Bless Online - All the bad stuff and none of the good stuff?

Rhoklaw

1 - First of all, it is a PvP focused game, but it's more like ArcheAge than BDO as far as I can tell.
2 - The world map is akin to FFXIV without being a true "open world" map but several large maps interconnected by long narrow paths.
3 - Fixed economy / No player trading is probably one of the worst things ever introduced to MMO's by BDO.
4 - B2P / Convenience Subscription / Cash Shop ( Still waiting to see just exactly what is offered in cash shop but rumors are, it's not pretty )
5 - No fishing? Granted most of BDO's tradeskill features could be done AFK, it still added flavor to the game for those who enjoyed it.

In regards to the cash shop, just be warned that even some of the Emissaries that went to the press release, played the game and asked them questions couldn't get a clear answer. From what I've seen and heard, it's as bad if not worse than BDO in that regard.

Kyleran

I have the solution,  don't play it, I'm certainly not.

Problem solved, my job is done here.

Captain Obvious has left the room.

DMKano

Your point #2 is wrong.

The world of Bless is 100% open world - but the only things that are FINISHED are the narrow path and quest areas and cities/towns. (there are some towns and villages that are in game but have no NPCs at all - just empty ghost towns)

90%+ of the world is just blank, empty terrain.

It is the weirdest shit you've seen - they probably would have been better off just putting in invisible walls - as you can step outside the quest areas and wonder aimlessly for hours without seeing a single thing in majority of the world - as it's literally there to just waste your time - there is no content to be found outside of quest areas at all. Like not even grass, nothing.


The rivers/oceans - (there's a huge ocean area on the east side of the map) - completely empty - not a single blade of sea-grass, not a single fish, not a single coral - nothing just empty terrain.

It's just bizarre how after 10 years of development, and 2 relaunches they did nothing to fill in the map. Now granted - redoing combat is a much higher priority, I'll give them that, but damn - the world of Bless really needs life, it feels so dead compared to BDO and other current games.



As far as the cash shop - they said that the Premium Membership grants you access to Premium Cash shop items - but they are refusing to disclose what the premium cash shop items are. A list would be really nice - but so far they are keeping that info away from everyone. 

Why are they refusing to give this info when the gam is 15 days away from Early access launch?

Rhoklaw

Kyleran said:

I have the solution,  don't play it, I'm certainly not.

Problem solved, my job is done here.

Captain Obvious has left the room.

That's all well and good, but the point of sites like this are to educate the masses. Don't we all preach that if you are unsure about a game to wait to read the reviews? So this is why we have forum discussions. Not only to help others make a choice, but to try and steer developers in the right direction.

DMKano said:

Your point #2 is wrong.

The world of Bless is 100% open world - but the only things that are FINISHED are the narrow path and quest areas and cities/towns. (there are some towns and villages that are in game but have no NPCs at all - just empty ghost towns)

90%+ of the world is just blank, empty terrain.

It is the weirdest shit you've seen - they probably would have been better off just putting in invisible walls - as you can step outside the quest areas and wonder aimlessly for hours without seeing a single thing in majority of the world - as it's literally there to just waste your time - there is no content to be found outside of quest areas at all. Like not even grass, nothing.


The rivers/oceans - (there's a huge ocean area on the east side of the map) - completely empty - not a single blade of sea-grass, not a single fish, not a single coral - nothing just empty terrain.

It's just bizarre how after 10 years of development, and 2 relaunches they did nothing to fill in the map. Now granted - redoing combat is a much higher priority, I'll give them that, but damn - the world of Bless really needs life, it feels so dead compared to BDO and other current games.



As far as the cash shop - they said that the Premium Membership grants you access to Premium Cash shop items - but they are refusing to disclose what the premium cash shop items are. A list would be really nice - but so far they are keeping that info away from everyone. 

Why are they refusing to give this info when the gam is 15 days away from Early access launch?

From the video footage I saw during the recent press release, it most certainly was akin to FFXIV world geography. Large maps connected by narrow, restrictive tunnels. Even if the entire world isn't designed this way, a good portion of it seemed to be. Then again, maybe it's just tutorial areas. I guess this is the problem you deal with when watching restricted game play. We only see what we're allowed to see and what I saw wasn't open world.

