MiHoYo employee mentions MOBA, shooter, sandbox adventure, fantasy, and multiplayer co-op projects are in development

“Our vision is to create a virtual world by 2030 in which one billion people worldwide would want to live.”

miHoYo tagline with Paimon from Genshin Impact, March 7th from Star Rail, Kiana from Honkai Impact 3rd, and Anby from Zenless Zone Zero — *Image credit: HoYoverse / Raiden Gaming*

All quotes have been translated from Chinese to English via MTL and might not be 100% accurate.

Speaking during a “sharing session” for the School of Animation and Digital Arts at the China Communication University (中国传媒大学), an unnamed miHoYo employee has confirmed that the Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail developer has multiple unannounced titles in development, including MOBA, shooter, sandbox adventure, fantasy, and multiplayer co-op projects.

We don’t know the name of the employee, as the speech was transcribed by Game Grape (游戏葡)—who attended the sharing session—without attribution. However, we do know they’re a “miHoYo professional” who briefly mentioned these unannounced games when providing a brief history of the company and its goals to their audience.

Here’s the full quote:

“Besides the anime and manga genre, we are also constantly exploring new areas, and more new works will be released in the future, including “Honkai: Nexus Anima”, “Petit Planet”, and “Varsapura”.

Of course, miHoYo’s pre-research projects don’t stop there. We’re also working on MOBA games, hardcore shooters with military sci-fi themes, and various sandbox adventure, fantasy, and multiplayer cooperative projects. Don’t just remember miHoYo as a company focused on anime and manga; we actually have a wide variety of projects for you to choose from.”

This isn’t the first we’ve heard about these projects, as rumours and job postings have been floating around for years about the shooters in particular, and the fantasy project already has an official website with a scene preview for recruitment purposes. However, this is the first time we’ve heard miHoYo talk about them all so openly.

Thanks to information from said job listings it seems that there are actually two shooters in development:

The “hardcore shooter” with a “military sci-fi theme” mentioned by the miHoYo employee in their talk. It’ll have a “realistic” art style, and feature AI NPCs and companions (something already implemented in Petit Planet’s betas). Its being developed with Unreal Engine 5.
A fantasy Hero shooter with Western cartoon visuals, set in the near future, has PVP and PVE, and is being developed with Unity.

It’s unclear if the military shooter is “Project X”, which was revealed as a prototype at Shenzhen Global Traffic Conference (GTC) in 2019. It was rumored that miHoYo’s Montréal branch was working on Project X, as when the Canadian branch was revealed, the shooter it was working on was described as “a brand-new AAA open-world action-adventure game featuring shooting-based gameplay within a living, breathing paranormal world.”

If you take out the shooting element, this actually sounds more like Varsapura than anything else. It’s been so long that Project X could have turned into any number of other projects at this point, as it was supposed to release in “mid-2021”.

reveal art of a sunset over mountains and clouds for Project X from mihoyo

Not much is known about the MOBA except that it’s in the pre-production stage, has “stylized” graphics, features PVP, has a per-match structure, and is being developed with Unreal Engine 5.

The sandbox game is equally mysterious, but thanks again to job listings, we know that it’s aiming for a Ghibli art style, might have dress-up mechanics, and is being developed with Unreal Engine 5.

One of the “multiplayer cooperative projects” might be a social sim that was (surprise surprise) revealed via job listings. It has that cute Petit Planet chibi-style going on, and some of its keywords are “making friends”, “multiculturalism,” “city life,” and “environmental protection”. It’s being developed with Unity.

MiHoYo sure likes to keep busy, huh? Another fascinating quote from this sharing session sheds some light in why that is (except for, you know, money):

“This is our mission: to save the world. For us, it means bringing the wonderful experiences of reality to everyone through the virtual world. Our vision is to create a virtual world by 2030 in which one billion people worldwide would want to live.

This vision is extremely important to us because it determines what we will do and what we will not do in the future. We will likely do everything related to the virtual world; we will not do anything unrelated to the virtual world. This is miHoYo’s goal for the future.

Some new students asked Brother Da Wei, “What if we don’t achieve this goal by 2030?” Brother Da Wei replied, “It’s simple, we’ll change it to 2035 or 2040. We will keep striving towards this goal.”

Is one billion players the new Space Race for huge gaming corporations? Sure looks like miHoYo President Da Wei and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma seem to think so.

See more: miHoYo, HoYoverse