Honor of Kings achieved over 100 million daily players in China but localization outside China has underperformed despite strong IP and mythological heroes. Chinese games with distinct cultural identity and high production values, such as Black Myth: Wukong and Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, have recently drawn more Western attention. Tencent and TiMi pursued a global release for Honor of Kings and shifted the franchise from MOBA toward a new genre to diversify appeal. TiMi emphasizes expanding the IP to be more unique and accessible to varied players. Honor of Kings: World adopts a hyper-real Unreal Engine aesthetic as a visual showcase.
If you haven't heard of Honor of Kings, you're probably not alone, even if at its peak it attracted over 100 million players per day. Those figures, however, were for China alone, while attempts to localize what's essentially a League of Legends clone, but with heroes drawn from Chinese mythology, haven't had the same impact. However, it's been an interesting few years as games from China that are also distinctly culturally Chinese have captured a lot more Western attention than previously.
"The original Honor of Kings was a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game, but it's a very big IP with great potential so we want to expand this IP to be more diversified and more unique for all the players and fans, which is why we decided to choose a new genre that can appeal to all kinds of players," TiMi combat designer Big Huang tells me via his translator Cole Zhang from the game's localisation team.
I can understand the appeal myself, having sunk hundreds of hours into another Chinese breakout hit, Genshin Impact. (Read our feature o n the art of making open-world games.) (Image credit: Tencent) Hyper-real art direction Rather than sharing Hoyoverse's cel-shaded anime aesthetic, Honor of Kings: World opts for a fantastical hyper-real art direction powered by Unreal Engine. While I'm given a hands-on with a PC build, it's also been highlighted as a visual showcase during last year'
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