As for the reduction of NPC's, a lot streamers or enthusiasts were saying the most likely reason was to reduce latency / frame drops which has been an issue plaguing Bless in other versions.

In regards to cash shop, I'm sure it's pretty obvious what they are hiding. While it may not be a full fledged P2W monetization. It was definitely leaning towards extreme convenience or mild to moderate P2W. Such as gems that could be purchased daily which could be converted into random skill based power ups.

Remember how you leveled up skills in Skyforge? Basically the same concept.

AnnaTS

I don't mind the no direct trading between players because there is an auction house and it will stop people buying gold or in game items with real money.

I also don't mind no fishing, It's not something a game has to have for me.

I am not worried about the shop, I will copy and paste something i wrote in another thread about the shops and yes there is two shops. 

The game has two shops, One which you buy stuff with tokens you can earn in game, The other one is the one which you can buy stuff with real money. 

To buy stuff from the shop which uses real money you have to buy lumena with cash then use the lumena to purchase items from the shop, also you can exchange in game currency for lumena. 

So you might not need to spend money in the shop that uses money, It depends what the exchange rate will be and how easy it is to farm the currency needed to exchange into lumena.

This was mentioned in the dev talk 3 about the shops. 

https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791460487597/announcements/detail/1653259610124065062

The game being open world PVP doesn't bother me, I have played a few games that were open world PVP.

Sephiroso

AnnaTS said:

I don't mind the no direct trading between players because there is an auction house and it will stop people buying gold or in game items with real money.


The game has two shops, One which you buy stuff with tokens you can earn in game, The other one is the one which you can buy stuff with real money. 

I personally have yet to see a game do no direct trading between players well. ToS tried it and it was horrible. BDO tried it as well, again horrible. There is far too many downsides to no direct trading between players for the few upsides. Both ToS and BDO still had website spammers spamming in chat.

Also the game has 3 shops. The token shop. The cash shop. And a sub only cash shop.

Theocritus

Hmmm no fishing that's definitely a - in my book.

AnnaTS

Sephiroso said:

Also the game has 3 shops. The token shop. The cash shop. And a sub only cash shop.

I didn't know about the third shop, I hadn't seen anyone mention it until now. 

ananit

AnnaTS said:

I don't mind the no direct trading between players because there is an auction house and it will stop people buying gold or in game items with real money.

this ! a hundred times.
BDO was the first mmo in nearly 2 decades where i didn't have to dedicate 5 minutes of my time per day blocking the obnoxious gold spammers. if a controlled economy and no player trade is the price to pay to get rid of gold sellers and spammers, so be it.

doesn't change the fact that the game seems bland and generic though.

Sephiroso

ananit said:

AnnaTS said:

I don't mind the no direct trading between players because there is an auction house and it will stop people buying gold or in game items with real money.

this ! a hundred times.
BDO was the first mmo in nearly 2 decades where i didn't have to dedicate 5 minutes of my time per day blocking the obnoxious gold spammers. if a controlled economy and no player trade is the price to pay to get rid of gold sellers and spammers, so be it.

doesn't change the fact that the game seems bland and generic though.

BDO's marketplace/AH is also god fucking awful and Kakao should be burned at the stake for creating it. The single worst AH experience i ever fucking had the displeasure to deal with. I'm pretty sure my blood pressure rose everytime i opened it.

Sephiroso

AnnaTS said:

Sephiroso said:

Also the game has 3 shops. The token shop. The cash shop. And a sub only cash shop.

I didn't know about the third shop, I hadn't seen anyone mention it until now. 

It's was mentioned on the updated steam post Neowiz made just yesterday or 2 days ago. No talk yet of whats gonna be in it but we shall see soon(hopefully).

DMKano

AnnaTS said:

Sephiroso said:

Also the game has 3 shops. The token shop. The cash shop. And a sub only cash shop.

I didn't know about the third shop, I hadn't seen anyone mention it until now. 

