Project TL “The Lineage” Closed Beta Tests Will Be In 2018 & Release Is Expected In 2019

Project TL or Project “The Lineage” is NCSoft’s newest venture with the 20 year old Lineage franchise. The in-development project will be the remake of NCSoft’s unreleased Lineage Eternal game and will act as the sequel to the original Lineage game. While not much is known about Project TL’s gameplay, we know that it will offer a single character system that Lineage Eternal lacked and will be an MMORPG created with Unreal Engine 4.

NCSoft released their first quarterly earnings performance report today which is paired up with a lengthy Earnings conference call. In this quarter’s call, Jae-Soo Yoon, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of NCSoft has stated that Project TL is running very well in terms of development and NCSoft has a very positive evaluation of its development team. As a result of that, they believe that they would be in a position to conduct Closed Beta Testing for Project TL within the second half of 2018! Of course, this will most likely apply to Korean players only.

They also stated that due to the complexities of the development process of PC MMO games, they cannot pinpoint when exactly the game will launch next year. The time-frame will be dependent on the results that they see from the Closed Beta phase, which will be within this year. There is also a “large possibility” that Project TL’s mobile version or “TL Mobile” as they refer to it will come first. The most likely time-frame being early into the first half of next year. It seems that a lot of resources are being invested into this project as they also mentioned that it is likely to be released before their other in-development mobile game Blade & Soul 2.

They also spoke briefly about the effects of the rise of PUBG model games and their plans to deal with new trends in the Korean video game market. If you have 45 minutes to spare and don’t mind listening to more than half of it in Korean, feel free to check out the 2018 Q1 Conference call here. Otherwise, watch the video below to get an idea of what Project TL can offer.

In response to the investor’s question about the development of “Lineage Eternal”:

“We actually have changed the named to “The Lineage” or TL in short. This is something that we have restructured last year and therefore we do have a team that is newly in place. It’s actually running very well in terms of the development. Internally we have a very positive evaluation about this team. Overall the team is running very well and the atmosphere surrounding the development is actually very positive. As a result of that, we do think that within the second half of this year, we would be in a position to conduct a CBT related to this game.

That being said, for a PC MMO game, the development process can be very complex, so it would be difficult to pinpoint when next year we would actually be able to launch because that would be dependent on the results that we see from the CBT that we would be having this year. But one thing that is clear is that we do think that we would be in a good position to launch sometime within next year.”

Source: NCSoft Q1 2018 Conference Call