- Blade and soul online character viewer Pc#
- Blade and soul online character viewer series#
- Blade and soul online character viewer free#
It’s classic wuxia – woo-sha – a kind of Chinese fiction that literally means "martial hero." You’ll recognize it from late nights watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The cutscene art style is beautiful, based on a visual style by the acclaimed artist Hyung-Tae Kim, known for his work on the Magna Carta series. Despite all its high Eastern fantasy - frogmen and cat girls and Hopping Vampires - the green hills of the East are blood-soaked. Your master dies, dogs die, everybody dies. The game’s introduction is like a trauma flashback to Red Wedding, as a nefarious crew wreaks havoc following a thousand-year peace treaty between the fledgling empire and the fading dynasty. The team calls it the Game of Thrones of Eastern MMOs.Īnd it’s certainly dark enough for ol’ George R. It hinges on the often strange myths of ancient martial arts.Īt launch this story will be made up of six acts, but the team already has five more years of plot points planned out, says Hulmes.
There’s a subplot about the ancient and seemingly evil Darksiders, and Jin Seoyeon, a martial artist who’s become infected with impure Chi. “It’s about a fledgling empire called the Wind Empire who is trying to overthrow the old Stratus Empire and unite the four continents in a new era of equality,” he says. The team has had to translate over three million words as part of their localisation effort, Hulmes tells me, and will launch this winter with the fully voice-acted results. This is a tale of martial arts fantasy, in which good and evil clash through battling factions and warring gods. The game uses an optional flagging system revolving around the doboks, a uniform worn by practitioners of martial arts which when added to your costume means you’re ready to be accosted by your peers.īut according to Hulmes, the team are particularly proud of Blade and Soul's storytelling. This too will be familiar to anyone who's tested the waters of Guild Wars 2's dynamic skill system, which changes the abilities you can access based on your character's weapon of choice, and brings a certain amount of skill to the art of maniacal keyboard thumping. PvP carries with it a similar rough-and-tumble tone. Combat is based around combo attacks, made from a combination of around 40 abilities - closer to what you'd find in fighting games than in a typical MMO arena glassing. Watch a tournament play out between two duelling Blade and Soulers and tell me it isn’t a bloodied ballet. A convoluted Hero’s Journey narrative wraps around a structure of twitch-like, real-time battle systems, similar in style to its cousin Guild Wars 2.
Blade and soul online character viewer series#
It’s had three years to cultivate an eSports audience in the East, and even has a television show in Japan – an anime series by the animators of the brilliant Afro Samurai: Resurrection.įor its Western outing, the game launches fully-formed with three years’ worth of content.
Blade and soul online character viewer Pc#
In South Korea it toppled Diablo 3 on the PC Bang charts at launch. In China it got 1.5 million concurrent users at its peak. NCsoft West's senior vice president of publishing John Burns is calling this one of the most successful games in Asia, an eSports marvel that you’ve probably never even heard of – but trust me, the game’s got more countrymen than the whole of Zhanjiang. But in a genre as unruly as this one, perhaps this is a glimpse into MMO development for the 21st century: a ready-made heavyweight, imported in from a continent afar. In other words, NCsoft are essentially reheating an old hit.
Blade and soul online character viewer free#
It’s free – no gated content and no strings attached. We decided to take a closer look.īlade and Soul already has a huge following in the East, senior community manager Mark Hulmes tells me. The publishers have announced today that they're localizing Blade And Soul, its three-year-old free-to-play MMO, for North America and Europe this year, making this the fifth title from the company to launch in Asia before it releases in the West. But somehow NCsoft have managed to keep a stable of these games in their portfolio for years. What exactly is the incentive for a studio to bring another free-to-play MMO to the West?Įven among fans of these here grind-machines, the approval-rating of MMOs rises and falls with a steadiness usually reserved for politicians.
0 kommentar(er)
