Get It Right!

 

In a short addendum to my previous post, here I am again to explain how little I understand about the games I play. It's embarassing at the best of times but to be proved wrong within minutes of hitting Publish is particularly painful.

After I finished my habitual post-publication proofread (three more typos caught) I read this slightly below-averagely snarky article (Snarkticle?) on Massively OP, which purports to explain why Bless Unleashed still has decent Steam concurrency despite no-one on Steam being interested in playing it. 

It's big in China, apparently. Is that like being big in Japan? 

I logged into the game where I'd logged out last night, which happened to be in Navarra, the main city in a region well below my character's current level. I wandered around for a while wondering what to do before I remembered I'd been farming bag pieces from the little chests that appear all over the map.

This is one of Bless Unleashed's more curious featurettes. There are NPCs in various cities and hubs, confusingly labelled Bag Merchants although they neither stock nor sell bags. As far as I can see, there's no way to buy actual bags or craft them. 

Instead, these public-spirited if lingustically-challenged individuals happily take any fragments of bags you may have found on your travels and weave them into... you're thinking bags aren't you? Nope. That would be too logical. Close, though. Inventory slots.

Is that a Fire Rift?

Four bag pieces get you one extra inventory slot and every chest has one bag piece inside. Also some gold and a few artifact shards which are used for something I forget. I'm sure it's important.

When I was levelling up I mistakenly believed these chests were, like gathering or mining nodes, not to be shared. I saw people camping the locations and jumped to the conclusion they were waiting for the chests to spawn so they could grab them before anyone else did. 

Now, I believe I was wrong about all of that. Now, I think the chests are always there, that you can grab yours even after someone else just got there first, and that I could have been expanding my bags the whole while, but I reserve the right to come back later and explain how that's a load of tosh and it works completely differently.

I got on my horse and rode out of the city gates intending to go searching for chests. They're marked clearly on the map but they lurk in bushes and behind rocks so it's a bit of a mini-game all its own. No sooner did I turn the corner, however, than I was confronted by the giant jellyfish you see above.

Something like that will stop you in your tracks. Once I'd taken a few pictures and convinced myself I hadn't logged into Rift by mistake, I cantered down to take a closer look. At first I couldn't see much happening but that turned out to be because too much was.

Looks like there's no-one here, doesn't it? Just wait another fifteen seconds.

 

There were scores of mobs fighting a couple of dozen players. The whole lot took a while to load in but I didn't waste any time. Well, not once I saw a few level 30s, anyway. The mobs were all level 28, putting them within my range to damage and therefore get credit but well beyond my capabilty of killing more than one a time and that carefully.

With plenty of bigger boys and girls doing the heavy lifting I was able to stay well back and smite as many mobs as I could target. I didn't get hit once but when the Raid Leader died I got to loot his corpse (just some gold) and then when the event ended I was allowed to grab a few trinkets from the huge chest that spawned.

I believe what I witnessed was probably one of the "invasions" I hear people talking about a lot in chat. Mostly they're asking how to spawn them and where to find them. I haven't paid much attention to be honest. Alternatively it might have been a Corrupted node, something the game occasionally tells me I can find on my map. 

Who knows? Not me, that's for sure. What I do know is this thing spawned in a low level area and a bunch of mid-levels turned up to farm it. Then, right after that I teleported all the way back to the very first starting area and got killed before I'd even tabbed back into the game (my own fault) because someone was fighting a flame saurin on top of the teleporter.

Don't push! There's something for everyone!

 

Flame saurins are part of the current summer event, Salamander Solstice, about which I was also planning to write, once I was sure I knew how it worked. One thing I do know is that every time you mine one of the glowing nodes that spawn all over the place a highly aggressive, very tough mob called a Flame Saurin spawns and tries to rip your head off.

These are always the exact level of your character, as far as I can tell, regardless of whether you spawned them or not. For some reason, although they seem to be left to wander about harassing all-comers in the areas appropriate to my character's level, back at the start there were half a dozen people  from four to thirty-four happily farming them.

I joined in for a while because that's how things go in Bless Unleashed. It's very similar to either Rift or Guild Wars 2 in that respect. See a fight or an event, all pile on, prizes for everyone.

The upshot of all this is that contrary to what I was saying in my previous post it seems the game has a number of contingency plans in place to keep people interested in all levels of the open world. Whether it's a strategy that will work long-term remains to be seen but it's definitely a positive approach.