Tencent and TiMi Studio have announced that they are working on an open-world spin-off of the world’s most successful game, Honor of Kings. MeinMMO summarizes all the information for you.
What kind of game is this? Honor of Kings has a long history related to League of Legends. After Tencent acquired LoL developer Riot Games, the Chinese publisher wanted to develop a mobile version of LoL.
However, Riot refused, there was a lot of trouble between the studio and its bosses at Tencent at the time. So Tencent instead had the LoL clone Honor of Kings developed.
In Europe, the game is called Arena of Valor. While the European mobile spin-off has failed, Honor of Kings currently has the highest number of players ever.
The title image shown above is official artwork for Honor of Kings.
Last year, the game recorded over 100 million active users per day (via dotesport.com). It also achieved higher revenue than titles like the Gacha MMO Genshin Impact, which has already made a fortune.
They apparently want to build on this success now and expand the universe in the form of an open-world spin-off with the simple name “World” across multiple platforms. Here you can watch the trailer:
AAA Open World like Genshin Impact with a controversial author?
What we know about the spin-off: There aren’t many details about the game yet. What is certain is that it will receive an AAA budget and thus a lot of money will be invested in its development.
- World is also being developed by TiMi Studio.
- On the official website, the studio also states that it is working on a game with life-service components and open world (via TiMi Studios), which deals with Chinese mythology. This fits very well with the scenes shown in the trailer.
- There, you can see a fight against a fiery monster, until suddenly a gigantic dragon bursts into the fight. Subsequently, we see a flying whale with two people sitting on it, flying towards a Chinese-looking city.
In building the world and the story, the renowned Chinese author Liu Cixin is said to be involved, whose sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem is currently being adapted by Netflix.
However, the author is under criticism for his views on internment camps in China and comments on the oppressed Uyghur minority. (via theguardian.com)
When is the game expected to come out and on which platforms will it be released? This is still not known. We only know that the spin-off is expected to be released worldwide on “multiple platforms”.
What kind of developer studio is this? TiMi Studio is known for various mobile titles. In addition to Honor of Kings, the studio has popular titles like Pokémon Unite and CoD Mobile in its portfolio.
However, an open-world game would be something new in the developer’s history.
