Playerunknown's Battlegrounds' developer and publisher Krafton revealed that it is adapting the Korean novel The Bird That Drinks Tears into a dark fantasy RPG described as "Korean Witcher."
This was spotted by PUBG data miner PlayerIGN. They covered a Krafton press conference on Twitter, translating it from South Korean into English. They said that Krafton not only intends to adapt the novel for the world of video games but also through comics and film.
Krafton said as much earlier this year when it announced that it had planned to expand on The Bird That Drinks Tears, making it into a "multimedia franchise." The studio roped in Hollywood concept artist Iain McCaig for as much. Now, it appears as though development has begun on a game akin to CD Projekt Red's The Witcher.
Krafton is working to expand beyond the battle royale that put it on the map and this is the next step in doing just that. Already, the studio has Dead Space's co-creator Glen Schofield working on a new survival horror called The Callisto Protocol which is a spiritual successor to the cult classic, albeit set in the PUBG universe. More news surfaced on that front, too, with a release date tenuously set for October 2022.
Beyond that, there's a new survival outing called PUBG Cowboy in the works and a project codenamed Titan.
That's allegedly another battle royale albeit from Striking Distance Studios, led by Glen Schofield. Krafton is looking to become a bigger player in the market, particularly in South Korea, and this slew of new announcements could serve to do just that.