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My Complete Review


bruno16pt

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Hi everyone,

Since I've been playing since release day I feel that I can give the devs some ideas for what to improve.  It's going to be long, and for the sake of the post, if you want to add your opinion please do, but try to keep a solid constructive opinion and let's make this a nice and clean topic!

 

  • Amazing fantasy graphics

Using Unreal Engine 3, witch is a very powerful engine, makes the game really beautiful and the animation is really well made. The Dragon Pulse Rides are super well animated and give the game a unique feel to exploring the map. Transitions between glide and running are also a good example of how good the animation is. Skills' animations are, for me, one of the best features of the game, amazing effects using the elements create a perfect atmosphere for a enjoyable combat experience.

However with some new-gen MMO's releasing this year I would love to see a Unreal Engine 4 update! With more detailed graphics, no loading screens and performance optimization.

 

  • Combat mechanics

Blade & Soul's combat mechanics are some of the best I've seen and experienced, the combo oriented combat is easy to get used to but really hard to master, and that's perfect. Everyone can enjoy a play through out the story and if you develop enough skill you can have lots of fun in PvP. But there's some negative points as well, the animation-cancelling should be fixed. I know it's considered a feature, but people with high ping are prejudiced; The training page/skill tree should also be revised since some skills' effects are hard to understand and consequently hard to make the right choices when levelling up.

 

  • Open World

As I mention already, loading screens are so 2012 :) Jokes aside, the map development is amazing, very well decorated and with really distinct areas. Some areas are super bugged and cause the player to run against invisible walls witch can get a bit annoying (this happens a lot when running). The map could be more populated, giving a more living world feel.

 

  • Dungeons

Dungeons are a big part of the game and as well as the world itself they should be more populated and a little bit harder, so people need to play smart instead of using every skill to kill the monsters and rush the boss. Every non boss drop should be stored in a dungeon inventory and in the end auctioned before the boss loot auction. I see a lot of people who just wait for the drops and press F like there's no tomorrow so they can get every potion and accessory that drops. We also need a system to kick AFK's and a voting system to choose the loot mode before entering the dungeon. 

 

  • Items and economy

Having to run the same dungeon multiple times can be frustrating but not being able to sell/trade the most valuable items you drop is annoying, and I don't even use one third of them to upgrade my own items, so I ended selling every one for 1 Copper :( I feel that inventory space is kinda in the limit... If it was easier to unlock inventory slots the system would be perfect. All equippable items should be tradable and marketable; this would create a useful marketplace and people wouldn't waste hours running the same dungeon.

Also items should have different upgrade choices with different attributes. This would make items more complex and harder to craft witch would result in a more stable economy (if they were all tradable/marketable) and a better character development experience.

 

  • Professions/Jobs

I haven't been in a guild and I don't know much about the professions/jobs, all I know is that they seem useless (at least for now). In a MMO a profession should give better items and better upgrade choices to items (following the above point). They should also have exclusive items and give exclusive small skills, that could be obtained by practising that profession and levelling it up.

 

  • Story and Quests

I haven't finished the story and I won't write any spoilers, so all I have to say about this is that cut-scenes are beautiful and the story, despite not being that original, is still interesting. The side quests starts to get repetitive, since all quests are to gather something or to kill some guys/monsters because they stole something or someone was captured. Some quests are unnecessary to the story and all you have to do is talk to a guy in one side of a building and then go to the other for like 300 experience, however most of them have well balanced rewards.

 

  • Game Shield

The game have a lot of bots and spammers, and I believe programmers are working hard to find a way to protect the game but please hurry, it takes away a big part of a MMO -> the community, and not being able to talk with people and make new friends is one of the worst things in a MMORPG...

 

  • Forum

The forum is beautifully well developed, love the quote system and notifications. Search is really power and useful! Plus the editor is so clean and functional... Just needs some CSS color tweaks and it's a 10/10 forum, it really makes me want to be part of the community and share my opinions and knowledge :)

 

In order to end this extensive wall of text, I want to congratulate the developers for creating a amazing game, and ask them to keep listening to the community and improve the game with every update!

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Great review overall! I agree with loading screens and the RNG of drops, THANKFULLY RNGesus has been on my side and I've only ran things 5-10 times and getting the item. Also, if you're someone who really enjoys a game, membership is the way to go! Rank 3 membership already and the bonuses are AMAZING. I get 15-20copper per minion kill at times, almost lvl 40 with less than 14 hours of game play (hence all the RNG loot ahha) but really in the end, this game is truly an upgrade from WoW!

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28 minutes ago, Critcrying said:

Great review overall! I agree with loading screens and the RNG of drops, THANKFULLY RNGesus has been on my side and I've only ran things 5-10 times and getting the item. Also, if you're someone who really enjoys a game, membership is the way to go! Rank 3 membership already and the bonuses are AMAZING. I get 15-20copper per minion kill at times, almost lvl 40 with less than 14 hours of game play (hence all the RNG loot ahha) but really in the end, this game is truly an upgrade from WoW!

