You are a powerful wuxia, nothing is in your way! Or the way of a 4/6-man party! One thing that is most depressing is the overall lack of difficulty in PvE. In short, professions are a waiting game. Your items will be delivered to you after a pre-determined amount of time, which increases as you seek or make more complicated items. There is nothing special in this regard, but killing trash mobs is entertaining enough for me not to complain.Ĭrafting and gathering are done by joining your prefered guilds and requesting NPCs to do the dirty work for you via the profession window. Some require you get certain items, others ask you to carry things around or interact with objects. Many of the quests are simple requests to kill a particular amount of a given mob. Those looking for some revolutionary questing won't find it here. It is even more beautiful in action.īeyond Blade & Soul's combat lies a ton of PvP, a good number of dungeons (especially for an open beta), standard MMO questing, and a somewhat disappointing crafting/gathering system. Anyone with any interest has seen artist Hyung Tae Kim's work for the game and seen screenshots. I don't need to tell you how beautiful this game is. Blade & Soul has it in spades, though one may argue it is heavily lacking in freedom. While another notable MMO on the market, Age of Wushu, goes more heavily into wuxia and qinggong, it lacks the speed and flair one would want from a game within the genre. The qinggong gameplay aspects and wuxia blend seamlessly here. Even with my limited knowledge of the language, I find myself watching all of the cutscenes and wondering what is going to happen next. To go paired with this is the game's general wuxia theme, putting you smack in the middle of what feels like some grand Chinese martial arts flick.Īside from what you as a player can do, the game's plot progresses very much as in other pieces of wuxia fiction. Throughout your adventures in Blade & Soul, you casually pull off running at super speeds and running on water, among other more completely inhuman feats of agility and strength. Wuxia movies, games, and novels make use of gravity and physics-defying manuevers known as qinggong. Some of you may be familiar with 'wuxia' from Chinese movies and games, and Blade & Soul fits squarely into the genre. It feels like a wuxia (martial arts) film The developers, Team Bloodlust, did an amazing job on this aspect of the game. Blade & Soul feels fast enough - it feels as fast as an actual action game as opposed to an MMO. I remember building up my hype for TERA based on its combat, but it never felt fast enough. This is what action combat in an MMO should look and feel like. Deeper down the rabbit hole lies (some seriously impressive) skill customization and frame counting/watching. The fairly low amount of skills (paired with the fairly high amount that have special conditions to trigger) and the game's soft-targeting make feeling like a pro easy, even if you are still a wee nub. To give an idea of how fast combat is, take a look at this Steparu PvP video picked at random:Īt the helm, you really do feel like you're playing an action game. Instead Blade & Soul's combat is lightning fast with soft-targeting and a wealth of combination skills. I, perhaps like many, assumed the combat would be much like TERA's: a bit slow and no targeting with a few exceptions. The one big thing that makes Blade & Soul stand out from literally every other MMORPG I have played is that its combat is fast, fluid, and extremely satisfying. Very quickly I realized I was in for more than I'd anticipated. I wanted something new, shiny, and fast! Even if I had to jump through hoops to get into a version of the game I couldn't understand all that well. I needed a break from the endgame grinds in TERA, FFXIV, and Aion. On one cold, boring day last week I decided to bite the bullet: I was going to download the Chinese Blade & Soul ( Blade & Soul CN) open beta client and give it a whirl. What more could I be looking for? Blade & Soul couldn't possibly bring anything new to the table. If I wanted a traditional MMO, I had Aion. If I wanted something above the average Korean MMO, I'd play Final Fantasy XIV.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |