Open-World RPG ‘Honor Of Kings: World’ Looks To Fuse ‘Monster Hunter’ With ‘Zelda: Breath Of The Wild’

Tencent Games has announced that TiMi Studio Group is working on an open-world RPG based on the popular Honor of Kings smartphone game (known as Arena of Valor in the west).

Honor of Kings: World is being created in collaboration with acclaimed Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin, who is most famous for penning the ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’ trilogy, which is often referred to as The Three-Body Problem. It’s one of the most popular Chinese science fiction series of all time, and the opening book was the first Asian novel to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel.

As you can see from the trailer, Honor of Kings: World shares the same combat-focused gameplay as its smartphone sibling, but this time the action is tied to a massive overworld, which is briefly hinted at in the footage. The main thrust of the trailer is the aforementioned Monster Hunter-style battle against a massive enemy.

The stunning quality of the visuals on offer would suggest that this is going to be a next-gen affair, but with the quite-similar Genshin Impact (apparently) coming to Switch, Nintendo fans might get a sniff of the action. There’s no confirmation of when the game will be released, so it’s clearly some way off, but we are promised a ‘worldwide’ launch.

The smartphone version of Honor of Kings was released on iOS and Android in November 2015 in China, and, according to TiMi Studio Group, it was the first game to average 100 million daily active users in the world. It’s also one of the highest-grossing video games of all time. Arena of Valor is the international version of the game, and launched on Switch in 2018.