Thanks @Critcrying! RNG is fine, some people have a lot of luck others may think they're cursed, it's part of the game, but yeah sometimes can get very frustrating... 

I can't compare Blade & Soul to WoW... Despite both being amazing MMO's, WoW is still ahead in some aspects, but hey, we are two weeks in the EU/NA release... I believe this game can take over the market if they really want to. 

 

Something I forgot to mention (I'll edit the post after) is the forum. It's amazingly well developed, a big shout out to the team who developed this forum, beautiful and functional, they just need to change some text color in CSS and it's kinda perfect :$

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I read the review, and it's nice and structured feedback, but some questions jumped out at me:

How much development power does NCSoft actually have ?

Do they have complete code documentation and are free to change and balance the game as they please ?

Or do they have to run it all by the original game producer in Korea?

And how many resources would the game producer actually allot to the US version?

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TBH as someone who probably wouldn't be able to do animation cancelling due to the fps I can get the game to run at I think it should stay, get better internet or play classes that don't need to animation cancel to be viable.

 

It sounds harsh but removing it from the game would be like say removing Sakura from the game in SFIV because some people can't do her combos when it lags or removing Alpha Patrakolos (think that was his name, it's been a while) from SC5 because people can't do his just frame inputs when it lags.

 

I mean ideally, online competition in a game that requires good timing and reactions are pretty sub optimal anyway but as this is an MMO it's the only way you'll get it so the onus is partially on the users to make sure their conditions are as good as possible for competition.

 

Personally I play on a laptop touch pad, so classes that can switch sides on you a lot are a real pain in the *cricket* for me to deal with, not going to complain about them being able to do that though as if I wanted to, I could go out and buy a mouse and figure out somewhere to put it on.

 

edit: I suppose on second thoughts a fix for this could be to add something like a 5 frame input buffer (What Arc System Works does to make their games feel so good online) or to allow a player to set a regular input delay so they can get used to the timing and do the animation links on muscle memory but it may be too late to do so at this point and I daresay the people with a good ping would see the first option as dumbing down the timings and complain just as loudly.

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Also a note, i have a high end PC, sometimes get those odd FPS jumps but you gotta realize also this game came out like a week ago, just over a week. Over a million players already, sure they must have anticipated it, but wow that was a HUGE increase in numbers from the start. Overall NCSoft has never been a PERFECT company, but they are FAR better than most (EA especially) I will be a long time BnS member, and love this game!

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1 hour ago, 895770_1452550614 said:

I read the review, and it's nice and structured feedback, but some questions jumped out at me:

How much development power does NCSoft actually have ?

Do they have complete code documentation and are free to change and balance the game as they please ?

Or do they have to run it all by the original game producer in Korea?

And how many resources would the game producer actually allot to the US version?

Those are some great questions, unfortunately I don't know anything about that...

 

1 hour ago, Iduno said:

TBH as someone who probably wouldn't be able to do animation cancelling due to the fps I can get the game to run at I think it should stay, get better internet or play classes that don't need to animation cancel to be viable.

 

It sounds harsh but removing it from the game would be like say removing Sakura from the game in SFIV because some people can't do her combos when it lags or removing Alpha Patrakolos (think that was his name, it's been a while) from SC5 because people can't do his just frame inputs when it lags.

 

I mean ideally, online competition in a game that requires good timing and reactions are pretty sub optimal anyway but as this is an MMO it's the only way you'll get it so the onus is partially on the users to make sure their conditions are as good as possible for competition.

 

Personally I play on a laptop touch pad, so classes that can switch sides on you a lot are a real pain in the *cricket* for me to deal with, not going to complain about them being able to do that though as if I wanted to, I could go out and buy a mouse and figure out somewhere to put it on.

 

edit: I suppose on second thoughts a fix for this could be to add something like a 5 frame input buffer (What Arc System Works does to make their games feel so good online) or to allow a player to set a regular input delay so they can get used to the timing and do the animation links on muscle memory but it may be too late to do so at this point and I daresay the people with a good ping would see the first option as dumbing down the timings and complain just as loudly.

It's a great discussion topic, however they've already stated this is a feature and won't be removed.

 

43 minutes ago, Critcrying said:

Also a note, i have a high end PC, sometimes get those odd FPS jumps but you gotta realize also this game came out like a week ago, just over a week. Over a million players already, sure they must have anticipated it, but wow that was a HUGE increase in numbers from the start. Overall NCSoft has never been a PERFECT company, but they are FAR better than most (EA especially) I will be a long time BnS member, and love this game!

If you change your settings to optimal for combat it gets a little better... But yes, I also have a high end PC and sometimes I get ridiculous frame drops :/ I'm sure it will get fixed.

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11 minutes ago, bruno16pt said:

 

 

If you change your settings to optimal for combat it gets a little better... But yes, I also have a high end PC and sometimes I get ridiculous frame drops :/ I'm sure it will get fixed.

Yes I'm definitely hoping it gets adjusted. STill doesn't take away from the awesomeness of this game tho!

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