I know this isn’t going to sit well with players who have been itching to begin playing this but I actually agree with Webzen’s decision to delay the release. It’s not only about completing all of the localization they are doing but also about the technical rollout considering the number of regional servers they will be deploying (besides the usual North American and European specific servers, officials have also confirmed regional servers for South America and Southeast Asia).
Lost Ark’s second CBT (September 15th through the 24th) is also going to completely overshadow this global open beta (even if it is just Korean only) given the sheer amount of new content that will be playable. MU Legend’s first Korean closed beta happened just a few weeks after Lost Arks closed beta (August 2016) and left players feeling underwhelmed by comparison. While this is the global open beta, they do realize there will still be extensive coverage of Lost Arks second closed beta with the inevitable comparisons.
This “open beta” moniker is also essentially just a bastardized label now for what is effectively a soft launch (a stress test of the infrastructure; authentication servers, network configurations, game servers). A poor open beta launch for this is going to be the only initial impression Webzen will get so they need to get it more correct than wrong (other publishers may have more leeway).
Some commenters asked they just release what is available and patch what is needed. That honestly never works out well because the game experience ends up being compromised due to the incomplete nature of what has been partly rolled out.
Since MU Legend is going to have an impact on Devilian (the only other similar style of game in this MMO-ARPG space that is live), it just received a 3 month stay before it takes that damaging population hit (which has already dwindled down to critical status). Trion Worlds window for announcing the next major content update is closing (reintroducing a revamped Devilian 3v3 is not what I am talking about either) where they can at least maintain the remaining loyal players (even though I’ve resumed, I still barely play so I no longer consider myself one of them anymore) before the global version of MU Legend launches.
I know there will be the inevitable calls for merging NA and EU servers. That isn’t going to happen (it’s not technically feasible given how Trion did not think through all of the possible conflicts that can happen especially with how their backend systems were designed for this game). It’s why there are Glyph related issues where marketplace items or even scripted rewards can be erroneously sent to a character on the other region server since character names are only unique per regional shard. Unfortunately, there is no money to spend like before when they had to do the server “migration” merge back in 2016 (which was mostly about data validation and testing of the merged databases – and to this day, there are some serious data flaws that can be triggered by a wide variety of conditions).
Bluehole Ginno hasn’t even updated Devilian Mobile for several months now (none of the additional guild related features, no additional arch bosses, no real time raid) so either even their mobile development team has been gutted or what few designers remain are trying to cut/paste something for Trion. Our source hasn’t had anything to share in this area though…. Again, the majority of the PC related resources have been reallocated to work on parent Bluehole’s main revenue streams; TERA and PUBG (the new sugardaddy) as well as working on the PS4 and Xbox One versions of TERA and the Project W MMO partnership with Kakao.
Digressing, while I am going to play MU Legend, I don’t see myself being too involved with it either (not fond of the general aesthetics as well as what I wrote about before regarding the combat lacking that visceral and impactful feeling).
