They’re crowding the front of the room on the 54th floor of a Los Angeles hotel, cameras flashing in rapid succession. A small group of men are before them, footage of their last work playing on a large screen. It’s difficult to get a good view of the promo vid that is running while all of the members of the Korean gaming press are nearly tripping over each other to secure the best possible angle from which to grab the perfect shot for their readers back home. The level of excitement among this crowd is palpable, if not completely understandable.

After all, what’s being shown at this point is nothing new, the footage is of 2010’s Dungeon Fighter Online (released in 2005 in Nexon’s home country of Korea). The speakers have thus far provided a nice little history lesson for the uninitiated, but those in attendance have hardly been treated to breaking news or exclusive footage at this point. With more exciting photo ops and demos of this fall’s hottest games vying for attention during E3 week than any one journalist can possibly tackle, why is the foreign press causing such a hullabaloo over a PC game that released seven years ago in their country?

Things had been slow to this point, a far bit different from the frenzied presentations the big publishers usually give during the hours leading up to each E3. A member of Nexon’s public relations team had politely informed Polygon’s Phil Kollar, John and yours truly that proceedings would unfold in such a manner, and so the only three members of the English-speaking video game press in the crowd made small talk, paged through the incredibly detailed PR packets that had been distributed and awaited for things to get started proper.

Somewhere along the way, the fervor brewing up front became somewhat understandable. More than three hundred million people are playing Dungeon Fighter Online in Korea, China, Japan and the United States. Suddenly, World of Warcraft‘s 10 million-strong user base is looking rather paltry. No longer content to dominate the PC realm in four countries with its hack-and-slash franchise, publisher Nexon has big plans to bring a sequel over to consoles and likely to new territories — and soon.

Dungeon Fighter Live: Fall of Hendon Myre, co-created by Neople Inc., the series’ original developer, and Softmax Co., LTD (Magna Carta series), is targeting a July release on Xbox Live Arcade. At least, that’s the first release estimate that is given by one of the presenters — another speaker, seemingly unaware of his predecessor’s statements, makes a point of saying that the companies involved are not yet ready to talk about release plans. Those big old PR packets also say nothing more than “TBD” under the release date section. Also curious is that a game supposedly a month or so away from release was not made playable, but game publishers sometimes do curious things.

In any case, the Microsoft-published title is expected to cost 800 MSP whenever it does hit the market. It should be make for a good deal if the developers can live up to the promise made by Jakie Lee, console-business department director of Softmax, that the franchise will have “better content” on console than on PC. Lee added that the game will adopt the “easy to play, hard to master” approach that has worked so well for so many other titles in the past. More than 40 hours of gameplay are promised to be in Hendon Myre, but there is a caveat: that figure was established based upon the idea of gamers playing each of the three classes through 15 or so hours a piece.

When fresh footage of the XBLA game finally rolls on the screen it looks as though XBLA is set to get a side-scrolling co-op (the game will support four-player online/offline jump-in/jump-out play) beat-em-up with a decidedly Eastern vibe. Games of this sort certainly have an established track record of success on the platform. It’s said that Neople and Softmax’s effort is more than that, however. Hendon Myre‘s release is teased as the “birth of a hybrid game,” in reference to the heavy RPG elements at play. In-game items, for example, can be crafted, reinforced, disassembled and even traded in a system that I’m told works similarly to Diablo III‘s.

Some of the items that players will acquire during their travels through the lands of Hendon Myre are going to be invaluable, others…not so much. Loot is color-coded in the game — Diablo is referenced again as this point is explained. Since one man’s trash is another’s treasure, players can trade or give undesirables away to their friends whether they’re online or off.

“And of course we still preserve the deep-crafting progression system,” Chris Charla, XBLA portfolio director at Microsoft, explains to the assembled crowd. It’s said that many of the PC title’s systems are being brought over to the Xbox Live Arcade release, but they’re all being tweaked a shade or two to make them optimal for Microsoft’s downloadable platform. Items are classified in one of five levels: common, uncommon, rare, legacy or unique. NPCs can disassemble unwanted loot and hand players raw materials in return. Weapons and defensive goodies can be created by gamers using those materials — which are also dropped by MOB — once recipes are ascertained. These items can be reinforced up to 10 times, but there is a risk involved: they can be weakened, but never ruined completely, if the process fails.

Dungeon Fighter Live‘s three classes (slayer, gunner, fighter) can each carry four different weapons at a time with varying speed and attack attributes. Weapons are swapped between using LT, with the four face buttons being assigned different skills. Aside from being traded for or crafted, these weapons can also be purchased with coins. Players will need to balance their spending, though, since the coins have another important use. They can resurrect KO’d players, saving them an annoying trip back to the beginning of any dungeon being explored.

Said dungeons function much in the same way as those traversed in the original game. Each one has 6-18 maps, with doorways to maps being unlocked when all the baddies in the current one are dispersed of. Optional mini-bosses will be present in each dungeon, and besting all of them will grant players bonus rewards. A boss fight awaits gamers at the end of each dungeon, because they’re dungeons and that’s just how you end dungeons. Players will be ranked from A-F following the defeat of a boss, with the rankings being tracked on a leaderboard.

It’s regrettable that Fall of Hendon Myre wasn’t made playable. Nexon is hoping to make a big splash by bringing the franchise over to console and adding support for eight languages, which probably means it’s headed to at least twice the amount of countries that Dungeon Fighter Online is available in. This sequel looks like a good time for a group of four friends, and it sounds like there is an abundance of content being made available for 800 MSP. Yet without actually being given the chance to get our hands on it, it’s impossible at this point to gauge whether or not Softmax and Neople’s end product features an experience worthy of the excitement our Korean peers displayed.