Titanic: Honor and Glory

Titanic: Honor and Glory is a video game currently under development by Vintage Digital Revival, also known as Four Funnels Entertainment. The game is expected to feature the most accurate digital representation of the RMS Titanic to date, as well as a model of the city of Southampton in 1912.[3] The game is intended to be not only entertaining but also a historical teaching tool, and a memorial to all those who lost their lives in the disaster.[4][5][6] The project was originally funded through crowdfunding on Indiegogo and other sites. However, during a podcast on April 10, 2015, director Thomas Lynskey announced that the team would move away from crowdfunding in order to focus more on the game's development.[7]

Titanic: Honor and Glory
Developer(s)Four Funnels Entertainment
Publisher(s)Vintage Digital Revival
Director(s)Thomas Lynskey[1]
Composer(s)Anthony Caselena[2]
EngineUnreal Engine 4
Platform(s)Microsoft Windows
MacOS
ReleaseTBA
Genre(s)Adventure game 

Gameplay

The game's story focuses on a fictional 23-year-old American Oxford University graduate named Owen Robert Morgan. After being mistaken for an international criminal, he must board the RMS Titanic in an effort to clear his name and to find the real culprits. Once the player has boarded the ship, the player must perform certain tasks of a real crewman and secure a cabin of his own. Once the Titanic hits the iceberg, the player has two hours and forty minutes to completely solve the mystery.[8]

There are three additional game modes planned to be included in the game.[8] The most prominent is Tour Mode, which will allow the player to explore both the ship and the city of Greater Southampton at their leisure without the restrictions of Story Mode. The next mode, Simulator Mode, will give the player the opportunity to sail the RMS Titanic and possibly other ships on the open ocean, such as Titanic's sister ships RMS Olympic and HMHS Britannic. The third, Multiplayer Mode, is still in the concept stage. It is expected to include two sub-modes: Sinking Mode and Voyage Mode. The latter will allow players to experience the Titanic together. Deck games and passenger services will also be available.

Plot

Setting

Titanic: Honor and Glory is set in April 1912 from the tenth to the eighteenth of the month or possibly even later to depict the arrival of RMS Carpathia in New York and the aftermath surrounding the eponymous disaster. Central to the story is the transatlantic maiden voyage of Titanic, while an explorable model of the city of Southampton is to be developed (with plans for Belfast, Northern Ireland and Queenstown (now called Cobh), Ireland; Cherbourg, France and New York City).[9]

Characters

The sole player character is Owen Robert Morgan, who is fictional along with the antagonist for the game. Historical characters, mostly passengers and crew, are to be included. Those confirmed are Captain Edward John Smith, the officers, Thomas Andrews, J. Bruce Ismay, Margaret Brown, John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim, Lawrence Beesley, Wallace Hartley and his orchestra, Masabumi Hosono, Joseph Laroche, Helen Churchill Candee, Violet Jessop, the Sage Family, Father Thomas Byles, August Wennerström, Jack Phillips, Harold Bride and the Guarantee Group.[10][11]

Development

Development of the game began in November 2012, after the cancellation of the Titanic: Lost in the Darkness mod for Crysis 2. On December 25, 2012, the first preview of the game was released, showing a fly through of the Grand Staircase and using CryEngine 3 to develop the game; the team has since switched to Unreal Engine 4.

On March 7, 2015 the first preview of the game in Unreal Engine 4 was uploaded to YouTube. It showed an early sinking animation of the D-Deck Reception in close to real-time.[12] On April 7, 2015, a playable walk-through demo was released, which featured a few select areas of the ship including the D-Deck Reception, Scotland Road, and the Turkish Bath. The numerous demos can be downloaded from the official homepage. On July 30, 2015, a podcast was held to provide updates on the project. During the podcast, several preview screenshots of the current state of the Grand Staircase were released. That same day, the official forums were launched. By the next day, however, the forums had been taken down for unknown reasons. As of January 1, 2016, the forums are still unavailable. In November 2015, game producers Thomas Lynskey and Matthew DeWinkeleer went on an 11-day research trip to England. Highlights of the trip included visiting the Grapes Pub in Southampton, which is to be depicted in the game, and measuring the wooden paneling of the RMS Olympic's original first class lounge which serves as the dining room of the White Swan Hotel in Alnwick.[13]

