The history of Bless Online
What is Bless online?
Bless Online is a asian open world MMORPG which was announced all the way back in 2011 and have been developed by Neowiz. Its a theme-park MMORPG which features 2 factions (think Alliance vs Horde) that can partake in open world PVP, Battlegrounds and Castle Sieges. Bless will also have lots to offer in the PVE aspect of the game with the usual dungeons and raids.
Bless runs on Unreal Engine 3, which is of course a bit dated by now. Although i think the grahpics look nice enough considering it runs on the same engine as the MMORPG Tera.
Failed in 2 regions already...
This game first released in Korea and Russia, where it both failed really hard. One of the reasons for that was that the combat felt cluncky and was no fun for many players. It is also reported that the in-game cashshop was one of the problems. This resulted in the closing of both the Korean and the Russian clients.
After that all happened a rebuild version of Bless came to Japan, where some changes were made to the way your character progresses and how combat skills work. The japanese version is still live today, however it has not been a great succes. The changes that were made were probably not enough to keep players satisfied.
New (better) version of Bless online coming
New bless published by Neowiz themselves!
We have had recent announcements that Neowiz will self-publish a new version of Bless online that have had very big changes to it and will be releasing globaly in May 2018 on Steam as a early access titel.
I think there is still hope for this new Bless version to work and that is mainly it is being published by Neowiz themselves! I will explain why this is important in a bit.
Changes made to combat
So the combat was one of the main reasons why Bless failed in the first place. So they reworked how combat works in Bless completely!
They have stated themselves that the most work done in this rebuild version has been with the combat, so expect big changes here!
On their website they describe the new combat system as "Rhythmic Combat", where you would pick two out of six stances, and four main skills to go with that. From there you will use your skills in combo with each other that would give you extra effects.
So how they are describing this, reminds me on how the Elementalist class in Guild Wars 2 works. As the Elementalist in GW2 you can pick a element as your "stance" and while being in a certain stance, would change your active abilities to that element.
Here is a video showcasing this:
Of course we have no further details on how exactly the combat will look like other then the official information that Neowiz have given us. One last thing worth mentioning is that they also appear to have made changes to the UI and Action bar as you can see in the below image.
Leveling up and Skills
In the new leveling system they appear to have created a new way of how you obtain and maybe upgrade certain skills. There seems to be system in place that needs "gems" to upgrade or unlock new skills. It is also stated that these gems can only be obtained through playing the game and it is not possible to buy them with real money, thus avoiding pay to win.
Will it be pay to win?
Short anwser is NO, it will not be pay to win at all. At least this is strongly stated by Neowiz themselves. But of course they could say this now, and also launch the game as such and implement P2W items at a later date, just like what happened to many games like Aion, Archage and Black Desert.
However...
Remember i said that it is important that Neowiz is publishing Bless themselves rather then a third party like Aeria games or Gameforge. Because, if there was a third party involved, they would have control over what was in the cash shop, and Neowiz could not do much about that. But now Neowiz is the publisher, they will have final say in everthing! Meaning, if they say do really don't want any pay to win elements in Bless, then there should not be any.
Also remember that the game failed in all regions already and still they are working really hard to deliver a game that the community asked for. So i find it really hard to believe that they would ruin all that work by making it P2W and letting it fail again, but now forever.
Massively MULTI-player
There is also a feature in the new Bless that we have not talked about yet. And that is the multiplayer aspect of this game and how Neowiz wants to motivate people to play together, as they should in a MMORPG. They have implemented a system that can give different buffs when in a party with other players. This means that when you play together, you can receive all kinds of buffs that would benefit you and your party and would make it better for you to group up with other people then to just solo everthing.
As stated on their webiste, you can choose between combat buffs, or lifestyle buffs. The last one is probably for the role players among us but not much else is known about this system. It does however really seems like Neowiz is really trying to make Bless a more immersive experience, which is great of course.
In-Game Shops
So we already talked about why Bless won't have any P2W elements in the game, but they will of course have a cash shop in-game, like many other MMORPGs. What is more interesting about this though, is that they will have two different types of currency you can use to buy items from the shop.
The content token is currency that you can only get from playing the game and can be used to buy "functional" items in the content shop, as they themselves stated. I assume this might be for things like potions or other consumables?
The lumena tokens are the ones you can buy with real money and purchase cosmetic items in the lumena shop. I also believe that they have stated that you can exchange content tokens for lumena tokens. So it would even be possible to buy cool cosmetic items without paying anything at all!
Improved Content
There were also massive changed made to the way you progress in this new Bless. It appeared that before these changes, you would just be dropped into the world without any guidelines of what you should do next, making it confusing for new players. Thankfully they have reworked this and created a tutorial zone, and a linear story questline, which would make it more easy to know what you should be doing next and where to go.
The tutorial zone supposedly is some kind of instanced hub which you can even access at later levels in the game at any time you want. While there, you could practice your rotation on dummies for example.
Also worth mentioning is that there are changes in place when fighting enemy monsters. Apparently in the earlier versions the monsters would just keep hitting you until one of you would die, but now the monsters will have special abilities to make combat more interesting.
Will Bless fail or succeed?
Right now everthing depends on how big the combat changes and all other issues people had with the game really are. I do not worry about P2W items ruining the game at all, right now it just depends on how "fun" the game is now. Of course it should be fun to play, or there would be no reason to play it at all.
But let's just say the changes they made are good enough to make the game fun again. If they managed that, their next goal should be new content releases. As it's a theme-park MMORPG, which depends on new content being added, they should not fail this. If there is nothing to do at end game, people will quit the game, its just as simple as that. But my concern is that they are releasing it as a "early access" titel, but i think most people will judge it as a fully finished game, and Neowiz might not release new content in time or exit the early access stage in time... This will hurt the game so much, that if this happens, they might never recover from it. But that is just my opinion.
I do hope that Bless will succeed, and we finaly can add a new good MMORPG to our lists, as we have so few right now. Initially failed MMO's have recovered from before, and even grew to one of the biggest MMO games of this moment. Of course i am talking about Final Fantasy XIV. This game also failed super hard but enough changes were made and the game relaunched as FFXIV A Realm Reborn, and is now one of the top MMORPG's! So it could happen for Bless as well, and i hope it will!
Release date
If you were not yet aware of the release date, it will be coming to Steam in May 2018, so in just a few weeks as of writing this post. But remember, it comes on Steam as a early access titel, so we all should treat it as such.
Brought to you by:
Also read:
DIABLO 3 VS PATH OF EXILE
ARMA 3 FUNNY COMPILATION
GAMES TO PLAY WHEN YOU ARE FEELING SICK
THE BEST CLASSIC MMORPG FOR LORD OF THE RINGS FANS!