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Step's Review of Blade & Soul
AmbrosiaAmor
Member Posts: 915
in Blade & Soul
Here is Step's lengthy review on Blade & Soul.
http://steparu.com/reviews/mmo-rpg-reviews/892-blade-a-soul-online-review
Some comments that caught my attention(Many: I would still read his review and look at his videos):
Blade & Soul Online is one of the top games in South Korea right now and the games' hype doesn't seem to be dying down. Whenever I play a game that I really enjoy, I end up spending a lot of my time in that game until I burn out, which is what happened with Blade & Soul. I played this game hardcore for two months straight with ten hour long gaming sessions each day. Blade & Soul is by far my favorite all time oriental MMORPG even though it has some minor flaws. The design of the world is very beautiful and fits perfectly well with the characters in the game.
I actually fell in love with the story of Blade & Soul Online, I really enjoyed the awesome cutscenes it had. There are a bunch of likeable characters that I have met through the story. As for the story, it seemed a bit cliche and linear at first because of the whole revenge thing going on. Once I reached the second and third chapters of the game, the story evolved into something bigger. I don't want to spoil it much, but the plotline becomes a lot more complicated. The story line of Blade & Soul actually made me feel like I was part of the game,as I always found myself rushing through the main story quests because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Unlike most MMORPG's the cutscenes in Blade & Soul are definitely worth watching. The whole game makes you feel like you're watching some kind of oriental movie flick or action anime.
Unlike most MMORPG's Blade & Soul uses a Bopae system when it comes down to equippable armor. What is this Bopae I speak of? A Bopae is divided into 8 pieces, think of it as your armor and such. Each piece is numbered one through eight, if you end up collecting a full set you will gain that Bopae's set bonus and an eerie blue glow on your character. Bopaes' also increases your characters overall attributes and can be enchanted once. Enchanting is not really necessary until you hit the level 36+ mark, and from there I suggest that players enchant critical on all eight of their Bopae pieces. If you do so, it will make your leveling life easier once you get a purple gem slotted in your weapon. Weapons in Blade & Soul can't be enchanted, however they can be socketed with gems. These gems play a very big role in this game, so it is a good idea to buy the best gems for your weapon.
Now that I have informed you about the Bopae system, the doboks in Blade & Soul does not give any stat bonuses. The doboks aka outfits are for looks only, which is why I love this game so much because I can wear any outfit I want without having to worry about gimping myself at all. It's a shame that most of the outfits in Blade & Soul Online are bind on pick up, which makes it much harder to collect all of the outfits. They also take up a lot of inventory space, at least for me because I love collecting them all. PlayNC announced that they are going to make a separate inventory just for the outfits alone.
One of the main reasons that players like myself enjoy playing Blade & Soul Online is because it has a very fun battle system. Players who watch videos of this game are often confused with the targeting system so let me explain how it works. First of all Blade & Soul is a semi-target action MMORPG, which means my character will auto lock onto a target that is in front of me. If I were to slightly turn to the right by a 20 degree angle, then I would still have that target locked on.Now if I were to perform a full 90 degree, then I would most likely lose control of my target. Blade & Soul has a very intense combo system because it's all about timing your skills in PvE and PvP. I really liked how the amount of skills I had on my character felt just right.
Tanking in Blade & Soul is really hard due to numerous reasons. For one thing, this game doesn't offer any classes that can heal other players very efficiently. The only sustain is from a few skills, potions, and life leeching gems that only proc when you hit a critical hit. Holding aggro is a pain in the butt, whoever deals the most damage will most likely pull an aggro, which leads to team wipes, and then blaming begins. Blade & Soul is all about how fast you can react in between boss attacks and memorizing patterns. As a tank your main job is to memorize all of the patterns, so that you can deliver massive amounts of DPS to help you hold aggro at the same time evade and parry/counter all of the bosses attacks. Not all of the boss attacks can be countered or parried, so you must also use your evasion skills by double tapping ss key for back step and the qq or ee keys for the side step.
Blade & Soul provided me with a lot of quests, most of them involved the usual kill mobs, collect items, and stuff. Sounds horrible right? I would have probably died of boredom but I survived through it because I had a bunch of instances to play around with while leveling up. I've only ran across a few problems while leveling and of them was running out of quests at certain levels. Then there is the level 43 mark, which is called the hell level. Once you're around level 43, the amount of quests you have will slowly diminish leaving you to grind a painful level 43 to 45. After the EXP patch was launched the amount of EXP needed to level up was halved, which was too late for players like me that went through all that trouble.
