Blade and Soul: First Impressions

Sandrianne, the Force masterIntroductions need to be made! I installed and started to play Blade and Soul yesterday. I made two characters over on the Hao District server.. Which was one of the recommended ones at the time. As I log in today there is an 800 people queue and I more or less gave up on logging in at all. Mostly because dinner is due to arrive at any minute, but also because I really don’t want to wait that long to get into the game at the moment.

Anyway, the moment I started looking at this game I fell in love with two races. The Lyn and the Yun. I made a Yun Blademaster at first, but didn’t like how she turned out so she is pending to be deleted. On my second character creation try I made this cute little Lyn Forcemaster and am absolutely loving her. It’s probably the least sexualized race in the game, which also helps. I guess Korean gaming standards are a bit different than the ones we have in the west… Because man, bouncy boobs everywhere! Also seriously out of proportion characters. It’s a bit wacky to see here and there, but I guess everyone is happy with this.

First Glances
My initial impression of the character creator is very good. There’s lots of options and you can really customize your character a lot. I think you can easily spend an hour or two tweaking away untill you have the perfect representation of you. I don’t really have the patience for this so I stuck to changing mostly the coulors, bodytype and ears/tail etc. I’m a bit sad you can’t change ear/tail colour on Lyn to match the haircolour, I hope they change this in the future.

After making my character I was able to immediatly hop into a server to play. The combat strongly reminds me of Neverwinter, which I spent about an hour playing before I gave up. It’s much more dynamic than I remember Neverwinter to be though, so that’s a very good thing. I have to say, it really takes some getting used to the mouse essentially being a fixed point on your screen. It changes the entire way the MMO plays, but not necessarily in a bad way. I got used to it really fast anyway and am taking down enemies and talking to people without any issues at all.

I haven’t played enough to really grasp the atmosphere of the game well, although the NPC’s so far are quite cliché. Also the amount of ridiculously big bouncy boobies or, for the men, overly muscular dudes is kind of annoying. I couldn’t stand looking at one myself, hence I opted to create a Lyn. Graphics wise I’m pretty sure my PC doesn’t do the game justice. I’m sure it can look much prettier than it actually does with my PC, although even for me it doesn’t look that bad and I seem to have no major FPS drops.

The Queue Thing
The one major downside to this game is that the queue times are seriously ridiculous. Even on a low pop server like Hao District (or well it was when I made my character) I was faced with an 800+ people queue during primetime. I can only imagine the already highly populated servers being much worse. Today NCSoft announced they are adding more servers to lighten the queue load, but honestly the two that the EU region has gotten is not nearly enough. I hope this doesn’t cause people to stop playing, because this game has it to actually be a decent MMO.

Final Verdict (for now)
A fun and different MMO to stick your nose into. The character creator is awesome, the gameplay is different but not bad. If you’re into KungFu and like the Korean MMO style this is definately something to consider playing, especially with it being F2P.
The only major downside I see for now is the annoying queue times, I will probably do a follow up on this post after I’ve been able to play more and can say more about the content itself.