The New World – Changing the Name

Iron Tower Studio’s upcoming colony ship RPG The New World will soon be changing its title to something else due to possible copyright issues, so the developers have put together this forum post where they explain the situation and list a number of possible replacement titles. If you’d like to cast your vote for what this new title should be, you can do so in the linked thread.

Here are some additional details:

We picked the name (The New World) a few months before the first reports about Amazon’s MMO hit the net, meaning we didn’t know about Amazon’s New World back then. Yes, we should have double-checked again before launching the site, but we didn’t. Back then it wasn’t clear if the MMO is still in development as there were rumors of cancellations, so we decided to wait and see what transpires. Well, as of last week it’s clear that Amazon’s New World is alive and kicking, which means we have to change the name.

I really liked The New World as it fits the game perfectly and while Amazon hasn’t contacted us about the name, their pre- and post-release media campaign would drown us. Fortunately, we haven’t done any real marketing yet, so changing the name is relatively easy at this point. All we need is a fitting name, which is where you come in.

We went through a hundred or so names, ranging from absolutely awful to really bad, and settled on these 3 names representing our last, best hope:

1. Starfarer – it’s the name of the ship in the game, so there’s some relevance. The obvious downside is that it’s fairly generic. It works as the ship’s name considering the nature of the ship but I’m not sure it makes a good name for anything else. I’d prefer Starfarers describing the people, but it’s trademarked up to its eyeballs so…

2. The Journey/Voyage to Proxima Centauri or something similar – the only advantage is that the plot summary is in the title. You don’t have to wonder what the game’s about.

3. The Pilgrims of Earth – similar meaning as the New World (i.e. the pilgrims of Mayflower), focus on the people not the ship or the journey, nice 50s sci-fi feel, built-in sequel (The Conquerors of Proxima Centauri).

I prefer #3 but I was wrong plenty of times before, so I’d like to know what you think first, before we change the logo, the site, and Steam’s page.