Netmarble on Wednesday launched its massively multiplayer online role-playing game Seven Knights 2 in Korea, drawing attention to whether the much-anticipated game will be able to compensate for the company’s lackluster performance in the third quarter.

As a sequel of Seven Knights, launched in 2014, Seven Knights 2 continues on the plot lines of the previous work and offers a story that players can consume like a movie.

The mobile MMORPG showcases 46 heroes, and players control a group of four of them instead of one. Players engage in real-time action combat, as opposed to the original-turn-based system.

In order to provide the most realistic movements, Netmarble hired a motion capture company in the Czech Republic to record all in-game actions for the game.

Seven Knights 2 ranked as the most popular game in the Apple App Store four hours after predownloads began Tuesday.

In the third quarter, Netmarble posted an operating profit margin of 13.6 percent, a stark contrast from competitor Nexon’s 34.8 percent. The average operating profit margin rate of the top 10 Korean game companies was 27.4 percent in the same period.

Netmarble saw a low operating profit margin rate due to massive license fees it paid to other game companies, as Netmarble mostly published popular games developed by other firms.

The Seven Knights series is one of the few, and most successful, original games of Netmarble. Seven Knights has recorded 60 million downloads worldwide since its launch in 2014.

By Kim Byung-wook (kbw@heraldcorp.com)