ODIN: Valhalla Rising Confirm 2022 Global Release, Removal of Auto-Play

Last week, the dev team behind the new ODIN: VALHALLA RISING MMORPG released a Q&A for its players, specifically, its Global, English speaking players.
Yes! ODIN is finally confirmed to be coming out Globally! And I know what you’re thinking – “Isn’t this that auto-play MMO you talked about earlier this year?” Yes, yes it is.
So with that knowledge, this wouldn’t necessarily be good news if it released in the form it’s currently in… but what changes things – for me – is the fact that they made a comment on the auto-play features and whether they’ll be present within the Global release.

For those of you unaware of what ODIN: VALHALLA RISING IS, it’s an MMORPG developed by Lionheart Studio and published by Kakao, the old publisher for Black Desert Online, and the current publisher for games like Guardian Tales and Elyon.
ODIN is, as you’d expect, a Norse-themed MMO featuring characters like Thor, Odin, Loki, Freya and more. It’s set in an enormous open world, and features a graphical style akin to that of Black Desert Online. This was considered to be actual competition for BDO due to the incredible resemblance it shared.

In their opening question, they went on to confirm their intentions to release the game Globally.

We have news to share indeed! Recently, we chose Kakao Games to be Odin Valhalla Rising’s publisher, for both the Taiwanese & global versions of the game. Kakao Games has an enormous amount of experience and in publishing games, both within and outside South Korea.
In addition, Kakao Games is our game’s publisher in South Korea. Our journey together has been, so far, overwhelmingly successful.

Now if you guys recall, I recently did a video pertaining to the overwhelming success of ODIN: VALHALLA RISING within South Korea. Not only did it earn over $100 million dollars within its first month of being available online, but it had millions of active players playing during its first few months being online.
So yeah, honestly, it was pretty successful.

We are looking forward to continuing that journey and seeing what the future holds for both of us.
Last but not least, Odin is scheduled to release in Taiwan during the first quarter of next year (2022). The global release is expected to take place right after the Taiwanese one.
So that is a confirmation that ODIN will be releasing Globally either during the first quarter of 2022 – January through March, or shortly after. Meaning the next few months!

And this, I believe, is what is going to make or break the game for us as Western players. Auto-combat is an atrocious feature that should not exist in PC games. Mobile? Fine, but PC? Not at all.
Their answer to this, though?

We are still considering that option and have yet to make a final decision on the matter.

What this means is that enough people requested they change it, and if enough people continue to make their voices heard – like going into the comment section and stating you want auto-play removed, then we might get a version free of that limitation.

To which they responded with,

Yes! We recently revealed that we are working on a couple of new titles, in addition to Odin Valhalla Rising.

For those of you that enjoyed ODIN, or for those of us looking for future MMOs – this is a confirmation that they’re working on more than one new title, one of which might be an MMO.

Those projects are still in a very early stage of development. When the right time comes, we will gladly reveal more information.

Unfortunately they’re not willing to really elaborate on what types of games they’re working on specifically. Which is fine. I’d honestly like a new PC MMO – a PC exclusive MMO. I feel like that’s a step in the right direction.

As you guys might be aware, G-star is one of Korea’s largest gaming events where Korean developers show off their games.
Their response?

“Yes you will! G-star is South Korea’s biggest game convention and since Kakao Games are one of the main sponsors of this year’s convention, Odin is going to be ‘The Star’ of G star!”

And that’s it for their Q&A.
We learned quite a bit from it – they’re in the process of working on releasing the game Globally within the next several months, and they’re contemplating removing auto-play from our version of the game. Which would make this into quite the competitive MMO title.
I genuinely hope they follow through with this, and we get a high quality new release next year.