Blade & Soul is a free to play Wuxia MMORPG where players fight to avenge the deaths of students from their martial arts school taking them on a journey battling against mighty factions and ancient evils. With an intense combat style that emulates the Wuxia martial arts style (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) the game has a lot of great qualities, but some elements need the chop (..karate chop… get it? Sorry..)

THE GOOD

Wuxia Genre – Glide through the air, run across water, leap from building to building; the game captures the Wuxia theme perfectly

9 Playable Classes – Each of the classes has its own unique style of combat, as well as some unique mechanics e.g. playing Kung Fu Masters relies much more on player reflexes, as well as this each class has its own quest story line

Soul Shield System – A soul shield if made up of nine different fragments that players can collect, equipping pieces from different shields to gain various boosts, or equipping more of the same shield to get improved boosts

PVP – The fast and fluid action combat lends itself perfectly to martial arts, with dynamic moves and adrenaline pumping speeds, combined with the Wuxia style players can battle almost anywhere including fights up on rooftops

F2P Model – The game’s premium store focuses on convenience and cosmetic items (though some are quite difficult to obtain through gameplay), but essentially there is nothing overly powerful to be bought with cash and nothing that can’t be acquired for free by playing

Appearance Customization – With so many sliders for appearance customization players can make some truly unique looking characters, from heroic and lifelike or grotesque and bizarre

THE BAD

Older Graphics – As the game was developed and released in 2012 for Korea, it wasn’t until 2016 that it came to the West and by then it was already looking pretty dated when compared to other current MMORPGs

Gold Farming Bots – There are a ridiculous amount of bots farming gold and the arena for PVP rewards that it can be extremely frustrating, combined with the gold selling spam in chat channels that make them unusable at times

Bad AI / PVE – The combat system is amazing, but it just doesn’t get fully utilized in PVE as the poor AI can’t move at the pace of real players, taking advantage of the dynamic combat mechanics, which makes PVE feel extremely slow when compared to PVP

Dated Questing Mechanics – The game uses the rather archaic “Go kill X amount of Y creatures” constantly, which is lazy quest design and a boring grind for players; furthermore the quest chains are extremely linear offering no diversification and simply walks you through each zone in order

Feels Like a Single Player – The game lacks the majority of features that make an MMORPG a community/social experience, no housing, no real guild orientated achievements, no player driven economy, the game might as well be a single player title

Any thoughts on the article? Got more to add? Let us know in the comments.

 

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