In the “what’s old, is new again” department, NCSoft will “finally” be launching the UE4 upgrade of B&S in a few days. This is not the same “Frontier Server” garbage they had launched as an enhanced premium version of the game that they tried to monetize in Korea (where it ran along side the original UE3 version). This was the completely new announcement they made last March (my criticisms are included in whole in this previous entry), not the one they originally made in 2018 (which is what ended up launching as a premium enhanced version in Korea).
Better late than never I suppose, but I’m still not sure if this will bring back players (and retain them) since the problem many players had was not with the graphics; it was the performance (client FPS drops as well as client/server latency since the game is highly ping dependent).
Their prior UE4 effort was also a mixed bagged since players felt they were playing a completely different game; that’s one of the challenges with recreating higher fidelity assets. Some folks felt that the previous “Frontier Server” was more like a graphics remaster (affecting the look of existing characters in the process). There were often times more than subtle color changes (colors that became a hallmark of the color palette that B&S graphics designer Hyung-Tae Kim used) to character models as one example. Some players expend countless hours customizing their character where it becomes easy to spot something not being quite right, when textures, colors, or lighting, are changed behind the scenes. Others felt like the game looked more like a mobile game (which is understandable since they probably used some of the same production pipeline they may have gotten used to with some of their mobile game developments).
NCSoft took that feedback from the Frontier Server (which they are closing down in Korea in order to focus on just this singular update), and realized how much they had focused on the wrong things (like not faithfully reproducing the UE3 assets into higher fidelity UE4 assets; and toning down on the realism). It remains to be seen if the visuals will feel like the way with this particular update.
Myself, I haven’t played this in years now. I’ve pre-downloaded the update in order to check out how it looks and feels. But I don’t see myself being drawn further into regular game play because it’s NCSoft monetization. It’s more of a curiosity as to their current day UE4 efforts (which I am sure is being incorporated into their development hell “might as well stick a fork in it” version of Project TL which again, was previously called Lineage Eternal, and has been vaguely referenced again in their recent financials about launching “soon™” into closed beta; something that has been repeated in prior financial reports over the past few years where it is past meme levels).