PlayNC said that they will change the EXP rates in the English version of the game.
Blade & Soul is powered by the Unreal Engine 3 so the world and characters are visually amazing. Each player made character is unique in its own way due to the crazy amount of sliders in the character creation process. Just to throw it in there, this game has three boob sliders! I guarantee that you will spend at least an hour creating your first character, that is if you want a unique and personalized look. Probably the second best character creation process for a MMORPG that I have ever played, with PSO2 being first. Blade & Soul isn't very demanding when it comes down to graphics, so don't jump the gun and buy a new rig just for this game!
People are often confused about the faction system in Blade & Soul. Once you've level 21-22 and completed a certain main story quest you'll be given an option to pick a faction of your choice. After you pick a faction, you will be given a faction outfit. If you wear this faction outfit, you will auto flag yourself for faction PvP. There are also different kinds of PvP outfits like the ones you get from the main story and such. Those outfits are mainly used if players want to setup a 1v1 duel without any interruption of getting PK'ed by faction players. If you or your friend accidentally picked the wrong faction, then you can instantly switch to the other faction by paying a small fee and talking to an NPC in the same town where you first chose your faction. The only downside to switching sides is that you lose all of your PvP ranks.
The Auction House in this game is cross server, meaning that all of the servers shares one Auction House. The cross server party system has not been implemented yet.
The field bosses in Blade & Soul Online are a good way to get equipment for leveling. Unlike most MMORPG's everyone that hits the field boss will profit. Depending on how much damage I do to the boss, I will be able to earn up to 1-2 tokens. If I end up doing a lot of damage and deliver the finishing blow. Then I will get 3 tokens that can be used for the Wheel of Fortune. What is this Wheel of Fortune I speak of? There are Wheel of Fortunes near the field bosses that players kill. Using the tokens I received from the boss, I can spin the wheel of fortune. The Wheel of Fortune gives me that bosses weapon, bopae, costume, and random stuff.
Disables are categorized into three different kinds: green, purple, yellow, and red. For example, I would call out to the party that I will perform a tripping move. Right after using my trip skill a green shadow will appear before the boss. Now someone else in my party must quickly follow up with another tripping skill. If we both timed our skills correctly, then the boss would get knocked down. In short, disables must be followed by the same type of color. If I were to use the same green colored tripping skill and someone else used a stunning skill which is categorized in a blue color then the boss won't budge and the team attack is ruined. Disabling bosses in this game is serious business mainly because you want to prevent the boss from performing special attacks.Everytime a boss is disabled, a Kung Fu Master can mount on the boss to deliver massive amounts of damage, or a Destroyer can grapple the boss while the rest of the party delivers crazy amounts of damage.
Kung Fu Master: This is the hardest class to play in Blade & Soul mainly because the of the short windows between combos.
Force Master: The most powerful DPS class in Blade & Soul, this is the perfect class for players who enjoy magical spells and nuking monsters from far away.
Blade Master: This class is considered as the main tanker of Blade & Soul because of the long duration of their parry skill.
Destroyer: The easiest class to play in Blade & Soul mainly because you can train a bunch of monsters and spin to win. That's right, if you want to level up to 45 fast then this is the class for you.
Summoner: The weakest class of Blade & Soul, the Summoner class was to supposed to be dumped but they decided to make it a cute class. Thus attracting a lot of female players to Blade & Soul and increasing their ratings by a ton. This is the most unwanted class in a party mainly because everyone that plays this class are terrible.
Assassin: The Assassin is one of the main damage dealers of the game, one of their main specialty is keeping the Poison and Bleeding DOT's stacked at bosses at all times.
The summoner class has a grand total of 63 bugs making it the most broken class in the game.
Blade & Soul will have some extra cash shop features in the future like changing looks, costumes, and many more. You can already buy 4 kinds different clothing but it is currently exclusive to the female classes of Blade & Soul. The outfits can also be sold in the Auction House so if you ever need to make some quick gold, then you can do the that.
http://steparu.com/reviews/mmo-rpg-reviews/892-blade-a-soul-online-review
Some comments that caught my attention(Many: I would still read his review and look at his videos):
Blade & Soul Online is one of the top games in South Korea right now and the games' hype doesn't seem to be dying down. Whenever I play a game that I really enjoy, I end up spending a lot of my time in that game until I burn out, which is what happened with Blade & Soul. I played this game hardcore for two months straight with ten hour long gaming sessions each day. Blade & Soul is by far my favorite all time oriental MMORPG even though it has some minor flaws. The design of the world is very beautiful and fits perfectly well with the characters in the game.
