black desert online or blade and soul online

#Black desert online or blade and soul online series#

This isn’t a pay to win game, but you have to wonder about any game that encourages a player to get through its content as quickly and as expediently as possible. There is some lightweight and relatively unimportant resource gathering and while the game is quick to remind the player that a cash shop is always open in which to spend real money, most of what’s there is cosmetic or convenient, like costumes, keys, or XP boosts.

There is a simple crafting system, but no player housing.

On the periphery of questing and combat, Blade & Soul checks off most of the boxes we expect with an MMORPG. You can read the impact of a teammate’s strike on an enemy by color and add your move to the chain. When Blade & Soul is in “fighting game” mode, it’s great fun, especially for an MMO, and the area battles are impressive and chaotic.

#Black desert online or blade and soul online series#

It’s great fun to kick an enemy down, pick him up like a limp doll, then finish him off with a series of whirlwind slices and dices. Consisting of seven classes that more or less conform to ranged, melee, dual weapon, and magic-using fighters, each has a unique system of combos and special abilities that really shine in the unpredictable and challenging PvP arena, where skillful use of abilities, strategy and practiced timing equate with success. There is a fast travel system but within each major region, distances aren’t huge and the characters can run/fly along the treetops á la Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.īlade & Soul has a strict class-based system but at least the classes are not gender locked. Despite the lovely Asian architecture and attractive environments, the enemies themselves could have spawned in just about any MMORPG. The enemies aren’t smart, there aren’t scores of them at a time and on the rare occasion you die, there’s no real penalty other than the loss of progress. Thanks to the combat system, clearing the level of the constantly respawning mobs is fun for a while, but it’s also easy. The quests themselves show a stubborn lack of originality: kill x number of monsters, fetch y number of some object, rescue z number of prisoners. The main story quests are voiced by earnest and American sounding actors, but sidequests are not and the quests themselves are grindy, a mixture of short instanced quests in mini-dungeons and environmental sub-bosses that are completed solo or by small ad hoc groups of players. After the well-produced cutscene-heavy tutorial chapter and in the game world proper, the player is quickly inundated by quests in service of one faction or another, leading them through the five major areas and dozens of locations. The anime-inspired story puts the player in the role of a mystical martial artist in training, whose school and revered master were destroyed by an evil sorceress, thus setting up the arc of revenge and retribution. As MMOs go, Blade & Soul ultimately feels like a lightweight experience.Īctually, Blade and Soul - like so many recent MMOs - consists of an essentially single player campaign that prepares the player for PvP arenas at level 45. An enjoyable and skill-heavy combat system is unfortunately wedded to an uninspired and ultimately repetitive campaign. Launched in Asia in 2012, NCSoft’s MMORPG Blade & Soul has been released in the West and while it’s a polished and attractive game that makes a good initial impression, a more extended stay in its anime and martial arts-inspired world reveals some issues that impact its staying power.