On April 14, 2016, the team uploaded a real-time animation video showing the sinking of the Titanic to their official YouTube channel to coincide with the 104th anniversary of the tragedy. That same evening, a live podcast was held in which the team commented on the video as they and the listeners watched it together.[14] The video received coverage on many news websites.[15][16] By the end of the month the video had accumulated almost 7 million views (as of October 2019 over 52 million), and it has received an overall positive reception from historians and the public alike. Ken Marschall wrote a message to them expressing that, even as an artist and historian, he got a fresh perspective on the ship's sinking after watching their video during the podcast.[17]

On July 1, 2019, the team announced their partnership with "5518 Studios", a video game art-house, to develop the NPCs based on historical characters.[18][19]

One of the historical consultants of the game, Bill Sauder, also was a consultant on both the 1996 computer game Titanic: Adventure Out of Time and the 1997 film Titanic,[20] as well as an expert panelist on National Geographic's 2012 television special Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron.

In researching the project, the team would track down obscure artifacts or preserved pieces of Titanic's sister ship Olympic in order to ensure proper recreations. The team has made several discoveries which have been announced and released, including the layout of certain areas of the ship, the colors of different items and the revelation of a different design in the windows between the first class dining and reception rooms.[21] They have also proposed that the lookouts were not the first to see the iceberg, and announced their intention to include this hypothesis in their recreation.[22]

A sister project entitled Britannic: Patroness of the Mediterranean was released on Steam in 2020 in the form of a walk-around simulation of the HMHS Britannic. In addition to having support for virtual reality headsets, the demo also features Britannic in both her civilian and hospital ship configurations.

References
  1. "Core Team". Titanic: Honor and Glory. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  2. "Support Crew". Titanic: Honor and Glory. Archived from the original on 2015-05-04.
  3. Clarke, Patrick (March 27, 2015). "'Titanic: Honor and Glory' Game Recreates Voyage, Sinking in Full Detail". TravelPulse.
  4. "Experience One of History's Biggest Disasters in Titanic: Honor and Glory". Paste Magazine. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  5. "Go down with the ship: Titanic game goes deep on history". Cult of Mac. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  6. Titanic: Honor And Glory (4 March 2015). "Learning History from a Video Game? - TITANIC: HONOR AND GLORY". Retrieved 21 May 2018 – via YouTube.
  7. "April 10, 2015 - 103rd Anniversary Of Departure". Titanic: Honor and Glory. Archived from the original on 4 May 2015. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  8. "The Backstory". Titanic: Honor and Glory.
  9. "The Story". Titanic: Honor and Glory. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  10. "Titanic: Honor and Glory - Phase 3". Indiegogo. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  11. "THE GAME". Titanic: Honor and Glory. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  12. "Early Sinking Animation - TITANIC Honor and Glory (UE4)". YouTube.
  13. "Research Trip to the UK 2015 - YouTube". YouTube. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  14. "104th Anniversary Recollections - With Real-Time Sinking Animation". Titanic: Honor and Glory. Archived from the original on 2015-05-04.
  15. "Commemorate the Titanic disaster by watching the doomed ship sink in real time". www.avclub.com. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  16. "Watch Titanic Sink In Real Time In Eerie Animated Recreation". The Huffington Post. 18 April 2016.
  17. "Titanic: Honor and Glory". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 21 May 2018.
  18. Titanic: Honor And Glory (2019-07-01), Titanic: Honor and Glory - Status Update - July, 2019, retrieved 2019-07-02
  19. "Walking the Titanic: recreating history with a VR experience". Unreal Engine. Retrieved 2019-07-03.
  20. "Bill Sauder Bio".
  21. Titanic: Honor And Glory (27 February 2015). ""THE REVEAL" - A NEW TITANIC DISCOVERY?". Retrieved 21 May 2018 – via YouTube.
  22. Titanic: Honor And Glory (31 December 2015). "The Collision Sequence of Events (TITANIC MINI DOCUMENTARY)". Retrieved 21 May 2018 – via YouTube.
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