Another Unreal Engine upgrade is once again the throughline for City of Titans’ latest quarterly development update, as Missing Worlds Media is plugging away at getting UE 5.6 set up in the MMORPG, which also could mean the next major step of introducing online play.

MWM assures that this engine work carries “a large number of behind-the-scenes improvements” like a better rendering pipeline, a reduction in graphical power needs that has reportedly already doubled framerates, and some smaller city detail and animation additions to the game.

All of this engine upgrade work, which has taken up most of this quarter’s development, is apparently a prerequisite to get CoT into an online playable state. “We have a new server ready to go, a new development environment has been set up for the folks involved with this step, and the expectation is that, once we have that new 5.6 build ready, we can actually start assembling all these pieces we’ve gathered for online play,” the studio says. “Many of those pieces are ready to be plugged in, as soon as the 5.6 update is ready.”

Unfortunately a timeline for when upgrades will complete and online play will be offered wasn’t shared, as the volunteer team has seen its progress slowed a bit by some unexplained “life challenges,” but ideally it won’t be too long now.