Keeping this VERY short. The Unreal Engine 4 Upgrade for B&S went live yesterday. Graphically, the game looks better due to the increased fidelity (character models, mobs, world environment). I’m not 100% percent certain that the original art style (color palette as an example) was completely retained but then again, I’m not a long time player. That’s about it for the good part.
NCSoft did very little however to improve the netcode or even taking full advantage of things like asynchronous loading; the game still drops frames in some areas including transition between zones or into a single player instance (unlike what Bluehole achieved with Unreal Engine 3.5 + custom extensions in Elyon and the 64-bit client and 3.5 Engine upgrade for TERA).
Considering NCSoft’s vast resources and the amount of time spent on this rework (that includes what they did with Frontier and this), I expected a little bit more than just upgraded graphics fidelity. This just seems more like putting a fresh coat of paint on a car that has underlying mechanical flaws.
