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"Like a phoenix, we will rise from these ashes."

City of Titans is a superhero MMORPG funded by Kickstarter, designed as a Spiritual Successor to City of Heroes. It's developed by Missing Worlds Media, a team of Promoted Fanboys, with the publisher yet to be determined. At one point, it was expected to drop in 2020 (with a beta in 2019); as of 2022, the release date for the avatar builder is listed as "pending".

Here's its Kickstarter page, and the page for the game itself.


City of Titans contains examples of the following tropes:

  • All There in the Manual: Thus far there have been an extensive amount of lore pieces that help flesh out the world, and it's all on the website written in articles.
  • Alternate History: Just like the game it spawned from, City of Titans has an alternate history where superheroes affected the world's gradual development.
  • Badass Normal: Codebreaker is The Team Normal of The Paragons, Kathleen Aurelia (the main character of her story Tales of the Titan City Police Department) is just a normal cop, and we can presume there are other examples. Of course, should the player so choose, they can be one themselves.
  • Bad Guy Bar: The Opal Room, a fancy-ish club owned by a mutant with luck manipulation powers named Opal Palinski. It's considered neutral territory by most of the criminal underworld so rival villain factions often use it as a place to conduct business. This is not just enforced by Opal and her powers, but also by various faction leaders who see such neutral ground as a valuable asset.
  • Cast Herd: Or in this case, the characters will be divided into herds upon herds. There are 48 different factions in the game (and that's only at launch) and at least five unique characters for each one.
  • Character Customization: It wouldn't be a proper successor to City of Heroes without it.
  • City of Adventure: Titan City, of course. This is actually lampshaded in the opening chapter of Tales of the Titan City Police Department.
    “Don’t transfer there,” her best friend had said. “Titan City’s crawling with super-fights and villains, not to mention Scorpion invasions and robots and monsters and things! Even some of the street gangs can shoot fire out of their hands! And SWAT’s gotta fight them all!”
  • Cursed with Awesome: The Unforgiven are a street gang based around this, to the point where the more curse powers you have, the higher ranked you are.
  • Cyberpunk: The ePunk Radicals group fits this trope, being cybernetically enhanced hackers. The Black Roses fit this trope to a certain degree with their cybernetic augments although they are far from punks.
  • Differently Powered Individual: In this setting, people with exceptional abilities are called "Titans". Though this is less a specific term and more of a blanket one, as the setting is a Fantasy Kitchen Sink with a wide variety of superpower origins, and can even apply to people with no powers at all.
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Like City of Heroes (and the classic superhero genre in general), this game is an unapologetic kitchen sink that features mutants, super-science, magic sorcerers, aliens, robots, demonic entities, monsters, ghosts, cyborgs, ninjas and more.
  • Good-Guy Bar: The Orbit Room, a revolving restaurant owned by a retired Silver Age superhero named Captain Orbit. It's a popular hangout not just for younger heroes, but ordinary citizens as well. While retired, Captain Orbit apparently likes to try to remain "in the game" by giving advice to younger heroes and it is implied he will be a mission contact.
  • Hero Does Public Service: Titan City has a lot of heroes that do this. Considering how it's a city famous for superhumans and their antics, this isn't surprising.
  • Hero with Bad Publicity: So far a young tech hero named Topaz has fallen prey to this, being framed by the Black Roses for the death of a undercover police officer. He is fighting against it despite being in a really bad spot.
    • Made even worse in recent updates as The Tarot, a group of villains that are known for killing heroes and breaking their employers out of prison were called in to frame him even further on his trial no less...
      • Eventually subverted, when it turns out a Dirty Cop hired them to provoke an anti-vigilante backlash.
  • Kill It with Fire: The Pyrebands.
  • Meaningful Name: Meta example. The developer is called Missing Worlds Media, most likely a reference to the missing world that is City of Heroes after its shutdown, creating a void that the devs are trying to fill.
  • Motif: The Phoenix. Originally, the Working Title was the The Phoenix Project, and the idea is very prevalent in the lore itself. Starting from the Great Fire of 1908 that burned the city down, only for Titan City to rebuild better than ever, with the famous quote "like a phoenix, we will rise from these ashes." referring to how Titan City would overcome the face of destruction. Furthermore, the seat of the Titan City government is called the Phoenix Plaza, a very important part of the city. The first and greatest hero of the setting, American Star, drew power from a MacGuffin known as the Phoenix, a mystical entity in the CoT universe. The main reason the Phoenix is so important is because of the idea of a phoenix rising from the ashes, much in the way of the City of Heroes fandom following the shutdown of the game by NCSoft.
  • Necromancer: So far the Barons enemy group are described as a voodoo version of this trope both in-universe and in lore pieces.
  • '90s Anti-Hero: The backstory mentions these appearing during the nineties before Hurricane Atlas happened. A Player Character can be one themselves if they so choose.
  • No Communities Were Harmed: Titan City is located in Massachusetts, specified as being near Gloucester.
