Bless Unleashed is a console (Xbox One only for now) version that is being developed by Neowiz’ Round 8 Studio and being published by Bandai Namco. The entire game is being built from the ground up using Unreal Engine 4 (which is what the company should have done with Bless Online). Instead, it is becoming clearer where some of the 60+ (and higher) million has been going.
I know I’ve mentioned ad-nauseum the whole “milk and fund the next thing” aspect that is common with a lot of Korean dev studios. Rarely does all of the revenue generated go back into the game that generated it. Instead, some of it gets funneled into some other project (not necessarily always on the same platform). Much of that is an outcome of that time when the VC money went into funding PC MMO’s for various game portals (and it was something that took place at a rapid clip). Thus the development mindset was not one based on longevity (it was more about being able to quickly generate revenue and use that to help fund the next title).
This further cements why I ended up quickly calling Bless Online a cash grab once they announced their founders pack pricing. Once again, western gamers have unfortunately proven themselves to be easy suckers by being enablers for this type of practice. If the studio working on this console version utilizes Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform API and properly abstracts the UI and I/O, they’ll be able to make the game available for Windows 10 (obviously not happening in the interim given the existence of Bless Online) in the future.
Larger Korean development studios like Neowiz are of course trying to position themselves better with their MMO offerings given NCsoft going all in with Unreal Engine 4 for many of their larger IP’s (Aion, Blade & Soul, Project TL). B&S console will also leverage the updated engine. With Black Desert Online getting set to appear on Xbox One, consoles are like the next logical step when it comes to leveraging existing IP’s (or being able to extend assets onto that platform) to ring out any residual revenues.
Bluehole of course launched TERA on PS4 and Xbox One earlier this year BUT it’s a port that inherits the poor optimization from the PC version (and Bluehole really doesn’t have any type of roadmap for improving or further leveraging it into a new title or even doing what NCsoft is doing with Blade & Soul where they are redoing it in UE4). Once they launch Ascent: Infinite Realm (UE3), the company will be way behind the curve compared to their competitors (as they are right now just riding on their non-MMO title PUBG).