"What is "Premium Subscription" & "Premium Customer Service"?
Premium Subscription: 

• Offers cosmetics such as skins, mount skins, and so forth
  
• Available in montly purchases
  
• Access to premium subscription only cashshop (Adds additional content into the cash shop)
  
• Lumena from the exchange cannot be used to extend this subscription
  
• More details coming soon..."

Scot

This game has so many question marks I am not going to bother to repeat them, but for some posters it will no doubt be their preferred tankard of MMO tavern ale.

Sephiroso

Scot said:

This game has so many question marks I am not going to bother to repeat them, but for some posters it will no doubt be their preferred tankard of MMO tavern ale.

Unfortunately the question marks is by design. They profit off there being question marks for as long as possible(i.e, until early access begins) because if people don't know, they might still be willing to buy in and give early access a try. But if they were to know the answers to their questions, a portion of the people will completely forego buying into the early access.

DMKano

Now that emissaries are releasing info - here's the details on the new combat skills (like I've said before - Steam version  - the skills work almost exactly the same as JP version, with minor tweaks)

Now you know who is speaking the truth about NA/EU Steam version and who isn't, lots of misleading info how NA/EU Steam version is completely different, please....

Note - combat stances - that is completely new to our version - but skills have been combined and retweaked to fit the new system hence the removal of passives and shift(dodge) skills - they haven't redone combat from scratch - they have simply combined these together

Look for yourself - posted by Carthh - one of the Bless emissaries who complied this after the media day - so this has cleared NDA

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQdITjyFoxT1ALCgkAu_oB5dgEGgGy3dw20M41hFDIz-v1UarrKg7kDjdogJTsd6tRn6_XcAhnFcj2f/pubhtml

" Notes on the new combat

I will be putting out a youtube video for every class going over skills and stance combos, so make sure you check out the link above to go more in depth with each class.

(This is all from a developmental phase and nothing is certain, everything here is subject to change. We tried to find as many as we can but I had to fill in a couple JP tooltips unfortunately. Don't look at damage numbers some are from level 1 characters.)

Most skills function exactly the same way as they do on Japan with slight tweaks here and there mainly with cooldowns or how they cc

"Auto Attacking" where you right click and hit no buttons but continue to attack is gone. This is actually a good change in my opinion.

Even though you no longer "auto attack" you still have the exact same skills in the form of basic attacks which you always have access to with no cooldown or resource consumption, the difference being you must click them now.

This promotes a more active playstyle, as opposed to a class that would use cooldowns then just run around passively attacking waiting for cooldowns and resources

This fits perfectly into the new combo system wher they want you to constantly be attacking, swapping stances, and using different abilities

Every skill is different, regardless of the name or icon, this goes for all classes.

What I mean by this is, for example, as a mage in fire stance you have access to three meteor skills, one in each combo section.

Even though they have the exact same name and picture, each one functions slightly different., The first meteor does damage and has no cooldown, the second one does damage and has a cooldown, while the third stuns the target but has no cooldown.

Also to note, while the first and third meteor do not have a cooldown on their respective tooltips, they DO in fact have a cooldown. The cooldown of these skills comes from the previous skill in the combo chain.

Passives are gone, but still around. You no longer choose and slot in passives, but some of them were baked into skills themselves, acquired through the gem enhancement system, or tied into stances.

Stance gem enhancement mostly consisted of incrementally increasing damage, cooldown reduction, reduced mana, and increased healing. But some skills can gain aditional effects such as mana regen on the Mage basic attack.

Non stance gem enhancement is where the fun starts to happen. This system was almost completely altering some skills to become brand new skills.

A couple examples of this include the Guardians Obtain Bravery, you were able to enhance it to grant more Bravery when cast, or reduce Bravery gained but turn it into a powerful Fightning Power buff.

Another one we found was the Berserker's old Requiem passive. It's been slightly altered, but possibly for the better. You could enhance Fightning Like KillKenny Cats to make it so if you go below 5% health with the buff active, you gain complete damage immunity for 5s and sounds like it heals you when it ends.

It's much harder to activate and has a shorter duration, but if timed correctly, you won't die now.

Unfortunately almost no one had the time to go over any of the Non Stance enhancements so this is completely up in the air and can drastically change some classes playstyle.

