With Honor of Kings: World, the probably largest MMORPG of the year has been released in China on April 10, 2026. Preparations for the launch in the West are underway. But how much MMO genre does the new spinoff of Honor of Kings contain? Actually, less than initially thought.
What is Honor of Kings: World? The Chinese MMORPG magazine 17173 had already ranked Honor of Kings: World #1 on their list of the biggest MMORPG releases for this year in March 2026. The main reason: The MOBA hit from Tencent is incredibly popular, especially in Asia. In October 2025, the developers celebrated hitting the milestone of 260 million players.
Honor of Kings: World is supposed to benefit from this popularity and attract many fans of the franchise to the servers. There, they will find not only the characters and classes familiar from the MOBA (you can also create your own character), but also a massive open world full of quests and puzzles, an action-packed combat system, instanced PvP modes, and challenging PvE content.
MeinMMO author Cedric Holmeier is currently reviewing the freshly released version of the game to tell you before the first alpha tests of the western version whether the largest new MMORPG of 2026 might also be the most exciting. One thing has already become clear: Honor of Kings: World is not a true MMORPG.
More Where Winds Meet than Aion 2
How much MMO is in it? Honor of Kings: World offers a huge, open world that does not hide in terms of scope compared to the continent Pywel from Crimson Desert. While you can see other player characters, this Tencent MMO has a special twist reminiscent of Dark Souls and Co.:
- The other characters are just phantoms and do not actually exist in your version of the world. Therefore, you do not compete with them for monsters or resources.
In fact, the content of the open world of Honor of Kings: World seems to be designed so that you can play it solo. However, if you want, you can team up with other players to tackle Dungeons or Raids.
This is reminiscent of a more developed variant of Where Winds Meet. There too, there was a strong focus on the single-player experience as well as the optional possibility of teaming up with others for certain content.
While the multiplayer in Where Winds Meet is strictly separated from the solo experience, Honor of Kings: World goes a step further: you see a small number of characters as phantoms in your world and can interact with them directly: chat, trade, or invite them to a group.
As part of a group, you then jointly explore the world of Honor of Kings: World to complete quests and accumulate experience points. You can even experience the story content in co-op if you wish. The progress made together counts for the worlds of all group participants (for the story, it is important that you are on the same page).
Due to the solo focus and the relatively small number of visible character phantoms, the world of Honor of Kings: World thus lacks the “Massively” feeling that one would expect from a proper MMORPG.
What multiplayer content is available? In Honor of Kings: World, you can tackle a large part of the content alone. Nevertheless, there are challenges and modes where you need to team up with other players or compete against PvP enthusiasts:
- PvE Dungeons and Raids
- Minigames and social features such as card games or housing, as well as multiplayer hubs where you actually meet other characters (and not just their phantoms)
- PvP: 1vs1 arenas and a 4vs4 mode reminiscent of the payload/escort content from Overwatch – there are rankings for everything and a custom mode to host your own tournaments
However, there is currently no guild function in Honor of Kings: World. You still have to organize yourself through friends lists and so-called interest groups. The pure multiplayer content for PvP and PvE is started via the respective group search registration in the menu.
How does MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz evaluate this approach? Honor of Kings: World is further proof that we will see fewer and fewer real MMORPGs. The genre is simply too complex to develop, thus extremely expensive and risky. Moreover, many MMO fans prefer to play mostly alone and only team up for specific content.
This is not a new phenomenon, but the consequences have been felt more clearly than ever in recent months:
- Promising projects like Project Ghost or the Warhammer MMORPG are losing their funding and being discontinued.
- Originally planned MMORPGs like Crimson Desert or Windrose are switching genres and thus becoming / still (?) a great success.
- Games like Where Winds Meet and Honor of Kings: World make the MMO part an option and instead focus noticeably on the single-player experience.
As a fan of large theme park MMORPGs, which distinctly showcase the “Massively” in MMORPG, I personally do not like this at all. This genre variant is dying out. The future of MMORPGs appears to be different. I will delve into exactly this in a dedicated analysis in the coming days. Please feel free to check back on MeinMMO. If you want to know where the genre comes from, you can find it here: The ultimate history of MMORPGs from the 1960s to now
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