Bless: Neowiz's Jacob Han explains more about Korea's hottest new MMORPG

Korea is definitely getting excited about Bless, Neowiz’s upcoming fantasy MMORPG, which will enter closed beta for a limited test run next week. But while we’ve seen some cool trailers for the game, that doesn’t necessarily reflect how it’s going to play. Thankfully, Neowiz producer Jacob Han recently sat down with 17173 to talk more about Bless.

For any MMO, one of the biggest concerns is that the game will be full of cookie-cutter quests (“Kill four goats. You’ve killed them? OK, now go kill five goats.”). Han says that after studying what MMO players want, some of the biggest goals for Bless are “cutting down on repetitive content, making game content more diverse, and satisfying the needs of different kinds of players.”

Bless also borrows some lessons from the Lineage series, which Han worked on previously. The team is putting special emphasis on the interactions between players:

When player cooperation, competition, betrayal, and other social interactions happen, it brings a value and a pleasure that exceeds the game content itself. Bless will continue this with the game’s factional ruler struggle system, which will create internal struggles within factions over who gets the highest level of authority over a faction. Additionally, there’s also an ongoing war between the two factions that can be fought 1v1 or in groups, much like the RvR feature in World of Warcraft.

Han wasn’t ready to go into too many details about the game’s PVE yet—that content will be coming in a later beta round—but he did say that the team’s goal is balance so that the better player, or the group with the better team composition and synergy, will win PVE encounters. And team composition won’t be based entirely on the class you picked at the beginning of the game; each class has core skills but there is also a degree of customization so that you can adjust your character in response to specific situations.

One of the coolest ideas in Bless is the city sieges, and it sounds like the team at Neowiz is taking them seriously and really working to make them feel unique:

Bless’s siege weaponry is based on siege weaponry used in medieval Europe; the game has typical fantasy-game weapons but also has unique enchanted weapons. For example, in terms of siege weaponry the game has battering rams, siege towers, and trebuchets, and the creation and use of these siege weapons will require the cooperation of multiple players.

Bless‘s world is massive and seamless; Han says it covers a massive 177 square kilometers with nary a loading screen in sight. He also says it’ll be packed with stuff to do; in addition to epic game-wide wars, there will also be factional struggles and local battles to participate in.

Will the game feature Peria Chronicles-style customization features to allow players greater freedom? Not really, says Han. “Bless’s goal is to provide numerous players an abundance of fun activities in the game, so playability is more important than freedom for us.”