Tencent’s New AAA Open-World Game Features Characters From Jin Yong’s Wuxia World

Tencent-owned Lightspeed Studio’s first AAA open-world game Code: To Jin Yong will be based on what the title implies: Jin Yong’s Wuxia characters. Jin Yong’s Wuxia novels are very famous, with multiple titles getting adapted into TV shows, comics, and other mediums over the years.

Lightspeed has released a trailer, showing what the game will potentially look like on Unreal Engine 5–but it’s unclear if it shows actual gameplay. We can see a character who is very likely Yang Guo, the protagonist from The Return of The Condor Heroes. A condor swoops in before his entrance, and the character’s missing an arm–two of Yang Guo’s key features. As for his opponent, it’s unclear who he is. He doesn’t look like any of Yang Guo’s canon enemies, so he’s likely from another Jin Yong novel or a new character entirely.

This version of Yang Guo is what he looked like late in The Return of The Condor Heroes novel–as evident by his missing arm and use of a giant sword. Yang Guo’s arm gets cut off in the latter half of the book when Guo Jing’s daughter, Guo Fu, accidentally slices it off in an argument. Guo Jing is his dad’s friend who raised Yang Guo for awhile, and Guo Jing’s story is explored in a direct prequel called The Legend of The Condor Heroes.

And if Yang Guo is in Code: To Jin Yong, we’ll most likely see Yang Guo’s love interest, Little Dragon Maiden, appear in the game too–an iconic cultural figure as well. She fights with cloth, along with a sword, so it’ll be interesting to see how Lightspeed studios incorporates that into gameplay mechanics.

While The Return of The Condor Heroes is a lot about fighting, martial art techniques, and revenge–at its core, it is a love story between Yang Guo and Little Dragon Maiden. Based on this trailer alone, we don’t yet know to what degree that will factor into the game.

Lightspeed has worked on PUBG Mobile and Apex Legends Mobile. Earlier this month, Lightspeed also announced its intentions to create a “Lightspeed universe“–an expansion of its IPs into multimedia formats.

It seems like a trend (if two games count as a trend) for big AAA games by Chinese studios to be based on well-known mythologies and stories. Black Myth: Wukong, a game that received much attention, is based on the Monkey King’s story–which has also been told and retold through various mediums and perspectives.