Blade and Soul: The Botpocalypse

My friend L and I played our duo characters in Blade and Soul up to the level cap (currently 45 on the NA/EU servers) and finished out the story missions. And that's as far as we're likely to go. There are several reasons, not least of which is the amazing amount of time needed to make any progress, but the last straw for me was the bot hordes that choke some of the endgame areas.

We finished out the currently available story missions just before reaching the level cap, and I have to say I wasn't impressed. There's no actual ending from a story perspective, because the evil lady who killed your master gets away (yet again, seems she does that in every story chapter) and nothing you've tried against her seems to work. I realize there is more to the story yet to be released, but it's still a letdown to get to the end and find very little in the way of resolution. You'd think they could have found a way to release the game with a complete, coherent story arc instead of just part of one.

Worse, the last bit of the story forces your character into a complete 180-degree-turn in terms of motivation. No longer is everyone telling you to "remember what Master Hong would want you to do" and begging you not to give in to revenge. The teaser for the next bit of the story is basically "come to the dark side." Stuff like that can be interesting in books and movies, but when you're supposedly playing a game where you have some level of control, it's a real downer.

Despite that, L and I were still willing to look into the endgame content. We tried Mushin's Tower, which is a series of solo instances, and each of us got completely destroyed. No problem with the toughest part of the story content or the lower level dungeons, but the difficulty in the tower spiked way up. Neither of us could make it past the first couple of levels, much less get all the way to the top. Which means we needed more and better gear, since it was unlikely after 45 levels that our combat reaction skills would improve much more.

Some gear upgrades drop from various world boss monsters, and it's here that the bots first became a real problem. You'd see dozens of players just standing around the boss spawn point, doing nothing. Then the boss spawns, and they all instantly jump at it and do some big attack. Once it's down, they go back to standing around. You might see a few actual players doing the same thing, but most of them are clearly just farmer bots. We missed a couple of boss spawns and had to wait around for the next one, because the bots killed it so fast.

You also need big chunk of in-game money to upgrade. Here the main way to progress is to do daily missions in big 24-man instances. The bosses you need to kill are difficult enough to require a full team of six, and in some cases more. There weren't many bots here because the zone is large and complex, but finding a decent team is no fun. Most people you pick up through the group finder just run around following whatever their own mission log says, and if you miss one objective, tough...they're not coming back to help you finish. Worse, the spawn rates for some of the objectives are very long, so you see a lot of players camping a particular spawn, and if you happen to be a little late getting there you've got a long wait for the next one.

Then there are the daily 6-man dungeon missions, and the bots are back there with a vengeance. It's easy to use the cross-server group finder to get a group. Too easy, because almost every time you'll find that 1-2 of the people who joined are bots. They walk into the dungeon and just stand at the entrance. The game doesn't check participation, so if the rest of the group manages to make it through, the bot gets the quest rewards for free. The obvious solution would be to kick the bot from the team, but there's no such option in Blade and Soul. So you end up either taking forever to get through a dungeon with less than a full group, or going back to the group finder over and over until you manage to get a bot-free group.

Between the story disappointments, major difficulty spike in areas like Mushin's Tower, the amount of time and effort needed to grind for money and items, and the bots making it all harder, I've had it with Blade and Soul. If the developers make an effort to fix the bot problem, if they smooth out the end-game grind, and if the story is extended to some reasonable conclusion, then I might consider trying it again. Until then, I recommend staying away.

Blade and Soul: Time Sink

Every MMO is a time sink to some extent. Daily quests, repeat boss and dungeon runs for specific loot drops, crafting, multiple characters, etc, etc. I've played a bunch of MMOs, and come to expect it. Even so, I think Blade and Soul is a pretty extreme example when it comes to how much time the game expects the player to spend.

Let's start with multiple characters. Every character you make has to go through the tutorial and the whole main story-line quest. No way to skip any of it (apart from skipping cutscenes) that I noticed. No alternate way to unlock travel powers, or get the important quest rewards. And as I mentioned before, the story is all very generic. Doing it once is mildly amusing. Doing it again gets old fast.

The most obvious time sink is crafting. The way you get raw materials is to put in an order with a gathering guild. The lowest level orders take 30 minutes to fill, and the time goes up from there. Then you turn over those materials and some other rare items to a crafting guild, who spend more hours making an item for you. The good news is that those countdowns continue while you're offline, but the bad news is that you have to log in to set up new orders as the old ones are completed. Lots of MMOs use this approach, but very few have this kind of length. (For comparison, Star Wars: The Old Republic gathering missions mostly take 3 minutes at low levels.)

Then there's that "other rare items" that I mentioned. All but the most basic crafting requires special items that come from random drops in boss fights and daily quests. Many of these aren't tradeable, so the only way to get them is to go do the quests...another time sink. Daily quests aren't anything new in the MMO world, but again, Blade and Soul stands out for the sheer amount that it expects you to do in order to progress.

