General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The King's Avatar (全职高手 (网络剧))

The King's Avatar (全职高手) is a 2019 Chinese web drama adapted from Butterfly Blue's (蝴蝶蓝) esports novel of the same name, starring Yang Yang as the professional gamer Ye Xiu and Jiang Shuying as internet cafe owner Chen Guo. It premiered exclusively on Tencent Video on July 24, 2019, ran 40 episodes, and was the first Chinese television drama to use virtual engine real-time shooting to render its in-game world.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	July 24, 2019, Tencent Video exclusive; 40 episodes; filmed April 2 to September 28, 2018¹
Source	Novel by Butterfly Blue, over 5 million characters, the first "thousand-alliance" (千盟) work on Qidian with over 3 billion clicks³^•⁴
Main cast	Yang Yang (Ye Xiu), Jiang Shuying (Chen Guo), Lai Yumeng, Li Muchen, Lai Yi¹
Key creatives	Directors Shi Yiyue (十一月) and Zhang Xiao'an; executive producer Teng Huatao; chief producers Fang Fang and Yang Xiaopei⁵^•⁶
Technology	First Chinese drama shot with virtual engine real-time rendering, supported by Original Force; over 300 minutes of in-game footage²
Reception	Douban about 7.0 to 7.2; Tencent Video plays exceeded 2.6 billion during its run⁷^•⁸
Awards	Golden Angel Award for Best Web Drama and Best Actress (Jiang Shuying) at the 15th Chinese American Film & TV Festival⁹

Spoilers

Plot and source material

The drama follows Ye Xiu, a top professional player of the fictional online game Glory (荣耀) known as the "textbook of Glory," who is forced out of his club Excellent Era (嘉世). He takes a night-shift job at the Xingxin internet cafe run by Chen Guo, re-enters the game on the newly opened tenth server under the ID "Jun Moxiao" (君莫笑) with an unfinished self-made weapon, the Myriad Manifestations Umbrella (千机伞), and begins building a team for a return to the professional peak.¹⁰^•¹¹

The source novel is one of the most successful works of Chinese web literature. Serialized on Qidian from 2011 and completed in 2014, it runs past 5 million characters, was the site's first work with a thousand paying "alliance leader" supporters, and drew more than 3 billion clicks.³^•⁴ Before the drama, the property had already been adapted into a well-received animated series, whose first season scored 8.2 on Douban, as well as comics, audio dramas, and a stage play.²^•¹²

Sequel

On October 30, 2019, Tencent announced a second season of the live-action drama, again directed by Shi Yiyue with composer A Kun, continuing the story of Ye Xiu's Xingxin guild competing for the professional league title. The project was formally relaunched in 2023 with a planned November start of filming; reported new leads Zhang Xincheng and Zhao Lusi drew controversy, and Yang Yang, Jiang Shuying, and Lai Yi were not among the returning cast. The sequel had no confirmed premiere date as of the latest reports.¹⁸

Development and production

The project started in 2015 under Penguin Pictures (企鹅影视) and Lemon Yuesin (柠萌悦心). Two rounds of scriptwriting took two years in total, with a change of writing teams along the way; casting took half a year, and combined filming of the live-action and virtual segments took place in 2018.⁶ Producer Yang Xiaopei, previously known for costume dramas such as Fighter of the Destiny, initially declined Tencent Video's 2016 invitation because she knew neither esports nor the novel, and accepted only after reading the first volume.¹³

Research into the real industry. To present esports as a sport with professional traits, the team surveyed more than sixty internet cafes in Shanghai to model the Xingxin cafe, attended live esports events to study venue design, hosting, and commentary pacing, and used the facilities of the OMG esports club as the real filming location for the Excellent Era team's base, with professional consultants reviewing plot details.⁶ Former professional player Wei Wei, the 2012 DNF Golden Tournament champion, coached the actors in competitive technique.¹⁴

Rendering the game world

The central production problem was showing the in-game world of Glory, which earlier Chinese esports dramas had usually abbreviated or replaced with romance. The team considered and rejected two options: animation, which would have duplicated the existing animated version, and live actors in costume, which a trial staging suggested would look like a large cosplay event without realism.²^•¹³

The chosen solution was real-time engine shooting, a technique previously used mainly in Hollywood films such as The Jungle Book and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with Original Force providing technical support. Actors wore motion-capture and facial-capture suits and performed without physical props in a studio, while scenes, characters, and props had to be fully designed before shooting because any script change forced redesigns. The online segments took four months to film and total more than 300 minutes, built from about 450,000 frames; the drama was the first Chinese series to use the method.²^•⁶

Adaptation choices

The 40-episode format could not carry the full cast relationships of a 5-million-character novel, so the writers condensed and merged characters, combining figures with similar functions such as Chen Yehui and Liu Hao, while keeping the novel's core plot and characterization.⁷^•² The drama opens with a match between Excellent Era and Tiny Herb to establish the world and the mechanics of professional play within ten minutes, and on-screen labels give each character's name, in-game ID, and class for viewers new to the property.⁶

Unlike most Chinese dramas in the competitive field, it contains no romance storyline at all, in keeping with the novel; chief producer Yang Xiaopei stated that the story conveys teamwork and the spirit of competitive sport rather than love.¹⁵ The production also reused the voice cast of the animated version, including Ajie, Baomu Zhongyang, and Ye Qing, to unify the characters' voices across adaptations.⁶

Reception

Expectations before broadcast were low among the novel's fans, who questioned the casting of Yang Yang and the adaptation itself. Ratings rose as the series aired: in August 2019 it held a Douban score of about 7.0 from more than 80,000 users, topped Yunhe Data's drama heat chart at 97.50, and drew favorable votes from 75 percent of Hupu users who had watched it.⁷ By its finale the Douban score stood at 7.2 and Tencent Video plays reached 2.91 billion.⁸ Baidu Baike records a final Douban score of 7.2 from about 158,000 users and a Tencent Video score of 9.2 from about 263,000 users as of May 2024.¹⁶

Reception among the original fan base was divided. Conflicts between novel fans and drama fans over plot changes and ownership of Weibo topics flared shortly after premiere, and some commentators judged that the drama had not achieved a broad "true fragrance" reversal among book fans even though its traffic data matched competing hits.¹⁷ Professional reviews praised the seamless transition between real and virtual worlds and the focus on competitive spirit over romance.¹⁶ At the 15th Chinese American Film & TV Festival in Los Angeles, the series won the Golden Angel Award for Best Web Drama, Jiang Shuying won Best Actress for playing Chen Guo, and Yang Xiaopei was named Best Producer.⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › East Asian web and streaming serials › Titles Iv to My

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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