Fantasy MMORPGs are a dime a dozen in China. And the fact is, most of them are derivative and terrible. But Blade & Soul, a Korean-developed MMORPG that just launched in beta in China late last week may be the exception that proves the rule. I’m not generally a big fan of MMOs, but after spending some time with Blade & Soul, I’ve got to admit I’m damn impressed, and hungry for more.
The game starts with a character creation feature that is as deep as any I’ve seen before. In the video below, you can see me jumping through some of the options and quickly creating a character, but rest assured that if you’re the type who is inclined to, you could spend days poking and prodding the sliders in Blade & Soul‘s system to get exactly the look you want.
And speaking of looks, Blade & Soul is a looker. There are a few weird design elements (some of the cutesy characters seem out of place to me alongside other characters that look more realistic), but in general the game looks fantastic; good enough, in fact, that I wonder how easily the average Chinese internet cafe PC is going to be able to run it. But it ran pretty smoothly on my machine, which has a graphics card that’s already several years old.
This style of character looks a little out of place to me.
It also sounds great. The music is intense, and the localization team at Tencent seems to have done a fantastic job with the Chinese voice acting. Sure, it’s a little kitschy at times, but I get the impression that it’s intentional, and perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek.
What really sold me on Blade & Soul was the story, though. Many of the MMOs that I’ve tried start off pretty boring: “Fetch me a pot. Now kill three boars. Good job, now kill another four.” Blade & Soul starts with your character unconscious, being dragged onto a boat in the middle of a rainstorm. And after a quick tutorial section that’s light on pot-fetching and boar-hunting, things get very intense very fast. By the time you start the game proper, you’ve got a good idea of the basics of the gameplay, but you’ve also got a good idea of who you are, who you’d like to kill, and exactly why those people deserve to die.
As far as the gameplay goes, from what I’ve experienced so far, it’s pretty basic MMORPG fare. There’s nothing too innovative on display here, but when it looks this good, do you really care? I’ve included a video of one battle below so you can see the game in motion. It’s a little laggy, but keep in mind that I chose a very slow weapon and that most of that lag was probably due to my own internet connection, not to the game’s servers.
I did encounter a few bugs in the game — it is a beta, after all — but there was nothing particularly serious or concerning. The most obvious bugs were just lines of spoken dialogue with no audio, but since all the dialogue is subtitled anyway, this really wasn’t a serious problem.
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