Like most free-to-play games, Blade and Soul has an in-game cash shop for you to spend real money or a special in-game currency on. ![]() You simply select what item you want to craft or gather, pay the fee, and then wait a certain amount of real time (around 20 minutes) and collect the item. You can join two crafting and two gathering guilds, but the process of acquiring resources feels is just a money sink, not a rewarding investment. Gathering and crafting are underdeveloped, too, requiring nothing more than time and money. I never struggled to beat them as an incomplete party well beneath the recommended level. Instead of demanding teamwork or mastery of your class, even the bigger, more elaborate dungeons feel like a breeze. Instead, they’re five minute romps through one indistinguishable cave or another with an anticlimactic boss waiting at the end. You can switch between “channels” in hopes of finding an instance of a zone that isn’t as populated, but it’s an inelegant solution to a problem that was solved years ago, made even more puzzling when you realize that the many bosses found wandering the zones will share their rewards equally whether you kill them as part of a group or not.ĭungeons are typically a welcome distraction from the bread and butter questing in other MMOs, but I found many to be unimaginative and short-most are barely dungeons in the traditional sense. Monsters or objects that you need for quests are available to everyone, not just you, which can make questing in crowded zones a nightmare as there’s no way to share the progress you earn from killing monsters with other players unless you group together. There’s also an annoying lack of quality-of-life features. Dungeons and PvP might suffice for more patient players, but the paltry experience points earned in either means it would take much longer to reach the same destination. Escaping from these quests is nearly impossible as they’re the only way to level up at a reasonable pace. It’s a ceaseless barrage of ‘go here and kill X of Y’ quests mixed with a few variants that always fail to mix things up. And though there are charming moments, they’re stretched over the PvE campaign and getting to them felt like sitting at the dinner table while my mother threatened to withhold dessert until I finished my vegetables. It’s good fun, but not exactly gripping stuff. Your quest to avenge your friends and master after they’re murdered by the mysterious Jinsoyun has the weight of a Saturday morning cartoon. Blade and Soul rarely endeavors to do anything original with this formulaic structure, and what few deviations it makes have middling results. On your quest to reach the level cap and open up the endgame activities, you’ll journey through fantastical mountains and jungles, run dungeons, and, if the fancy strikes you, dabble in crafting and gathering skills. If you’ve played any MMO in the past decade, you’re likely already familiar with every activity Blade and Soul will occupy you with. Compared to its free-to-play peers-especially NCSoft’s own Wildstar-Blade and Soul is a hard game to recommend. It has too few surprises and lacks too many features. Blending the traditions of fighting games and MMOs is a great idea, but Blade and Soul’s smart combat doesn’t propel it out of the shadow of other MMORPGs. But now that it’s finally here, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about. ![]() For western fans of the game, the wait has been torture. It’s been four years since Blade and Soul first launched in Asia.
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