NCSoft's James Bae Details Cinder City Pre-Alpha Test And Winter Alpha Plans
The pre-alpha gave NCSoft a large pool of North American player feedback it says it used to rework the game's difficulty design, and the planned alpha widens that feedback loop to three regions at once.
Reporting from 1 source: 4Gamer.net.
NCSoft vice president James Bae discussed Cinder City in a 4Gamer interview, describing the open-world MMO tactical shooter set in a collapsed Seoul modeled on Samseong-dong and Nonhyeon-dong. A three-day pre-alpha test ran in North America in August 2026 with about 7,000 players, and an alpha test is planned for the end of the year across North America, Europe, and Asia, including Japan.
Cinder City has been in the open before: announced under the codename Project LLL in 2022, with the final title revealed in August 2025. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, with an in-house server built to drive its AI NPCs, and it spans PC and console. The August 2026 pre-alpha in North America drew about 7,000 players over three days. Bae said he watched player reactions in the game's global Discord channel and pushed patches on a daily basis during that test. An alpha test is planned for around December, expanded to North America, Europe, and Asia.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.