Blade and Soul. The name of this cult MMORPG of Korean origin, which was released in 2012 in our homeland, brings back many nostalgic memories. BnS has gone through a lot of changes, starting with various updates and ending with the transition to the new Unreal Engine 4, which refreshed it a lot.
Backstory
Blade and Soul has been on the market for a number of years and has a large fan base that has been developing the project with YouTube vids, artwork, fanfics and other fan art. So there’s a pretty tight-knit community built around the game.
The game itself is free, but has an in-game store, which is quite common, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. After downloading the game and accepting the classic user agreement, you will be opened the main menu, where you can dig into the settings, create a character, come up with a name for communication and read about classes. But let’s not dwell here too long, after all we came here for the game.
Races and Classes
The most exciting part of the game is creating a character and choosing a class. Usually, you have to go into more detail about it, telling you about everything at once. But I want to share my experience with you, and I will tell you about the rest only in passing.
There are 4 races to choose from. They are ordinary people Sheng, basketball fans Wang, eared and tailed Lin and melancholic Feng. The latter, by the way, can only be female.
Appearance customization, by the way, is a separate respect, because I haven’t seen such an elaborate character editor in any MMO yet. Of course, we can change hairstyles and beards, skin and hair colors, change height and physique. But on top of that, there’s more fine-tuning of every wrinkle on your face. The color and shape of your eyes, what pattern they will have, customize scars individual details of the face and body.
Whatever. To have a SIMS editor in MMO is, of course, cool, and you can pick at it for a long time, but we are still more interested in classes. And there are a lot of them here. You’ll be offered 14 different classes to choose from, starting from milish master of paired blades and master of kung fu, long-range master of spirits and master of shooting, and guys who can give the heat equally well at any distance.
I’m not going to tell you about each class. I’ll just point out that the game doesn’t have the classic division into the roles of tank/healer/DD, so each class is self-sufficient. To be successful in a fight, you will not only have to deal damage, but also effectively defend yourself from enemy attacks. To do this, all classes have a number of damage avoidance abilities in their arsenal. Blocking, teleportation, jumping, anti-control – all of these will have to be used as often as attacking techniques.
Beginning of the game and story
Your story begins with a beautiful cinematic of a poor fisherman rescuing you from the angry elements in a raging storm, trying to bring you to your senses on his boat. After that we are thrown back a day, where some lady wakes us up from our sleep in the local Hogwarts, explaining that we will sleep through everything and it’s time to go to training.
The first set of quests is basically a small but cool training where we are taught to run fast, float beautifully in the air, interact with characters and the world, and fight. And if you’re playing as a summoning master, you’ll also be given a cat to partner with.
I was wildly hooked by the fact that every move we make is backed up by a beautiful cinematic. And at the very end of the chain there’s a whole mini-movie, which is epic enough to overwhelm many anime series.
You know, it’s hard to tell you that the plot is great without spoilers. It’s really great and can rival many modern single player projects. Skip tasks to get to the mouthpiece faster is clearly not worth it here. The developers have done a good job of presenting an interesting story that you want to follow.
