Honor of Kings levels up with game-changing update

Tahawul Tech

5 days ago

Honor of Kings Plus redefines MOBA gameplay with Flowborn hero, player-centric features, and global inclusivity.
Honor of Kings, the world's most played MOBA, is entered a transformative new era with the launch of Honor of Kings Plus. The expansive update, which was live on June 24, introduces a suite of enhancements driven by community feedback—from deeper hero personalisation with the groundbreaking Flowborn avatar to a fairer performance-based reward system and multilingual voice-to-text translation. With over 100 million daily players, the update marks a pivotal moment for the franchise. Dean Huang, Game Producer, shares what inspired this evolution and how it sets a new benchmark for the genre.
Interview Excerpts:
Honor of Kings Plus marks a pivotal evolution for the franchise. What inspired the scale and ambition behind this update, and why was now the right time for this transformation?
As a live service game, we can't just stand still. We need to constantly evolve and innovate to maintain our position as the world's most played MOBA, and the ambition behind this update is driven by our commitment to deliver fresh, meaningful content and improvements that resonate with our global player community. Since launch, we've been closely listening to player feedback with the goal of enhancing the overall gameplay experience. With Honor of Kings Plus, we're introducing a series of innovations, such as the new hero Flowborn, a post-match star-rewarding system, the Honor Pass system, battlefield updates, voice-to-text functionality, and a wide range of quality-of-life improvements. This update reflects our commitment to adapting to the dynamic market and evolving player preferences.
With Honor of Kings being home to over 100 million daily players, how do you balance large-scale innovation with maintaining the competitive integrity and core mechanics that longtime fans cherish?
Ultimately we always look to adhere to our guiding principle that Honor of Kings is both free and fair to play, with a player's success determined by their performance, not any money spent. From the very beginning, our mission has been to lower the barrier of entry for MOBA games, enabling more players to experience the fun and excitement of the genre.
'While staying true to the core mechanics of MOBA gameplay, we continually enhance the experience in Honor of Kings through innovations, seasonal limited-time modes, different gameplay options, original skins, and exciting IP collaborations.'
Flowborn introduces a new level of personalisation never seen before in a MOBA. How did the concept of creating an in-game avatar as an 'extension of the player' come about, and what kind of impact do you expect it to have on gameplay immersion?
The concept of Flowborn as an extension of the player comes from our desire to break away from traditional MOBA norms, where players are limited to predefined heroes and fixed skills. After years of experience in MOBA development, we asked: what if players could create a hero that reflects their own skill set and style of their choosing? Flowborn is our answer to that idea, allowing players to acquire diverse skills and weapons, and choose their preferred role—Tank, Mage, or Marksman—and fight alongside their teammates, providing a more personalised gameplay experience. We believe this will immerse players even more deeply into the Honor of Kings universe.
The updated rating and reward system offers players recognition even in defeat, which is a major shift. How did community feedback shape these changes, and what message does it send to competitive players and casual fans alike?
From listening to community feedback—and as a player myself—we realised that players often encounter situations where an individual or even the entire team performs well but still ends up losing the match. This, in many ways, is part of what makes competitive gaming so compelling. As the game's producer in collaboration with other team members, what we want to communicate to both competitive and casual players is that while match outcomes do matter, what's equally important is how well individuals performed during the game and whether they demonstrated a spirit of teamwork. These are values we deeply care about and aim to recognise through our systems.
Real-time voice-to-text translation is a huge step toward global inclusivity. What technical and design challenges did your team face in bringing this multilingual communication feature to life?
To lower the input barrier for player communication in the game, we have introduced this voice-to-text system. The main challenge we faced is that while a group of players may speak the same language, those from different regions have distinct local accents and dialects. To achieve accurate recognition, it is necessary to train the system with a large amount of speech data from various regions. Our team spent a significant amount of time collecting speech samples from different local areas to complete the training of the speech AI recognition model. Of course, after the update, we will continue to optimise the system based on player usage to further improve accuracy.