We’ve checked out NCSoft’s Blade & Soul which released this week, a martial arts MMORPG taking on themes of Qinggong and Wuxia (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” style) as we stepped into the oversize shoes (due to amazing character creation settings) of a student of a legendary school. The game was originally released in Korea in 2012 and is seeing the western release. We first checked out the game at GamesCom, getting only a few minutes to try out some gameplay (the publishers took up most of the meeting pushing the Founders Pack… not quite as interesting), and then a little more hands in in the closed beta weekends at the back end of last year, but now we’re coming at it to see the final product.

Character creation was a blast, starting off simple enough you got to choose your race (four fairly human style races) and the classes available to them; this was actually a bit annoying as we generally pick a class we like and then see the available races, but with Blade & Soul you can only see the available classes by selecting the race, just a bit annoying. Character appearance creation, however, was spectacular. We love it when we have a bunch of sliders, colours, facial features, etc. to try and create some truly amazing (and AWFUL) looking characters, and Blade & Soul definitely delivered. The long, skinny pink haired, bug eyed, jawless geek that we had made (with the voice you would expect from an orc) put us in mind of our recent foray into Aion and the character we made there. However, this character was just ludicrous to look at, once more being an attention grabber as people stopped in the street to watch us (particularly when we were doing the robot with our /dance emote). The hilarity of killing other players as this character was too much and so we went as an Assassin, striking from the shadows, this guy appearing out of nowhere would be enough to scare anyone to death.

The only issue with this character is that he absolutely ruined an otherwise fantastic cinematic, where he featured very heavily as the main hero, running around with his chump face in his boxer shorts was amazing, but did put a dampener on the cinematic portion after the tutorial. This cinematic was great, and we don’t want to give any spoilers, but it must have gone on for around five minutes, really building up the story and getting us in the mood to go and kick some bad guy butt. It was a great intro into the game that built up the right levels of suspense and excitement to create a story driven MMORPG, something very lacking these days.

Whilst the cinematic was good, the graphics aren’t always up to par. Ninety percent of the game looks amazing, the world design and environment graphics are breath taking with some wonderfully detailed vistas and immersive locations that do a great job of creating atmosphere. However, then there’s ten percent which are truly awful, jagged edges, flat textures, blurry graphics; it’s at these points where game is showing it is a few years older than a brand new release. That said, it’s still hands down graphically better than most titles out there.

What also suffers from being a bit dated is the quest mechanics, only they’re more like ten years old and really don’t offer anything new whatsoever; heading to a new location you get the same rinse and repeat quests of killing a few bad guys of choice that plague the area, steal some items from a location, go fight a boss. There’s nothing innovative to see here, albeit at least the story at least tries to keep on point and (for the most part) doesn’t have you doing pointless quests that someone in your position simply wouldn’t do. The most annoying and, well, odd element of questing was where the quest hub locations were located; entering a new zone we’d literally have to run past a lot of the enemies to reach an area for a quest, to then head back the way we had come to fight them (and then of course run back to the quest giver to hand in).

As well as story quests and side plots there was also the main class questline, which for us consisted of meeting an NPC in different training caves where he’d teach us some new combos that we could perform by joining up certain skills we’d unlocked as we levelled up. The combos actually worked really well and gave us a lot of variety whilst still only using a handful of primary abilities; the good about our attacks was that they actually felt epic, diving up into the air, dashing from enemy to enemy, and combined with the ability to run at extreme speeds and even float through the air (thanks to our legendary school training) it felt a lot more like a manga martial arts than more traditional wuxia; either way it was very fun.

We managed to get a decent amount of open world PVP in the game. We could join a faction early one in the first main city, joining either the Cerulean Order or the Crimson Legion, who were permanently at war. As the Crimson Legion wore red, so presumably the bad guys (right?) went to choose them, however, we were told that their ranks were currently full, so ended up joining the Cerulean Order instead. Whether this restriction was simply to balance number in beta, or is a constant balancing of factions for the game, we’re not sure, but we think it was a good idea. Once a member we were given a uniform, a special item that didn’t replace any of our gear, but acted as a PVP flag making us attackable (and able to attack). We took advantage of fighting everyone we came across, but other than gaining or losing PVP fame points there wasn’t that much detriment to losing a fight other than a minor inconvenience. We probably broke even with our wins and losses, in fairness though most of our wins were probably attacking people when they were fighting mobs or speaking to NPCs and caught up in mini cinematics; we figure if you don’t want to fight whilst questing then take off the uniform!

Other than our uniform the rest of our gear was fairly typical, with armor and weapons that we could equip into various slots, we could also acquire different “elements” to upgrade our weapons; kind of like feeding the weapon XP from the elements until it levelled up. We also managed to collect quite a few Soul Shards; essentially they are like armor sets, broken up into 8 pieces you get set bonuses for having three, five or eight pieces equipped; however, they don’t take up any physical space and you can still wear gear, the Soul Shard have their own area and players can try to find and collect a variety of them from different locations.

Our time playing Blade & Soul was definitely enjoyable, the graphics were pretty great overall and the combat is quick and easy to get into, made all the better by being able to PVP in open world. Unfortunately we didn’t get to try out any group based activities, which we think given the combat system could have been really fun. Though it is far from an innovative MMORPG it is at least one of the titles we’ve come away from thinking “Yeh, that was fun”, which isn’t something that happens all that often.

 

SCORE

• Graphics: 9


• Performance: 8


• Gameplay: 9

• Pros: Quality graphics, great cinematics, fantastic character appearance creation, fast paced combat.


• Cons: Doesn’t break the mould of the MMORPG genre and is a little too “standard”, lag spikes occasionally.

Final Score: 8.5

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2016 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.