I actually fell in love with the story of Blade & Soul Online, I really enjoyed the awesome cutscenes it had. There are a bunch of likeable characters that I have met through the story. As for the story, it seemed a bit cliche and linear at first because of the whole revenge thing going on. Once I reached the second and third chapters of the game, the story evolved into something bigger. I don't want to spoil it much, but the plotline becomes a lot more complicated. The story line of Blade & Soul actually made me feel like I was part of the game,as I always found myself rushing through the main story quests because I wanted to know what was going to happen next. Unlike most MMORPG's the cutscenes in Blade & Soul are definitely worth watching. The whole game makes you feel like you're watching some kind of oriental movie flick or action anime.
Unlike most MMORPG's Blade & Soul uses a Bopae system when it comes down to equippable armor. What is this Bopae I speak of? A Bopae is divided into 8 pieces, think of it as your armor and such. Each piece is numbered one through eight, if you end up collecting a full set you will gain that Bopae's set bonus and an eerie blue glow on your character. Bopaes' also increases your characters overall attributes and can be enchanted once. Enchanting is not really necessary until you hit the level 36+ mark, and from there I suggest that players enchant critical on all eight of their Bopae pieces. If you do so, it will make your leveling life easier once you get a purple gem slotted in your weapon. Weapons in Blade & Soul can't be enchanted, however they can be socketed with gems. These gems play a very big role in this game, so it is a good idea to buy the best gems for your weapon.
Now that I have informed you about the Bopae system, the doboks in Blade & Soul does not give any stat bonuses. The doboks aka outfits are for looks only, which is why I love this game so much because I can wear any outfit I want without having to worry about gimping myself at all. It's a shame that most of the outfits in Blade & Soul Online are bind on pick up, which makes it much harder to collect all of the outfits. They also take up a lot of inventory space, at least for me because I love collecting them all. PlayNC announced that they are going to make a separate inventory just for the outfits alone.
One of the main reasons that players like myself enjoy playing Blade & Soul Online is because it has a very fun battle system. Players who watch videos of this game are often confused with the targeting system so let me explain how it works. First of all Blade & Soul is a semi-target action MMORPG, which means my character will auto lock onto a target that is in front of me. If I were to slightly turn to the right by a 20 degree angle, then I would still have that target locked on.Now if I were to perform a full 90 degree, then I would most likely lose control of my target. Blade & Soul has a very intense combo system because it's all about timing your skills in PvE and PvP. I really liked how the amount of skills I had on my character felt just right.
Tanking in Blade & Soul is really hard due to numerous reasons. For one thing, this game doesn't offer any classes that can heal other players very efficiently. The only sustain is from a few skills, potions, and life leeching gems that only proc when you hit a critical hit. Holding aggro is a pain in the butt, whoever deals the most damage will most likely pull an aggro, which leads to team wipes, and then blaming begins. Blade & Soul is all about how fast you can react in between boss attacks and memorizing patterns. As a tank your main job is to memorize all of the patterns, so that you can deliver massive amounts of DPS to help you hold aggro at the same time evade and parry/counter all of the bosses attacks. Not all of the boss attacks can be countered or parried, so you must also use your evasion skills by double tapping ss key for back step and the qq or ee keys for the side step.
Blade & Soul provided me with a lot of quests, most of them involved the usual kill mobs, collect items, and stuff. Sounds horrible right? I would have probably died of boredom but I survived through it because I had a bunch of instances to play around with while leveling up. I've only ran across a few problems while leveling and of them was running out of quests at certain levels. Then there is the level 43 mark, which is called the hell level. Once you're around level 43, the amount of quests you have will slowly diminish leaving you to grind a painful level 43 to 45. After the EXP patch was launched the amount of EXP needed to level up was halved, which was too late for players like me that went through all that trouble.
PlayNC said that they will change the EXP rates in the English version of the game.
