This is kind of late, but better than never! SoulWorker, a new Anime-styled MORPG from South Korean game maker Lion Games, has officially been confirmed for Western release by Gameforge (nearly a month ago, sorry — to be fair, the site didn’t exist then, so I get a pass).
Gameforge in the North American region is somewhat unknown as a desktop game publisher. Most of their published games are browser-based. In the European region, however, they have published several popular MMO titles such as Aion, Tera, Elsword, and Wizard101 to name a few.
This announcement is both great news and worrisome news. It’s great because SoulWorker is a lot of fun (I’ve been spending some time in the Japanese version of the game recently) and I can see myself spending hours just grinding out missions after a stressful day at the office.
It’s worrisome news because Gameforge has been known to make games Pay-2-Win (P2W) — players can gain an easy advantage over others by spending real currency in the in-game cash shop. As with any free to play (F2P) game, there are good F2P models and bad F2P models. Tera is actually a great example of a game that has a great F2P model (in the NA market where it’s published by En Masse) and a bad F2P model which allows or even encourages P2W (Gameforge).
Now, that’s not to say that Gameforge is going to add a bunch of P2W features to SoulWorker. Will it happen? Maybe, but there has been at least one instance where a publisher was known for being P2W but then turned around and made strides toward reversing course in recent years — looking at you here Aeria Games.
So, as is always the case with being in the North American market and enjoying Asian games, all that’s left to do is just wait and see. And hope.