Energy is completely gone, your shift skills have been moved into your Non Stance, some staying the same and some being altered. With it being in the Non Stance category though, that means you'll be able to provide it with some nice enhancements.

Rings were no where to be found so we have no idea what stats will be on them, but nothing costs energy now and was replaced by a static cooldown.

You can still sprint out of combat but it looked like it was only for 1-2 seconds and no resource bar appeared any where.

CC's seem to have been adjusted to compensate for the removal of iframes and breaks, such as outright removing some cc or lowering the duration by a large amount. But it looks like you can possible increase the duration through stance enhancing.

Parameter gems are somewhat similar to the "Blue" passives we have on JP on the right side of the tree, except we have a lot more to choose from.

It looks like you snake your way through one of four sections and the effects get better the more you invest into them.

It also seemed you don't have to finish a row before going into a different one, you just want get as strong of buffs right away.

The buffs included a wide variety of things ranging from: Increase in Strength, Vitality, Stability, Physical/Magical Defense, Toughness, Acceleration (Haste), XP Gain, Guild XP Gain, Gold Gain, Pet XP.

This is only a few of the ones we saw, again, most streamers didn't have enough time to go over every single one but this one we got a pretty good idea that they're mostly just passive increases and don't really affect active combat.

Some stances have special effects tied to them when swapping, but no stances had tooltips so we do not know any of them.

Every stance across all classes had completely different cooldowns ranging anywhere from from 3 seconds all the way up to 10.

~ Key will swap stances, and they stated they want you to be stance swapping a lot. The only restritcion to stance swapping is the cooldown.

You do not gain any benefit from "Chain" or "Finish" it's just purely aesthetic.

You can use any combo starter ability at any time if it's not on cooldown.

You are not required to finish or go all the way through a chain, you may break the chain and start over at any time."

The work on google docs was compiled by 

https://www.twitch.tv/carthh_ws

DMKano

Rhoklaw said:

From the video footage I saw during the recent press release, it most certainly was akin to FFXIV world geography. Large maps connected by narrow, restrictive tunnels. Even if the entire world isn't designed this way, a good portion of it seemed to be. Then again, maybe it's just tutorial areas. I guess this is the problem you deal with when watching restricted game play. We only see what we're allowed to see and what I saw wasn't open world.

As for the reduction of NPC's, a lot streamers or enthusiasts were saying the most likely reason was to reduce latency / frame drops which has been an issue plaguing Bless in other versions.

The difference is in Bless you can jump and climb out of the narrow passages - there are no invisible walls - it is an open world map. Now the fact that there's nothing there once you do manage to climb out - that's a different story.

My point is - the tunnels/channels are not so restrictive that you can't get out of them - like in FFXIV - you literally can't. In Bless you can.

Nobody is showing areas outside of quest/finished areas - because there's nothing there - I was sort of hoping Hiveleader would do it on his stream - but nope - he just stayed in quest areas - he did come up on empty villages towns without NPCs and quickly cut away, lol

Hiveleaders stream - check out 27:30 mark 


You can actually start at 25min  - busy city, eh?


The reduction of NPCs is due to Unreal Engine 3.5 limitations - with too many NPCs in open world - the performace craters, so they thinned out the spaws. The downside is the world feels dead as there are no little critters running around to give it that "living" feeling.

DMKano

IceAge said:

[mod edit]

Ok so lets take 2 ends of the spectrum

1. Combat is completely different 100% redone from scratch

2. Combat is exactly the same as Japanese version



The NA/EU version is closer to #1 or #2?

Is NA/EU version 50% between 1 and 2, is it 80% towards #2? Is it 90% towards #1?


- look at all the skills - they are the same skills, same animations with slight tweaks - this alone is what makes up for majority of the combat


The stances are new, the energy/stamina (shift dodge skills) has been removed, the passives are combined - these are small changes in the big scheme of things when the basic skills are largely the same

So I'd say the combat is 80% the same - aka a lot closer to Japan than you want to admit.

These completely redesign combat is simply not true - we don't have completely new skills, we don't have completely new animations, it was not redone from scratch.

