Epic Games has announced NCsoft‘s purchase of a license for Unreal Engine 4. The deal was done between NCsoft‘s Korea HQ and Epic Games‘ Seoul division, making NCsoft the first Korean developer to own such a license.
“Unreal Engine 4 is an extremely fascinating game engine in terms of its unprecedented efficiency and performance,” said James Bae, Chief Product Officer of NCsoft. “We plan to release our best game ever using our Unreal Engine expertise and the new state-of-the-art Unreal Engine 4 tools.”
This will not be the first time NCsoft uses the Unreal Engine; 2003’s Lineage II (2004 in North America) featured Unreal Engine 2 and last year’s Blade & Soul, a martial arts-based MMORPG exclusive to Korean and China so far, was built using Unreal Engine 3.
Epic Games‘ press release stated that no game announcements have been made at this time, but one could speculate that, after Lineage II’s 10 years as a top-10 seller in Korea, Lineage III could be in the works.
NCsoft has seen its share of ups and downs within the past year, so the timing of a game using what’s considered a “next-gen engine” will be interesting to follow. In North America, Guild Wars 2 has been a massive success thus far, selling over 3 million copies. Unfortunately, last year NCsoft decided to close down its own Paragon Studios and its famed MMO, City of Heroes.
Though a couple of years into development, NCsoft has not given a release date for its next North America MMO, WildStar.
