having hundreds of players sharing the same space" and "a very strong horror element". We frame the blurring as "genre anxiety," but Bae says this stems from forging new paths. 

"It's really tricky to define this kind of game, especially because there is no exact predecessor that incorporates both this heavy MMO and the shooter," he says. 

"It's not just a small-scale, four-player or eight-player instance play – we're talking about a much more large-scale MMO, so it's really hard to find [comparable games]." 

The absence of a clearly defined design lineage to Cinder City won't present a problem to those seeking to enjoy it, Bae assures us. 

"We recently had a pre-alpha test in North America, and we were really happy about the results. It was received very well when it comes to the gunplay experience." 

He adds: "From our experience during the pre-alpha test, we noticed players not really caring about what genre it is. They just jump into the session, they naturally connect from the single-player into the multiplayer and the open world… I don't think labelling it as a specific genre really matters to the players, as long as it can deliver an experience." 

Bae's aim has been to balance the best from FPS and MMO, taking care to achieve campaign-like standards from "high-profile shooter games," and not favour one over the other. 

"The focus, especially to really differentiate our game, was to really harness the gunplay. [We] do not sacrifice gunplay to achieve the MMO experience… We really tried hard to achieve the high level of gunplay experience, at the same time [as the] MMO experience."

Back to business

While all of this undoubtedly looks good (any lapsed Destiny player will view the horror instances with misty eyes), it doesn't explain why NC is making such a large-scale play in the live-service sector, an area fraught with real, costly danger. When discussion turns to Nvidia, however, the situation becomes a little less opaque.

The commitment to higher-end shooter and MMO aspects quickly caught the attention of Nvidia, a long-term NC tech partner. As a graphically demanding, large-scale PC title, the game is exactly what RTX features exist to showcase. 

At Gamescom 2025, Cinder City was unveiled as an RTX flagship game, with hands-on demos on RTX 50 Series hardware and showcases of DLSS4 with multi-frame generation, ray reconstruction and Nvidia's Reflex technology. It’s also planned for GeForce NOW cloud streaming. The risk is underwritten: Nvidia itself is headlining Cinder City. 

"We are being presented as a flagship partner," says Bae. "The partnership itself has been going on for decades now between NC and Nvidia… It doesn't really feel like a new opportunity for us, because we have always been collaborating, receiving new SDKs first, testing them out in the field, getting performance checks from them to make sure we are up to date and fully optimised. It's not a new strategy or a new challenge for us – it's been going on for a long time." 

This big-box collaboration also means that Cinder City will be allowed a more traditional route to consumers. While the game may seek to differentiate itself from its peers, its business setup will be familiar to those who spend time playing or selling live-service games. 

"The business model will be a box price," says Daniel Lafuente, director of operations at NC America. "And then as part of the live service we'll have an in-game shop that will have cosmetics for sale, and a battle pass that's also cosmetics. 

"There will definitely be regular updates of content… There will be new campaigns, new stories unlocked, new characters unlocked along the way, and that will be a continuous live service." 

Which all sounds very solid, very triple-A, and, frankly, very tempting to those who're constantly looking for the next Speranza, or Super Earth, or 1890s Louisiana bayou in which to shoot baddies alongside friends. Why not the ruined Seoul districts of Samseong-dong and Nonhyeon-dong? Closing the door on the demo room, we cannot think of too many reasons.