Blade & Soul is powered by the Unreal Engine 3 so the world and characters are visually amazing. Each player made character is unique in its own way due to the crazy amount of sliders in the character creation process. Just to throw it in there, this game has three boob sliders! I guarantee that you will spend at least an hour creating your first character, that is if you want a unique and personalized look. Probably the second best character creation process for a MMORPG that I have ever played, with PSO2 being first. Blade & Soul isn't very demanding when it comes down to graphics, so don't jump the gun and buy a new rig just for this game!
People are often confused about the faction system in Blade & Soul. Once you've level 21-22 and completed a certain main story quest you'll be given an option to pick a faction of your choice. After you pick a faction, you will be given a faction outfit. If you wear this faction outfit, you will auto flag yourself for faction PvP. There are also different kinds of PvP outfits like the ones you get from the main story and such. Those outfits are mainly used if players want to setup a 1v1 duel without any interruption of getting PK'ed by faction players. If you or your friend accidentally picked the wrong faction, then you can instantly switch to the other faction by paying a small fee and talking to an NPC in the same town where you first chose your faction. The only downside to switching sides is that you lose all of your PvP ranks.
The Auction House in this game is cross server, meaning that all of the servers shares one Auction House. The cross server party system has not been implemented yet.
The field bosses in Blade & Soul Online are a good way to get equipment for leveling. Unlike most MMORPG's everyone that hits the field boss will profit. Depending on how much damage I do to the boss, I will be able to earn up to 1-2 tokens. If I end up doing a lot of damage and deliver the finishing blow. Then I will get 3 tokens that can be used for the Wheel of Fortune. What is this Wheel of Fortune I speak of? There are Wheel of Fortunes near the field bosses that players kill. Using the tokens I received from the boss, I can spin the wheel of fortune. The Wheel of Fortune gives me that bosses weapon, bopae, costume, and random stuff.
Disables are categorized into three different kinds: green, purple, yellow, and red. For example, I would call out to the party that I will perform a tripping move. Right after using my trip skill a green shadow will appear before the boss. Now someone else in my party must quickly follow up with another tripping skill. If we both timed our skills correctly, then the boss would get knocked down. In short, disables must be followed by the same type of color. If I were to use the same green colored tripping skill and someone else used a stunning skill which is categorized in a blue color then the boss won't budge and the team attack is ruined. Disabling bosses in this game is serious business mainly because you want to prevent the boss from performing special attacks.Everytime a boss is disabled, a Kung Fu Master can mount on the boss to deliver massive amounts of damage, or a Destroyer can grapple the boss while the rest of the party delivers crazy amounts of damage.
Kung Fu Master: This is the hardest class to play in Blade & Soul mainly because the of the short windows between combos.
Force Master: The most powerful DPS class in Blade & Soul, this is the perfect class for players who enjoy magical spells and nuking monsters from far away.
Blade Master: This class is considered as the main tanker of Blade & Soul because of the long duration of their parry skill.
Destroyer: The easiest class to play in Blade & Soul mainly because you can train a bunch of monsters and spin to win. That's right, if you want to level up to 45 fast then this is the class for you.
Summoner: The weakest class of Blade & Soul, the Summoner class was to supposed to be dumped but they decided to make it a cute class. Thus attracting a lot of female players to Blade & Soul and increasing their ratings by a ton. This is the most unwanted class in a party mainly because everyone that plays this class are terrible.
Assassin: The Assassin is one of the main damage dealers of the game, one of their main specialty is keeping the Poison and Bleeding DOT's stacked at bosses at all times.
The summoner class has a grand total of 63 bugs making it the most broken class in the game.
Blade & Soul will have some extra cash shop features in the future like changing looks, costumes, and many more. You can already buy 4 kinds different clothing but it is currently exclusive to the female classes of Blade & Soul. The outfits can also be sold in the Auction House so if you ever need to make some quick gold, then you can do the that.
Comments
I really look forward to this game, please come to the west unnerfed and uncensored.
well you're in luck!
uncensored *CHECK!
The game is also a linear themepark similar to TERA.
However, to "Step's" credit Blade & Soul is a much more polished version of TERA.
Even though I'm perfectly happy with my current MMOs & RPGs, I am really looking forward to this one going in my library. I can't wait to play it whether it be alpha, beta, P2P release, or whatever! Seeing other people play it many times across streaming web video has been torturous! lol
I didn't really understand the point of this game when playing. As the above poster says it is a linear game just like TERA, it doesn't really offer anything new on that front. There's no sieges or main event that is meant to rally your faction.
