NCsoft has announced a release timeframe for the Unreal Engine 4 upgrade for Blade & Soul (the announcement was made at the conclusion of the 2019 Blade & Soul Tournament with a new trailer). The company last posted a preview of the Unreal Engine 4 upgrade back in July.
The trailer is mostly CGI rendered via the UE4 game engine but does not actual much in-game footage (there is a scripted fight scene done machinima style). The company noted this major update will include remastered visuals, a reborn world, advanced combat, new awakenings, and a new dungeon.
This update will be released for the Korean version in December and is being called, Blade & Soul Complete. This is one of the first Korean MMO’s from the large generation of Unreal Engine 3 based ones, to receive this type of overhaul. NCsoft has the resources (money and people) to perform this but they also drew upon the experience gained from scrapping Lineage Eternal and rebooting it using UE4 and a new name; Project TL. It however remains in development hell due to changes in the project leadership and development team (a closed beta was initially slated for 2018 with a 2019 launch date for Korea; the CBT never happened though and the company has not really covered this title in their earnings calls).
The company has been also working on a mobile version of Blade & Soul which is likely where they killed two birds with one stone when it came to the remastering the graphic assets while another team worked on recoding the game client. While I am not a fan of NCsoft’s business models and monetization techniques, I am looking forward to seeing how their overhaul works in a real server/client setting (because if it sets a higher bar, other Korean studios will be forced to re-evaluate their existing UE3 titles, and make a decision if they need to do something similar to remain competitive or end up being left in the dust since NCsoft has been committed to UE4 for their PC MMO’s for several years now).
