#Blade and soul online gameplay 2015 Pc#
#Blade and soul online gameplay 2015 plus#

There will also be a one-versus-one Player versus Player (PvP) arena (with 3v3 tag-team PvP scheduled to appear post-launch). Those dungeons can be traversed as four-player, six-player or 24-player parties – the latter being the toughest challenge you’ll find, with all prompts (for example detailing when to parry, as bosses launch certain attacks) turned off and, naturally, the numbers of enemies cranked up massively. Initially, Blade & Soul’s game-world will be somewhat cut-down in comparison with what is available in South Korea and China, but we’ll soon catch up over here (and in the US, where the game is also launching).Īt launch, as well as the first three acts of the story, there will be two so-called epic-level dungeons, which will require you to hit the level-cap before you take them on. The joy of MMOs is that their developers can add content at their leisure, and NCSoft has an impressively voluminous plan to add dungeons and features, and extend the storyline, as Blade & Soul beds down in the UK. The game has been designed to encourage you to level up quickly – NCSoft says that it’s possible to reach the level-cap of 45 in three days or so (although it adds that feedback during the closed beta programme which has run in the UK since August 2015 led to the company adjusting initial difficulty levels upwards).

There’s a big, involving single-player storyline. There are four races (purely cosmetic – what race you choose won’t affect your stats) and seven character classes, including Warlock, which will arrive a while after the UK launch. When setting up a character, NCSoft is proud of the fact that you can generate a unique name for it across all the global servers (a big thing for existing Blade & Soul devotees, apparently). But that has a welcome corollary, as Blade & Soul will run on a pretty low-specification PC. Don’t expect your breath to be taken away by the general resolution and modernity of its graphics, though – it isn’t the newest of games. Visually it’s pretty impressive with a strong, highly stylised, anime-influenced art-style.

Swords and guns feature prominently as, naturally, do dungeons and boss-battles.

Instead, it’s very much an action-oriented game, with an emphasis on martial arts-style combat and movement (you can, for example, glide in the air and dash on the surface of water).

#Blade and soul online gameplay 2015 plus#

Although it is free-to-play (however, those eager to commit it to from the start in the UK can choose between three Founder’s Packs, offering different lengths of premium membership plus an array of exotic and useful in-game items, priced between £19 and an eye-watering £95), its gameplay falls outside of the expected fantasy-RPG blueprint. But if you crave the camaraderie and community feel that playing an MMO (perhaps as part of a clan or guild) brings, Blade & Soul could be worth checking out.īlade & Soul doesn’t conform to many of the MMO stereotypes.

#Blade and soul online gameplay 2015 Pc#

Sure, South Korea has such a unique gaming culture (centred exclusively on online PC games) that what plays well over there doesn’t necessarily make sense over here. Sadly, publisher NCSoft (also an industry giant, but until now known only in the UK for the MMOs Guild Wars and Lineage) refuses to give out audience figures for it, but it’s likely that millions of gamers have played it. For Blade & Soul has consistently been among the top ten most successful games in South Korea since it launched in 2012 (and since 2013 has enjoyed similar success in China). It’s a pretty safe bet that you’ve never heard of Blade & Soul, unless you happen to be a connoisseur of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) – in which case, the news that it has finally arrived in the UK is probably the source of much excitement.