I do like the combat, gliding through the air, graphics, music and story line are superb. But .. another subscription based linear game? Level up a few characters and what do you have? It seems like they're not taking into account what players are going to do at the end of the time levelling. Unlike the ArcheAge developers which are working on end game first to actually keep players in the game, it seems like another MMO which will be hyped up but won't keep a playerbase longer than a month or two, forcing the devs to go into panic mode and try and appease the playerbase with miniscule things.
How could it be any more linear than the straight line that was Tera?
Tera questing was everybit the following: 'Go kill ten piglets', 'go talk to this guy who will tell you to kill ten MORE piglets', so you can go talk to someone else who will ask you to kill MORE piglets. There wasn't even any effort to dress up the quests to make them not feel like more than grind.
As much fun as the BAM's were in Tera, I only made it to level 43 or so before I was asked to go kill souped up versions of the piglets I had killed on starter island. I had had it by then.
Also, please note, BE WARY of getting attached to the game, as if it doesn't meet NCSOFT's definition of success, whatever that is, they will pull the plug on it. See how they have treated Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners, and City of Heroes.
Pretty easy, you just do the same thing. Just like TERA, there doesn't seem to be anything worthy of working towards. So far any way.
- healers.. tera liner and no healers pass. come on healers plz .
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one ..." - Thomas Paine
what the fuck? this games main selling point is the gameplay you tard
I've wanted to find a game based on Japan and this one looks like it may be fun. Youtube vids of the Asian version show off the nice graphics and some of the other game elements.
Not every game needs to have some deep meaning to be enjoyable.
I agree, as well. Combat looks fantastic, but there's a certain type of gameplay that Korean gamers tend to enjoy in MMOs, and "It's doing great in Korea" is just a red flag for me at this point.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
These korean action combat games are bit of a niche, but they do have a solid fanbase in the western world. Tera was doing "ok" and now that its going F2P it has more players than ever, which makes me believe tha B&S will also have loads of people giving the game a try. It's a big plus that B&S starts and progressess a lot faster than Tera so people won't give up on the game pre-level 22 like it's with Tera.
It's obnoxious how many derpies are calling Tera's combat slow and static when they haven't seen it in the latter levels. Guess their non-existant attention span and need to get everything "right now" will work better with B&S.
This said, I'm really excited about B&S because I love skill-based combat and since is still months away I have plenty of time to play Tera
Having no healers and the intense 1vs1 duels are my main interests.
nice review. Even though i already played some of the korean beta i know how good the combat is and its very good. Everything else plays very nice too.
The only thing i really dont like and would not pay a sub for if it had one, is the TERA questing system. Its as bad, grindy, repetitive as TERA in that regard (at least when i played it it was like that). I hope they add some dynamic questing before launching in NA.
Patiently waiting for B&S to come out in the west and waiting for a B2P model announcement too.
Biggest issue I have with Tera aswell, the quest grind is really long/repetitive/boring at times.
Although I don't have anything against the traditional quest grinding as long as it has enough instances and other stuff hidden in between. B&S has really easy levelling courve in KR and they westernize it even more when it arrives to the west.
B&S also have solo instances so pushing those in levelling experience makes it stay fun for bit longer.
Ultimately I'm not worried about B&S levelling.
Yeah... I won't write a lengthy response to this.
Goldenarrow already responded for me but If you played a warrior at 60 and found TERAs combat slow, then good for you.
Also Blade and Soul is probably going to be received simalarily to TERA in NA, it's going to be niche, korean and retain it's small playerbase through graphics, fanservice and combat.
You know the part on grouping really tuned me off from the game.
Theres no real tank and healer. Also bosses distribute rewards based on DPS done, at least open world bosses. So this means that having the highest DPS means you will most likely profit the most of boss kills, as well as probably die doing so.
Really not interested in a game where everyones a DPS, and only a few classes excel at DPS, meaning your probably going to get most players picking the highest DPS class. This makes PVP a bit boring sounding as well.
I dunno, its hard to tell without actually playing the game, but the more i hear about this game the less interested i become in it.
There hasn't been any new update since December 2012; but that might change soon. This was a response from NCSOFT last week in regards to the state of the game:
Hopefully soon means Q2/Q3 2014.
they said something similar over a year ago...:(