They took the existing combat, and tweaked it with stances - but the actual skills are almost the same - again the Bless Emissaries are saying this as well.

Filbur

It's true that the game world could be "livelier", which think is hindered by engine limitations. But to be fair, the empty terrain some are speaking of is clearly unused landmass for later game updates. Other games build invisible walls around it, here it's fully "explorable". The world design is much more akin to the original World of Warcraft with little fleshed out zones within a zone and mountains around them.

rertez

IceAge said:

Kano , how can you say that the combat is not different then the JP version?! 

FYI Kano just linked and quoted Carthh's words on the changes.

Sephiroso

Filbur said:

It's true that the game world could be "livelier", which think is hindered by engine limitations. But to be fair, the empty terrain some are speaking of is clearly unused landmass for later game updates. Other games build invisible walls around it, here it's fully "explorable". The world design is much more akin to the original World of Warcraft with little fleshed out zones within a zone and mountains around them.

Eh, it just comes off as sloppy if you have empty towns and shit to me. Even if it was going to be used in later updates. Better to have invisible walls, or rather mountains or closed doors blocking off access to future zones then to just give people access to them but have them empty.

Filbur

Sephiroso said:

Filbur said:

It's true that the game world could be "livelier", which think is hindered by engine limitations. But to be fair, the empty terrain some are speaking of is clearly unused landmass for later game updates. Other games build invisible walls around it, here it's fully "explorable". The world design is much more akin to the original World of Warcraft with little fleshed out zones within a zone and mountains around them.

Eh, it just comes off as sloppy if you have empty towns and shit to me. Even if it was going to be used in later updates. Better to have invisible walls, or rather mountains or closed doors blocking off access to future zones then to just give people access to them but have them empty.

I'm talking about this unused landmass: https://i.imgur.com/q1z1yr5.jpg

And yes, I agree that some of the ghost towns ingame should be populated. Maybe it's some form of phasing and these are unlocked through story progression? I don't know.

Mikeha

This game is going to be awesome.

lucyluffy101

I very familiar that Korean dev from Neowiz I found that Neowiz is a publisher  one of the game of XLgames before sense 2005

Kajidourden

IceAge said:

rertez said:

IceAge said:

Kano , how can you say that the combat is not different then the JP version?! 

FYI Kano just linked and quoted Carthh's words on the changes.

FYI....Kano just linked and quoted Carth's words on the changes which clearly says that the combat SYSTEM!! is different.

Here is an exemple for ignorants : 

Clearly BfA has the same combat system as..Pandaria for exemple

You mean youtubers are akin to shock jockeys and over-sensationalize things for clicks!!?!?!  No.....they would never.

IceAge

Kajidourden said:

IceAge said:

rertez said:

IceAge said:

Kano , how can you say that the combat is not different then the JP version?! 

FYI Kano just linked and quoted Carthh's words on the changes.

FYI....Kano just linked and quoted Carth's words on the changes which clearly says that the combat SYSTEM!! is different.

Here is an exemple for ignorants : 

Clearly BfA has the same combat system as..Pandaria for exemple

You mean youtubers are akin to shock jockeys and over-sensationalize things for clicks!!?!?!  No.....they would never.

LOL really ? Is about the BfA combat changes, which he's right. There are some big changes coming to BfA, but .. I assume you don't play WoW, aren't you ?

Kajidourden

IceAge said:

Kajidourden said:

IceAge said:

rertez said:

IceAge said:

Kano , how can you say that the combat is not different then the JP version?! 

FYI Kano just linked and quoted Carthh's words on the changes.

FYI....Kano just linked and quoted Carth's words on the changes which clearly says that the combat SYSTEM!! is different.

Here is an exemple for ignorants : 

Clearly BfA has the same combat system as..Pandaria for exemple

You mean youtubers are akin to shock jockeys and over-sensationalize things for clicks!!?!?!  No.....they would never.

LOL really ? Is about the BfA combat changes, which he's right. There are some big changes coming to BfA, but .. I assume you don't play WoW, aren't you ?

The BfA changes are not as big as people make them out to be.  It's not like you're going to go from Tab-Target to Action Combat or vice versa, it's just a tweak on the current system.