I’ve been sitting on this draft for almost a week now deciding how to keep it short without going off into a full on rant about these South Korean game studios…
The following was posted on June 15th around a week after the news first broke about Aeria Games canceling their contract to publish the game.
http://www.mmorpg.com/bless/news/neowiz-committed-to-bringing-the-game-to-the-west-1000044563
Neowiz Bless Studio (the developers) reached out to MMORPG.com in order to reaffirm their commitment to a western release (self-published) of Bless Online while also providing more details as to the news from the week prior.
My (short) thoughts? NO! NBS has had years to try and iron out the technical issues and it seems the design falls apart outside of high bandwidth/low latency locales (like say South Korea or Japan; both well connected in major cities). They obviously have been trying to resolve those issues so that the game works better across larger geographic regions (which is going to be the case for NA and EU) but haven’t gotten there considering the closure of the Russian servers.
South Korean development studios (for MMO’s) generally do not give a rats ass about truly delivering quality products that are designed from the ground up to work well outside of Korea. When a western publisher shows interest, of course they are going to wine/dine them. All many of them want however is the added revenues from all too eager western players (quality be damned).
The health of any title domestically is usually a good indicator of its long term potential outside South Korea. To keep this short, all I see is a last ditch effort to try and salvage what they have where it wouldn’t surprise me to see it turned into a cash grab.
