NCSoft announced on November 14 that it is integrating advanced technologies into the development of its new game “Cinder City,” leveraging a technical partnership with Microsoft.
At G-STAR 2025, held at BEXCO in Busan, BigFire Games CEO Jae-Hyun Bae of NCSoft and Jeremy Hollett, Corporate Vice President of Azure Customer Trust Engineering at Microsoft, met to further define the direction of collaboration between the two companies.
The development of “Cinder City” will utilize Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure as well as Azure OpenAI technologies. These tools will be used to enhance NPC behavior modeling, personalized content recommendation systems, real-time load balancing, and other systems aimed at improving player immersion.
Bae stated that Azure’s infrastructure stability will significantly support NCSoft’s global service expansion and added that the company expects strong synergy with Microsoft not only in development but also in operations and marketing.
Hollett noted that reliability and resilience are essential competitive advantages in the gaming industry and said Microsoft will actively support NCSoft in enhancing the quality of the upcoming title by applying Azure technologies.
“Cinder City” is an open-world tactical shooter currently in development with a target release date in the second half of 2026. NCSoft unveiled the first playable demo of the game at G-STAR 2025, held from November 13 to 16.
