Is Project TL the Next Big MMORPG?

Last week I did a video on Lost Ark where I talked about how we won’t be seeing the game this year.. probably not next year either. And that upset a lotta people.
And don’t get me wrong – you’re anger is warranted – you’re completely justified in being upset.
We’ve all been waiting on the game for years now, and despite Smilegate stating a while back that they planned on one day releasing in the West.. we’ve thus far gotten nothing.
I mean sure, no problem. They’re a South Korean developer, they have no obligation to us, nor are they supposed to simply acquiesce to our requests to have an English localized version of the game.

But one common response I saw on the video was “That’s fine. I’ll be waiting on Project TL which looks better and will release sooner anyway.”
So here I am, doing another video on Project TL. No, this isn’t clickbait. I’m not trying to bait you into watching, I’m legit here to discuss the game and their plans for a Western release.

So, before we go any further, what exactly is Project TL?
Project TL was announced years ago, roughly at the same time as Lost Ark.
They were.. competitors, I guess, with people taking sides like they do with Xbox and Playstation consoles. But back then it was called Lineage: Eternal. How many of you actually remember that?
Either way, people weren’t too happy with how Lineage: Eternal was turning out, thus NCSoft decided to completely overhaul the entirety of the game while undergoing a rebrand.
This set them back quite a bit, and resulted in silence from the developer for years.. until the end of December 2019.
Lineage: Eternal was built with the ability to not only field, but also control several characters simultaneously. You would go about the game, slowly recruiting various different characters that you could customize however you pleased.
It was still a pure MMO – but it would have taken the game in a very interesting direction. Project TL though is much more like Lost Ark: It’s an open-world MMO that provides a single character and sick action combat – but from an isometric point of view.
The game looks and plays like Lost Ark, it always has. That’s why people often considered them as direct competition for one another.

Now I did a video on Project TL back in December 2019. In it I spoke about a specific announcement NCSoft made pertaining to its release.
See, last year NCSoft were required to supply investors with their quarterly financials, like every year.
However, during their third quarter financials, they revealed that Project TL is still in active development, but not only that, they have a scheduled South Korean Closed Beta release date for 2020.
Specifically, “the first half of 2020.” Whether that means the game will launch this year within the region is up for discussion, but considering it’s one of NCSoft’s potential biggest hits.. they’d be crazy to continue to delay it.
Especially considering Lost Ark is losing players daily.

There were a couple different reasons I wanted to do this video.
On the one hand, we have people under the impression that Project TL will be launching this year. That is correct and incorrect both: It is correct to assume it will launch in 2020 within South Korea, but not outside of the region.
The game isn’t finished yet, and even when it finally is, North America, Europe, the entire Western market in general is a mere afterthought for South Korean developers.
I’m not saying that it’ll be 5, maybe 10 years before we get it, but it’s best to temper your expectations with regards to a release date.
Then there’s the public thought that Project TL is vastly superior to Lost Ark: That just isn’t true. I’m a fan, I’ve always been a fan of Project TL over Lost Ark, but even I know we don’t have definitive gameplay or endgame content yet.
Thus we don’t have nearly enough to gauge whether or not the game will compete with, surpass or fall short of Lost Ark.

But that’s pretty much the purpose today. I wanted to let you all know that Project TL is coming this year. It is. And it’ll likely have an English fan-translation available shortly after it releases.
But since it’s a South Korean MMO it’ll also have IP blocks in place requiring a VPN to play.

The game’s going to be a pure action MMO – but we can’t compare it to currently released games until we have a more finalized version of the game to actually compare.
And finally, no, the game won’t be releasing in the West for a while, just like Lost Ark. Sorry.