NCSOFT Bets Big on Shooters—Can Time Takers and Cinder City Shake Up the Genre?

Why NCSOFT’s Shooter Pivot Caught My Attention

Anyone who’s played MMOs in the last 20 years has run into NCSOFT-Lineage and Guild Wars have been genre pillars, especially if you’re into Korean online games. But seeing NCSOFT open Gamescom 2025 with two brand-new shooters–Time Takers and Cinder City-made my veteran-gamer eyebrows shoot up. For a company famous for elves and epic fantasy, this is a sharp swerve, and it might be exactly what the stagnating shooter scene needs.

• Time Takers introduces a time-as-currency twist on survival-shooter gameplay.
• Cinder City channels MMO ambition into a tactical, post-apocalyptic world with Knights vs. Mechs.
• Both games are aimed squarely at global audiences, not just NCSOFT’s East Asian home base.
• NCSOFT’s broader 2025-2026 line-up signals a serious attempt to break out of their comfort zone.

Breaking Down the Announcement: Time Takers and Cinder City

Time Takers, the first of the new titles, is being developed by Mistil Games and stands out with its core hook—time is your lifeblood. Instead of just blasting through waves of enemies, you form trios of “Time Travelers” and scrounge up “Time Energy” to keep your squad alive, level up skills, and tweak play style on the fly. Every second literally counts; waste it, and your team risks getting wiped out. The idea is ripe for risk-reward moments and clutch last-second gambits, which could make for some real grinding-of-teeth showdowns if the balance is tight.

Meanwhile, Cinder City is what you get if you drop Destiny, Warframe, and a dash of EVE Online’s scale into a ruined Seoul. Players suit up as high-tech knights, fight through gigantic mech encounters and mutant swarms, and chase a personal quest (finding your daughter) that can be attempted solo or with a squad. The MMO hooks are clear: mixed open-world and corridor battles, gear progression, and a world that’s meant to keep you coming back. The trailer promised dynamic skirmishes—think Guardians with broadswords if Destiny let you punch mechs in the face.

Industry Context: Why Is NCSOFT Moving Into Shooters Now?

NCSOFT is no small fry—they basically defined massive online worlds for a generation of PC gamers. But the shooter market is relentless. Fortnite, Apex Legends, Valorant, even Destiny 2—all have hardcore fanbases and are hemorrhaging-and-gaining players by the season. Seeing NCSOFT step up with not one, but two ambitious shooters suggests they aren’t content to milk established MMOs forever. Korean devs like Nexon have stumbled in the West by chasing flavor-of-the-month trends or generic battle royale designs. NCSOFT, to its credit, is actually trying to fuse their systemic approach (deep systems, layered upgrades) with shooter action.

The Gamer’s Perspective: Cool Ideas, But Questions Remain

This isn’t just a reskin job. Time Takers might finally give PvP shooters the kind of progression-system chess that usually lives in MOBAs (think how quickly matches can shift when every “second” becomes a resource to hoard or spend). If the character builds are as flexible as the press demo suggests, we could see some wild meta developments—and a healthy dose of rage in ranked lobbies. But the “time as resource” pitch is easy to hype and much harder to balance. I’ve seen plenty of “innovative” shooters land with a thud because cool ideas weren’t fun after 20 hours.

Cinder City feels like the bigger risk. Tactical MMOs with persistent worlds are a holy grail, but the genre’s littered with failed hybrid projects (remember Defiance, or LawBreakers?). NCSOFT is touting high-fidelity Unreal Engine 5 visuals and “brutal choices”—let’s hope the gameplay isn’t another corridor-shooter slog dressed up with MMO trimmings. The “search for your daughter” hook is potentially interesting, but the pull will come down to whether the world feels alive and whether grinding for upgrades stays fun after the first dozen hours.

Why This Line-Up Might Actually Matter

What’s genuinely exciting is NCSOFT’s willingness to take risks. After years of MMO expansions and gacha-lite mobile games, seeing a veteran publisher try to shake up the formula means the big players see room for something different. If either Time Takers or Cinder City nails its pitch, we could get a new pillar for squad-based competitive shooters—something the genre badly needs with battle royale fatigue and the usual overdependence on tried-and-true formulas.

Of course, it’s early days—release isn’t until 2026, so all we have are curated gameplay slices and PR-fueled promises. But I’d rather see this kind of boldness from an old MMO powerhouse than yet another “classic” expansion or a half-hearted hero shooter clone. NCSOFT is staking its global reputation on these titles, hoping to reach beyond its home turf. That’s worth watching—and if the closed-beta feedback is as positive as the hype, these games might actually earn a permanent slot on my desktop.

TL;DR

NCSOFT just dropped two shooters built on weird, gutsy ideas at Gamescom 2025. Whether Time Takers’ time economy and Cinder City’s MMO-mech ambitions deliver, these aren’t rehashes—they’re big swings at reviving shooter multiplayer. We’ll have to wait for hands-on play, but for the first time in a while, I’m genuinely curious to see how this shakes out.