I’ve known that Perfect World Entertainment was targeting western audiences for some time. It’s an obvious move for a company parented by Perfect World Co. of China. If the companies own admission wasn’t enough, the purchase of Cryptic Studios, makers of Star Trek Online and Champions Online, put them into action. Now we’ve news that took me by surprise, Neverwinter, the latest title from Cryptic, is heading to Xbox One as the company’s first console game.
Neverwinter, expected in the entire year of 2014, will remain free-to-play on Microsoft’s platform, assuming you’ve a Gold subscription. And no, it’s not a simple port of the excellent PC title that has absorbed quite a bit of my gaming allotment and earned an occasional spot on the livestream.
Hit the jump for more details, including confirmation that a console version will be made available to China as early as this year.
“Consoles are a perfect fit for action-oriented MMORPGs like Neverwinter, and we are thrilled to be one of the first publishers to bring premium free-to-play titles to leading next-gen platforms.” said Perfect World Entertainment CEO, Alan Chen. “Being able to bring Neverwinter to the Xbox One is a critical achievement for Perfect World. It is our first step taking our games beyond the PC market.”
This news just became official here in the aforementioned western world. News out of China indicates that the console version of Neverwinter will be launched there first, on September 23 in fact. That’s because the game, at least the Chinese version, is already 90% done with debugging all that remains. We expect more once ChinaJoy 2014 gets underway.