We're taking a look at NCSoft's action asian-fantasy MMORPG, Blade & Soul, in this next article, a battle of ancient orders and a tale of one student's revenge at the destruction of their martial arts school and the loss of their companions. For Asian style MMORPGs this title has drifted into obscurity slightly within the genre, pushed out by the overwhelming number of titles it tries to stand shoulder to shoulder with, and here we have a few reasons as to why we think this is the case.
The graphics are very outdated. When we look at current Asian MMORPGs on the market it's easy to say that Blade & Soul is far from the top of the list, with stunning visuals from the likes of Black Desert Online and Bless Online, Blade & Soul doesn't come close. The biggest issue is that whilst we in the West saw release of the game in 2016, it had already existed in the Taiwanese version four years before in 2012, so by the time it reached our shores it was already extremely outdated of what was already out at the time and what has been released since.
Questing is extremely tedious. As with the dated graphics so too is the questing experience, falling too much into the familiar grind of "kill X number of Y enemies" one after the other, laid out in a linear format where progression is on about as straight a path as you can get. Questing lacks options, no deviation from the objective or alternate ways to complete what is asked of you, it's the same for everyone, a long chain of quests from start to finish that lead you through every zone along the way, every area offering the same quests, and so the replayability factor for levelling up another character is gone. With this kind of questing format it's no surprise that we frequently see players bottlenecked into the same location with the same quest fighting against each other to try and kill quest enemies first.
Weak PVE Combat. No we'll be the first to say that the actual combat system is pretty sound, very fluid movements, action based mechanics, a blend of fast combos and explosive moves create for a really fun and cinematic battle experience. Unfortunately this only really applies to PVP. Once you're facing off against AI enemies then the challenge just isn't there, they don't fight at the same speed, they rush headlong into combat and just stand there exchanging blows, the AI doesn't think and with that provides no tactical challenge to players. Stepping into Dungeons and the experience is very much the same, so much so that most groups that you might meet up with to complete a dungeon care less about the exploration aspects and trying to overcome the bosses mechanics, and instead just steamroll through the content because it's so easy.
The number of gold sellers and bot accounts. Every game suffers with it, and no doubt NC Soft try to curtail it as much as possible, but seemingly they fail miserably as the game is rife with them. From the early areas, to resource/drop rich zones, even into the PVP arena, bots are everywhere and they're dominating the game. In conjunction with this is the gold sellers constantly spamming the chat channels over and over, as the game is completely free to play it means creating a new account and auto-spamming can be done quicker than NC Soft can ban them; but it is pretty difficult to hold a conversation in chat sometimes with the global channels on.
The game lacks a reason to work together. Unlike many other MMORPGs where players can't do everything themselves, where they do require other players in the community to help them achieve certain things and having an impact that creates an actual player run economy; Blade & Soul lacks any of it. There isn't really anything in the game, other than a few slightly more challenging dungeon encounters, that requires or rewards players for working together; the game plays like it's a single player title, from the effortless questing to the self-sufficient (and extremely shallow) crafting system.
So that's a few of the things that we think Blade & Soul needs to change, let us know if you agree or disagree and let us know what you'd add to the list down in the comments!
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