I decided to check out Blade & Soul, the latest F2P Korean MMO to launch. So far so good… combat is fun but I haven’t played enough to form an opinion on the rest of the game.
I tried playing a Blade Master and a Kung Fu Master, both melee classes. Combat utilizes the left and right mouse buttons, number keys, and sometimes the tab key. Basically you attack with the left mouse button, which cycles through 2 builder attacks to unleash a 3rd more powerful attack. You can block with the right mouse button (or the 1 key), avoiding damage, and if you block you can counter-attack with a different skill for big damage.
Combat isn’t tab-target based – you have to get in range and face your opponent, so overall combat is a mix of timing and positioning. In this next shot, you can see the targetting reticule showing my range to the monster – 13m in this case. That’s too far for my hand-to-hand attacks so I have to get closer.
Most fights are fairly short, giving the feeling of power, versus an attrition-style wearing down the enemy over a lengthy fight.
The questing became a fairly typical advancement from quest hub to quest hub, with the minor difference that there aren’t that many quests at each, just 2 or 3 besides the storyline quest.
This game has a sprint feature, for a limited time based on endurance (whatever the green bar is under those blue circles – when you sprint that bar decreases). It’s handy to zip from mob to mob or run back to turn in a quest.
If you jump when sprinting, and then hit space, you glide for a bit. Yep, feels just a little bit like Guild Wars 2. 😉 Another thing that feels a bit like GW2 is that hitting F or Y generally advances quest dialogs, picks up quest items, etc. I kinda like the general purpose “response” key actually, much better than hunting around to click a small button or something like that.
I’ve played about an hour fiddling around on 2 chars. It’s a decent game but then at only 1 hour into it, I claim no deep insights. I personally enjoy the more involved quests of TSW or ESO, and so far I haven’t been given any skill choices. One of my favorite things about the original Guild Wars was taking hundreds of skills and mix-n-matching them to make a build. Here, new skills show up already bound to keys and so far, that’s it. Granted, at level 6 I’m not expecting too much.
MMO Juggler 