Tencent Games announces Honor of Kings: World

In 2015, Tencent Games and developer TiMi Studio Group released Honor of Kings, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game for mobile devices. By 2017, Honor of Kings was clocking over 80 million daily players, a number that has climbed even higher since.

You may be more familiar with the game's international adaptation, Arena of Valor — a "Westernized" revamp with a substantially altered aesthetic. A direct competitor to League of Legends, Arena of Valor touts 108 heroes and counting.

Either way, there's a flashy new open-world RPG on the horizon, and it owes its existence to its franchise forebear: Honor of Kings: World. Props to Gematsu for uploading our exciting first look:

Perhaps most intriguingly of all, Tencent has revealed that the game is being crafted in collaboration with famous Chinese science-fiction author Liu Cixin. Cixin's epic trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past — more commonly referred to by the title of its first book, The Three-Body Problem — has given him the distinction of being the first Asian author ever to win a Hugo Award.

Little else is known about Honor of Kings: World at this time, with no release window to reference and not even a list of targeted platforms. (PC is rather likely, but even that's technically unconfirmed for now.) The targeted visual fidelity this announcement trailer insinuates would strongly suggest a current-gen only approach, but that's pure conjecture on my part.