If you've spent any amount of time in Korea or even hearing about Korea you will know that Koreans are obsessed with Starcraft. I was not surprised then when I went hunting for Korean RTS games that were not Starcraft, I came up mostly dry. By mostly I mean that I found no current Korean made RTS games. I haven't completely given up the search, and I did find some, just not playable at this time. I'll detail a couple of them here.
The first is
TKOnline. The TK stands for Turbulent Kingdom. TK was an active RTS that apparently started to undergo a redesign last October. News on the site is scarce, and there haven't been any updates. There are users occasionally posting on the site asking about updates, but so far the devs have said nothing. If it makes a come back you can be sure I'll write about it. The art style is a little cartoonish and reminds me vaguely of Warcraft 3. It is an independent website and not part of a portal. The company behind it is
Mobicle who seems to be mostly focused on a few mobile games. This is their only PC game that I can find.
The other game I've found is a game called
3rdplanet. This RTS game doesn't appear to have been released yet and I can't find an announced release date. The graphics do look nice and it appears to be a sci-fi RTS with some giant robots. There is also some kind of card game mechanic, but I'm not sure what that is. The company behind the game is
UTPlus. They have one other game listed on their website called M Project, but there doesn't seem to be any other info on it. Also with a name like M Project, it is a little hard to search.
Personally I find 3rdplanet to be a little more interesting than TKOnline, but I plan to try them both, if and when they're released. None of the game portals I've joined have any RTS games on them and it appears very few companies want to try and compete with the juggernaut that is Starcraft. With Starcraft II coming out it will probably make the RTS market in Korea even tougher to break.
Update: TK online has finally been released. So for those interested, see my latest post on it
here. The 3rdplanet site is returning a database error, so that doesn't look so good.
Awhile ago I commented on two seemingly defunct Korean RTS games. One of them, TK online, has come back to life. I was surprised to see an email for them in my inbox. They've announced a group test from October 15th to 25th. Running from 4 pm to midnight every night. Good news is that even though it is a stand-alone site, you don't even need an ID to make an account. It just verifies your e-mail address. So get signed up and try it out. It will start tomorrow night.
First head over to the official site and click the registration link under the login box on the left. If you are not familiar with what the registration link looks like, its on the left, black button labeled "회원가입". After doing so you will get this lovely pop-up to the right. The upper button just shows us the poster, the lower button starts the registration process. You will then get our standard ToS checkbox questions, click the left most check boxes after each one. I don't know what the right one does, but I expect its the "I don't agree boxes". On the next screen you'll input a name (use Korean, make anything up if you want), then you will have to enter your e-mail address on the next line. Then press the gray button. After pressing this, the site will send you an e-mail.
Go check it and get the code, put that code on the last line and press the ever familiar and wonderful "확인" to continue. On the next page you're going to pick out a few miscellaneous details, like your user name, password, gender, age, and "Do you want to get our spam/updates" radio button. After setting all those obvious fields press "확인", and that is it, finished. Fantastically easy. You can log-in now if you want, but you can't download the client yet. It just generates that same pop-up about registering. Even though I'm logged in. Perhaps the client download will be available tomorrow night. If not, its going to be a very boring group test. So for now, I have no screenshots or videos that I can show. Not my own anyway, I found a couple random ones on the site. Though these shots make them look almost like different games. I think there is a persistent hero that levels up in all your games that you play. You can get items, etc for him.
