Devilian – Reincarnated as “Dark Faith” – or maybe not…

Back in November 2016, a Chinese mobile game developer (Cool Games – 拟酷游戏) announced they were creating an open world style mobile MMO-ARPG in collaboration with Bluehole Studios. I initially gave this project the benefit of the doubt even though I realistically knew what it actually was.

http://www.9game.cn/anheixinyang/1311623.html <- this was one of the original announcements on the official game site where the machine translation mentions this title being developed jointly with Bluehole Studio. Also included in some of those earlier articles were machinima style fly overs of some of the game environment that were clearly from the PC version of Devilian. Like the following is from the Abandoned Mine area of the Adeline Coast.

Also something to consider is that in November 2016, GAMEVIL was officially launching Devilian Mobile outside of Asia. And months prior to this, there was a massive global marketing campaign by GAMEVIL (they had done something similar for the Asian launch). Back then, Devilian Mobile was also being handled by Bluehole Ginno. Additionally, Bluehole had long dispensed with being called Bluehole Studio. So I naturally found it odd they were referring to the old company name.

Throughout 2017, there were short articles often times containing assets from the PC version (for previewing the environment as well as models that would be used).

One of the more impressive ones though was a pre-rendered model of Asperon. It wasn’t an exact duplicate as the one in the PC version since some parts had been moved around (like the location of the main portal). It also had what looked like was the lower parts of the guild sky castles from TERA (the three formations on the top right corner).

The actual rendered version of the above proved to be stunning. This is something I had written about before in terms of wanting to re-create Asperon (and my characters) in Unreal Engine 4. I doubt the mobile assets are anywhere close to this level though.

The mobile game also went into an actual beta test cycle on Android (the latest is happening between March 22-29). Looking through the APK’s, I found the assets not in Unreal Engine 4 but in Unity3D. That was interesting since Devilian Mobile was done using Unreal Engine 4. So it didn’t make sense that if there was this collaboration with Bluehole, that development would be done in Unity instead of Unreal Engine (due to the already existing assets that had been done for Devilian Mobile).

The game play itself was similar to Devilian Mobile (which derived it’s game play from Nexon’s mobile game that popularized the format; Heroes of Incredible Tales aka HIT). All 3 classes were the same melee style. The biggest differences though was there were male/female versions (the male counterpart for the Elin is an adapted model from some other game) and no devil form. The game world was also open world where you could see, interact, and play with others.

Oddly enough, this is how Devilian Mobile should have been (instead of being this linear/staged progression where the only time you played with others was in the raid). It should be apparent that the following question is pretty much rhetorical; so why is this Devilian derived mobile game only being released in China and being developed by this smaller development company (instead of one of China’s larger game companies)?

Well, China is the operative word here. The fact that Bluehole has nothing in their press releases about this particular game or collaborative partnership with Cool Games is indicative this is not an officially licensed title. The principals involved with the company seem to have a decent game industry background but doing a cursory search, also doesn’t result in a lot of hits. The founder even shares the name with one of China’s billionaires (Xu Bo; founder and chairman of one of China’s largest mobile game companies, Guangzhou Duoyl Network).

Basically, the mobile game industry in China is rife with same named knock offs and invalid intellectual property licensing. South Korean companies like Nexon and NCsoft have long held the view that it wasn’t worth trying to pursue legal action against a lot of these operations because of the time/cost involved. And for Bluehole, this was all pre-PUBG (relying solely on TERA for their revenues). In recent times, Korean game studios have tried to partner with Chinese companies like Tencent and Netease (or Korean subsidiaries operating in China) to bring their main titles over relatively quickly to stem the tide of copy cat clones attempting to fill the void.

But this stand by the Korean game companies also meant that some of these Chinese companies can make such partnership/collaboration claims that aren’t really valid. In the case of Dark Faith, the previous lack of mention by Bluehole is one tip off. Additionally, the lack of news in the usual Korean PR newswire services covering the game industry there is another. Another sign was Unity over Unreal Engine 4 (while free for personal use, commercial deployments that also go beyond a certain number of concurrent players, requires a paid license; and Epic Games is aggressive in this area).

The other notable point as mentioned above is this was announced around the same time that Devilian Mobile was going to be launched globally (it had already been released in parts of Asia a few months before). The Devilian franchise at that time was still in play at Bluehole where this Dark Faith partnership would have made no sense.

Given that Dark Faith has intellectual property from both Devilian and TERA (many of the cosmetic items, animations including the one for gathering, and various models including the raid boss Vergos, are taken from TERA), Bluehole would have partnered with a major mobile development company like what they did with TERA M where Netmarble licensed it to develop their version. Bluehole also has another licensing deal with Lantu Games (a subsidiary of LINE and Longtu Korea which is owned by China’s Longtu Games) for TERA Mobile which will be published by Kakao. And Bluehole also recently acquired Red Sahara Studio (a Korea based mobile game developer) which is also developing their own mobile version of TERA.

My point is that when it comes to their TERA related IP (which Devilian is also encumbered with), Bluehole nor the Korean press would be silent on this “collaboration” (though it does sound official from the Cool Games side). Basically, Dark Faith is a re-skinned version of a Chinese designed open world mobile hack and slash which utilizes assets (audio and graphical) from Devilian and TERA. They obviously spent a lot of time getting the game to this point though.

I played the March 22nd beta test for a short bit using the Android emulator Nox (so the graphics weren’t going to be the best). As a long time player of the Devilian franchise, it was sort of strange to see this where there were all of these familiar elements (there were players even on familiar mounts from the PC version), but none of the actual game play aspects that were associated with Devilian including even the mobile versions devil form.

Chinese text was messed up since I didn’t have the emulator running with Chinese language (once I changed it, the UI looked better). I had to use a randomly generated name since it wouldn’t accept alpha characters.

But what it did show me was how adept the Chinese are. I wrote before about there not being any known Devilian private servers/emulators for the PC MMO. The folks who created this game made the following video clip early on. They were obviously very interested in the visual aesthetics and artwork of Bluehole where they spent significant time extracting those elements and converting them into Unity. If the machine translation from some of the earlier articles are contextually correct, they mentioned something like 8000 man hours (and I know it took Ginno Games far more hours than that by the time they were acquired by Bluehole).

This was one of the initial “scenery” video clips released when this mobile MMORPG was initially announced. This was taken from the PC client (connected to an emulator) since the mini map can be partially seen at the top right. I mentioned emulator since the clip includes long unused assets like parts of the original tutorial (23-26 second mark), old newbie prologue town (video thumbnail and 55-58 second mark) and a mount that was available only in the Korean version.

If there is some partially working Devilian emulator out there, it probably exists somewhere in China (or at least in the hands of the folks who are working on this Dark Faith mobile MMO). As for this Devilian inspired mobile MMO, I doubt it will last long (legal or not, this seems to be the constant fate of this franchise) because there are limits to what they can do in terms of game play (like Devilian Mobile, it lacks an actual ranged archetype like what exists in Lineage 2 Revolution).

Netmarble has these type of open world mobile MMORPG’s down to a science now where they’ve been able to adapt several PC franchises to mobile. And while China has a huge market of players, this game has to compete with the actual legitimately licensed titles that are going to become more common place as the Korean studios sign deals with the major Chinese firms. What it does show though is there is still potential in the assets that were associated with the Devilian franchise (where a small Chinese developer is able to create something that many Chinese mobile players found visually pleasing).

If the western MMO sites were of any real use, they would use their press/media credentials to pose some questions to Bluehole about this.