I realize that it isn’t going to happen with western players falling for the “new MMO” hype that will eventually happen once Kakao and Bluehole begin their PR campaign with this title. But given what happened with Bless Online (unsurprising if you just search through this blog) where many folks were unrealistically optimistic about Neowiz, it bears repeating that Ascent: Infinite Realm is going to be a niche and will likely have a lot of Kakao’s monetization handprints in many of the games systems.
This blog slowly became intertwined with “stuff” regarding Bluehole to the point where I have zero confidence level in their development teams being able to optimize the engines they use for their games. Devilian (RIP) was an oddball exception more so considering the fact that it ran on a really old version of Gamebryo and it took a lot of particle effects on the screen to FPS lag the client; the same cannot be said for their currently published titles which relies on Unreal Engine 3 and 4. Part of TERA’s “optimization” (which is based on a much older build of UE3) includes prioritizing/delaying the loading of textures plus using base model appearances (as greyed out silhouettes) which in 2018, just doesn’t look good.
Ascent: Infinite Realm (A:IR) began its development in 2014 towards the tail end of the Korean PC MMO venture capital investment wave (before it shifted to mobile) when it was known as Project W. The design experience to this day remains around Unreal Engine 3 (though NCSoft is now going hard into UE4 which will eventually translate into more Korean developers having more experience with MMO design in that version) which is why A:IR ended up being designed using UE3. It is also safe to presume that some world assets were simply reused/modified from TERA.
The whole “floating islands” aspect which the game world is comprised of is really just an extension of much smaller themes used in both TERA (guild Sky Castles which are no longer functional) and Devilian (Asperon). The emphasis with A:IR is large scale realm versus realm combat though and FPS client lag is probably going to result in a nice slideshow effect if Bluehole continues on their “standard operating procedure” with (poor) optimization. And if they utilize the same texture loading prioritization scheme, the game is going to look really bad when you see dozens of grey blobs coming at you with FPS stutter as textures are loaded in. For a title being released in 2019, that would be unacceptable.
Bluehole of course wanted to quickly announce the game coming on the heels of PUBG’s unexpected success during its Steam Early Access. I’ve said what I wanted to about PUBG and PUBG Corp (formerly Bluehole Ginno) throughout recent entries in this blog that one can just search for. PUBG however is losing momentum and their recent lawsuit against Epic Gaming (filed in South Korea) could end up backfiring (since as mentioned, Epic has the right to exercise the nuclear option given their terms of use when it comes to indemnification and termination where they could revoke all of Bluehole’s rights to use the Unreal Engine that powers TERA, PUBG, and A:IR).
One thing I am certain of is that A:IR is not going to be the next MMO that players are looking for even though Kakao is going to try to put a lot of marketing behind it (best not to fall for that hype).
