I noted my skepticism about the longevity of the game back in December 2019 when NEXON announced they would be ending the Korean service.  It didn’t help when they opened a free to play version called Astellia Royal (that from reading the Steam discussion forum, turned out to be a “hot mess”).  The game did last longer than I expected even though it seemed it had been running mostly on auto-pilot for most of 2020.

Buy-to-play with the majority of Korean developed MMORPG’s is already a challenge (because most times, the leadership only views these non-Korean regions as additional revenue from already produced content as opposed to throughly understanding and designing them for a western audience).  Black Desert Online has been one of the exceptions because it garnered a huge following early on (thanks to its then outstanding character creation).  ArcheAge Unchained continues to chug along, but Gamigo is clearly trying to milk what they can from the same group of hardcores that spent thousands in F2P ArcheAge (during the Trion years).

By comparison, Astellia Online itself was fairly generic (the Astel system is what gave it some uniqueness, but not enough to overcome what I felt was extremely lackluster game play).  It had potential though because Barunson E&A were very committed to try to make changes to the game for its western market.  The problem however is that it would be a work-in-progress versus a game with content and systems already tuned for the global market.  The Korean version was already lacking content (a deathknell when trying to gate content for the western market).  Thus another Korean MMORPG ends up in the dustbin of never ending cash grabs and then the inevitable closure.  Condolences to those players who really did enjoy what it had to offer.

Initial part of the stress test worked as intended (took maybe 10 minutes to be able to connect to the game server).  Considering the number of different regions that are being crammed into one server and stressing their infrastructure, the client/server performance was pretty decent during the time I played.

The actual game itself is a very lazy port of Xbox One version.  The UI and game controls are pretty much controller optimized with very substandard optimization for PC keyboard and mouse.  Trying to just customize your character is a mess since the mouse control there barely works (and you need to get past the prologue and then into the actual campaign, to get the rest of the settings that allow customizing the UI to display).

The prologue doesn’t really convey anything that you are initially in a prologue.  Even though this is a server/client stress test, the game client itself should’ve been better designed for PC because this is a players initial impression of Bless Unleashed for PC.  And it’s TERRIBLE.  After an hour, it was enough for me to say nope.  The combat itself was not satisfying at all and the graphics looked pretty lacking.  Low grade effort seems to be a hallmark of Neowiz.

Again, I realize this part isn’t necessary the focus BUT not having a better PC centric experience ready as an initial impression, is the first important impression that players will get.  Considering what happened with Bless Online, it does not matter if Unleashed is being developed by a different subsidiary studio (Round 8 versus the now defunct Neowiz Bless Studio), it’s still a Neowiz unit.  And this does nothing to change my already low opinion of this company and its handling the Bless IP.

This test is meant to test their infrastructure before launching the actual CBT.  The PC version is expected to launch in early 2021 (The Xbox One version has been live since March of this year while the PS4 version will launch on October 22).  The preview is available for pre-load (26GB required).

I’m not expecting much out of the Bless IP at this juncture except to let them try to surprise me.

Let me just cut to the chase; Neowiz has ZERO shame with pulling this BS cash grab stunt with their Bless franchise.

I called this back in 2018 when they made their original announcement for the Xbox One (with regards to milking the Bless IP on the PC platform to fund the console version); the console version was developed by another Neowiz’ subsidiary, Round 8 Studio.  At the time, Neowiz Bless Studio (NBS) had launched Bless Online on Steam (initially as a buy-to-play title); they obviously did not want to suddenly have this newer version of a game based on the Bless IP, to be competing with this older technical nightmare version (whose development began in 2011 and had enough underlying core design problems where NBS ended up announcing a “rebuild” project in 2017, which itself was merely a bandaid fix).

The buy-to-play western version (launched as an early access title) ended up being a major cash grab and still launched with technical flaws (which to make a longer story short, resulted in the game bleeding players over several months to where it was critical enough to force them to go free-to-play 5 months later when it finally came out of early access).  Neowiz eventually shuttered the entire Bless Online franchise in all regions (with the Steam version being the last to close on September 9, 2019).  Simply put, a massive failure that most sane people could see from early on.

Bless Unleashed launched as a free-to-play Xbox One only title on March 12, 2020.  Maintaining a healthy player population on console platforms is always a challenge so it wasn’t surprising to hear they are looking to bring the Bless franchise back onto the PC.  Translation: we milked the frontloaded founders pack revenues for all that we could and our metrics reveal that we now need new suckers to milk this pig for all that we can.

Anyone and I mean anyone who falls for what will be a frontloaded founders pack cash grab, deserves being scammed out of their money since Unleashed will not have any long term viability because the studio (and parent company) behind it, primarily sees the franchise as something to be milked (because they view their customer base, as punching bag suckers who will fall for it again).  If they try to push the PC version as a paid to play product, that is also going to be huge red flag (because the Xbox One version was released as a free-to-play title with monetization designed around the cash shop).  Neowiz has proven by the failure that was Bless Online (Bless in South Korea), and the inability to retain a healthy player base on console, that they are INCAPABLE of creating a viable title with ANY long term lifespan.  It’s a complete cash grab for suckers who cannot get enough of being ripped off by false promises.

I know I’ve mentioned ad-nauseum the whole “milk and fund the next thing” aspect that is common with a lot of Korean dev studios.  Rarely does all of the revenue generated go back into the game that generated it.  Instead, some of it gets funneled into some other project (not necessarily always on the same platform).  Much of that is an outcome of that time when the VC money went into funding PC MMO’s for various game portals (and it was something that took place at a rapid clip).  Thus the development mindset was not one based on longevity (it was more about being able to quickly generate revenue and use that to help fund the next title).

This further cements why I ended up quickly calling Bless Online a cash grab once they announced their founders pack pricing.  Once again, western gamers have unfortunately proven themselves to be easy suckers by being enablers for this type of practice.  If the studio working on this console version utilizes Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform API and properly abstracts the UI and I/O, they’ll be able to make the game available for Windows 10 (obviously not happening in the interim given the existence of Bless Online) in the future.

Larger Korean development studios like Neowiz are of course trying to position themselves better with their MMO offerings given NCsoft going all in with Unreal Engine 4 for many of their larger IP’s (Aion, Blade & Soul, Project TL).  B&S console will also leverage the updated engine.  With Black Desert Online getting set to appear on Xbox One, consoles are like the next logical step when it comes to leveraging existing IP’s (or being able to extend assets onto that platform) to ring out any residual revenues.

Bluehole of course launched TERA on PS4 and Xbox One earlier this year BUT it’s a port that inherits the poor optimization from the PC version (and Bluehole really doesn’t have any type of roadmap for improving or further leveraging it into a new title or even doing what NCsoft is doing with Blade & Soul where they are redoing it in UE4).  Once they launch Ascent: Infinite Realm (UE3), the company will be way behind the curve compared to their competitors (as they are right now just riding on their non-MMO title PUBG).