Even daily awards require more time than I usually see in these kind of games. Blade and Soul has a "Daily Dash" where you spin a wheel to get a number, then move a token that number of spaces along a game board, and get whatever item you land on. You get multiple spins, but you can only use one per hour. So in order to even get the full daily log-in reward, you have to play the game for multiple hours.

Finally, there's item upgrades - probably my least favorite example of how Blade and Soul eats up your time. At several points, the only way to continue to upgrade your weapon (at least, as far as I can tell) is to defeat a world boss, take reward tokens that he drops, and spend those tokens on a "wheel spin" where an NPC gives you a random item. You'll eventually get a weapon box, which you then have to open and hope to get something usable by your class. It's not tradeable, so you can't buy one or sell your extras. It can take dozens of attempts to get what you need, which means a ton of boss fights, which means sitting around with a lot of other people looking at the ground until the boss spawns and everyone jumps in hoping to get a few hits in so they get a reward. It's a terrible player experience, combining the worst of boredom (waiting on the boss spawn) and frustration (getting useless crap from the random wheel spins).

Blade and Soul has some good aspects, certainly. There's some really good art and animation, and some interesting combat moves (even if it's not really my favorite style). It's fun to play as a duo, at least as long as you stay away from the 6-player dungeons. But the sheer amount of time needed to progress means I'm unlikely to stick with it after I've made it through once.

Blade and Soul

My friend L recently decided to start playing Blade and Soul, a Korean MMORPG which just recently released an English version. He convinced me to give it a try.

The first thing that struck me about Blade and Soul is that it's very pretty. There are lots of big open landscapes which are nicely realized, and the interiors of caves and the like look appropriately gritty. The art style is very much in the tradition of martial arts fighting games and anime. The characters are overly cute, but since they spend a lot of their time kicking monsters in the face, it sort of balances out between cute and dangerous. A dozen or so levels in, you'll start encountering Dragon Soul travel points, each of which has a pretty incredible travel animation. The game has plenty of eye candy.

I was pretty impressed by the character appearance creation options. As I said, all the characters are anime-style cute, but you have a ton of choices of exactly how that plays out. Everything from slight facial changes to body style to coloration is customizable. Unfortunately that doesn't extend to clothing - everyone has the same starting uniform once you get into the game. You can find others as you play, but it takes a while.

There are a bunch of different class and race options, as you'd expect. It's all based around magic and martial arts - options like the Blade Master or Assassin on the martial arts side, or Summoner on the magic side. It all bleeds together, of course; for instance, your Blade Master might use a magical Lightning Sword attack.

Combat is very interactive, requiring the player to move around a lot, execute attack combos, and keep the target lined up. I've only played the lower levels thus far, and not run into anything too difficult, but I can see the direction things are going. There's going to be a lot of twitch-reaction coordination needed, which sadly means I'll probably be awful at it. I'm sure the basic story content will be workable, especially in a duo. But higher level dungeons and such will be a challenge.

Speaking of story, Blade and Soul does have one, but it's very limited. Nothing that I've seen thus far is specific to class or race - everyone gets exactly the same quests and meets the same people. It's all very generic for the genre: you're a martial arts student, some bad guy comes after your master and fellow students, you must avenge them. Heard that one before! Some of the quest bits are entertaining, but none of it is a surprise.

Having said that, the writers sure seemed to have a good time putting quests together. You'll run across plenty of amusing little stories, like the hopelessly-in-love guy sending mushrooms to the object of his desire (who hates mushrooms), or the old man that sends you after his apprentice because the kid stole all the beer. They use a fun little system where you can see thought bubbles from the character you're talking to, so you know when they're trying to deceive you, or just asking you to do something dangerous because they're too scared to do it themselves. It's entertaining to go through once; too bad there's not anything new if you want to play another character.

And then there is loot. You get a lot of it, mostly from defeating the occasional boss monster and from doing quests (many of which can be repeated daily). And you can't use much of it at all without removing "seals", or in some cases unlocking treasure boxes. Even once unlocked, most of the items will be class-specific, which makes the vast majority unusable. You get a decent amount of the keys and seal breakers, but there are special key versions that give you better results if you use them. (Which are purchasable in the real-money store, of course.) And you'll need those better versions to get items specific to your class, or else be prepared to grind for the same drops over and over while hoping the random drop is something you can use.

I'm enjoying Blade and Soul as a change of pace. It's not the style that I normally play, and the duo experience with L has helped to smooth out some of the more difficult points. The combat isn't my favorite style, and the loot system seems unnecessarily focused on repeat grinding. I'll give it some time, though; maybe it'll grow on me.