  • Prison: A superhuman prison named Hardlock is mentioned a lot. One can assume judging by how feared it is that it's a Hellhole Prison that has elements of The Alcatraz. More information needed....
  • Shout-Out: Considering this is a successor to City of Heroes made by diehard fans of the game, this should be expected.....
    • The game's title is one to Titan Network, a prominent group of COH fansites, where the project was originally founded.
    • The name of the Freedom Phalanx equivalent in this game? The Paragons. A very obvious reference to the main setting of CoH, Paragon City.
    • Chaser drugs sound similar to Superdyne which was used by members of the Trolls gang, and Excelsior which was used by members of the Freakshow gang. On top of that the cartel for this drug is being run by a mafia like group (The Black Roses) just like The Family running the drug business behind Superdyne....
    • The Atlas 33, a superhuman team of both heroes and villains, held the line against a twisted villain named Cumulus Rex who was using Hurricane Atlas to tear apart Titan City in 1998. Atlas 33 is a reference to the final days of City of Heroes where so many Player Characters were protesting in Atlas Park that it spawned thirty-three instances of the area to hold them all (and the thirty-third instance, actually called Atlas Park 33, remained up until the game closed).
    • The Regency seems to be somewhat inspired by the Circle of Thorns backstory wise.
    • The name of the Arachnos equivalent in this game? Scorpion. Again, an obvious reference to the original primary villain faction, trading spiders for, well, scorpions.
    • The original and greatest superhero of the setting is American Star, an unaging Captain Patriotic Paragon who was ultimately killed by a megalomaniac supervillain? Sounds a lot like this game's version of the Statesman.
    • Paranormal Investigations and Tracking (PIT), a government group dedicated to tracking down, containing and studying supernatural phenomena, seems to be a less morally grey and more public version of the SCP Foundation.
  • Spiritual Successor: To City of Heroes. After the original game died, and a revival proved impossible, CoT has been developed as the reincarnation of CoH. It's planned to feel as much like the original as possible, while also improving and modifying the formula to feel like its own entity.
  • Start My Own: City of Titans was made after the termination of City of Heroes, by fans who wanted a replacement for the lost game and to improve on the established formula.
  • Steampunk: The Aether Pirates.
  • Super Hero: Presumably what the Player Characters will be, unless they're a Super Villain.
  • Super Registration Act: Defied. It's written in the law that superpowers are a constitutionally protected classification, along the lines of race and religion. Supers aren't required to register just because they're different. Back in The '60s, there were laws requiring registration, but they were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1970 for being unconstitutional.
  • Super Serum: Chasers are a highly addictive drug that gives the abuser fire powers. The first appearance of this drug was when a esteemed football player decided to use it with the assumption that it would improve his performance. Instead he ended up nearly incinerating an opposing player which created a scandal for Titan City, getting him vilified by the media, and getting his football career destroyed. He ended up becoming Skullcharred, leader of The Pyrebands gang whom all routinely abuse this drug.
  • The Mafia: The Black Rose gang is a cybernetically enhanced group of this.
  • Take That!: Part of the game's lore delivers one to NC Soft. Specifically, a villain named Cumulus Rex created Hurricane Atlas to destroy Titan City, and was held off by a team called Atlas 33, a reference to the final hours of City of Heroes where many player characters did a stakeout across 33 instances of Atlas Park. It's easy to imagine that Cumulus Rex represents NCSoft, while Hurricane Atlas represents them shutting down the original CoH, and Atlas 33 holding them off represents the fans creating the successor that is City of Titans. For an added bonus, the biggest casualty of the incident was American Star, the Alternate Company Equivalent of the Statesman, who was the face of the original game for everyone. That makes the connection even easier to piece together.
  • Unconventional Alignment: Instead of the standard Black-and-White Morality or Order vs. Chaos alignment system many other games have used, this game intends to use a three axis alignment system based on Violence note , Honor and Lawfulness with some choices made during missions effecting one or several of these at once. To a certain degree, where you fall on any of these don't effect whether you're a hero or a villain since that will be more up to the player, but it will effect how NPCs react to you. NPCs have twelve different alignments: Law Abiding, Law-breaking, Violent, Honorable, Dishonorable, Heroic, Villainous, Scoundrel, Rogue, Weird, and Mundane.
  • Very Loosely Based on a True Story: A very important event in the City of Titans lore was the Great Fire of 1908, wherein the entire city was set ablaze, but would rebuild into the Titan City that it's known today, leading to the motto "Like a phoenix, we will rise from these ashes." This is inspired by an event that actually happened in real life, in Chelsea (located 40 minutes away from real world Gloucester), and would be part of the metropolis had Titan City actually existed.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: As to be expected, but compared to its predecessor, Titan City is estimated to be around 40 square miles which would put it at least four times larger than Paragon City (for reference, this is the size of real world San Francisco). It's only expected to expand from there.

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