Long Tails And Ears For Hats : Blade & Soul

It puzzles me sometimes how certain MMORPGs seem to catch on while others don't. Blade & Soul seems like a prime example of a game that could have done as well as or better than any other imported title of recent years and yet it's entirely possible to go months without seeing any mention of it.

When I first heard the name I had a vague idea it might be part of some video game franchise I probably ought to have heard of but now I think maybe it was only ever what it is, an MMORPG no-one in the West plays. Or, if they do, they keep it to themselves.

I remember liking it quite a lot in the brief period I played, a few years back. That was when a bunch of imported MMORPGs came out around the same time, although when I stop and think about it, a bunch of imported MMORPGs always seem just to have come out or to be just about to come out or to have just closed down.

I told you that wasn't a fish!

Unlike, say, Revelation Online or Bless, where I couldn't pick my character out of a line-up now, I still remember my B&S character quite well. And a memorable character makes it orders of magnitude more likely I'll eventually wander back for another go.

It's taken a while but I'm back for that overdue visit. They say you can't go home again but no-one ever said you can't go back to some place you lived for a month, that one time. Just don't count on being able to remember the key code to get in the door, though.

Actually, I did remember that part. There really is one. I still have it written down. It was when I got inside that the problems began.

We talk a lot about the re-learning curve, coming back to an MMORPG we haven't played for a while, but Blade and Soul has more of a learning cliff. I played for two hours this evening and I had to stop and read tool tips or tab out and check the wiki before I could do pretty much anything.

It comes back to me now that I found B&S a tricky proposition the first time around. I called some of the design decisons "bizarre and baroque" but I also praised the game for letting you play it as "a traditional hotbar MMO". Which comes as a surprise to me now, having just spent a couple of hours mashing buttons action style.

This is why I have a blog , I guess. It saves keeping notes. Next time I log in I'll go through the options and see what I'm missing. I think there was a toggle to swap between traditional MMO and action combat . Let's hope they didn't take it out.

With little or no idea what I was doing I thought it  would be best just to follow the main quest line until I settled in. I was hoping the plot would come back to me. I seemed to think it was decent enough, from what I wrote four years ago.

The story remained opaque but the xp rolled in just fine. Leveling would seem to be very much quest-driven. The bar barely moved while I was completing intermediate quest steps and killing mobs but finishing two storyline quests bumped me from the start of level 31 to near the end of level 32.

A simple "Yes, Mistress" would be quite sufficient. No need to be sarcastic.

As I mentioned first time around, the writing and voice acting is polished and professional. That alone puts Blade and Soul well ahead of most of its imported competitors. It's also one of the most visually appealing of games, particularly in the character design but also in the lush, color-rich environments.

It takes a particularly good photo, too. It's nice to take screenshots that look as good as the view I was looking at in the game itself for once. I didn't need to tweak anything to make these shots pop.

It was through taking the pictures that I happened to notice my characters feet. I'd been thinking of her as a fairly normal, small humanoid, something like the local equivalent of a gnome or a halfling, maybe, albeit a lot better-looking than any halfling I ever saw. Then I noticed her feet.

She very clearly has paws. Which made me think. And When I was thinking it occurred to me that, oh yes, she has large furry ears, too. And a gigantic fluffy tail!

Really, I wonder if I should get my eyes tested. Or my brain. I guess when I said I remembered my Blade and Soul character quite well that was a relative term. I basically remembered she was short and had red hair. I somehow forgot about the tail.

Oh, geez... is that mine?

I did remember she had a giant, pantomime cat although I couldn't remember what it could do or how to make it do it. Two hours later I still can't. I'm going to have to look that up, too.

As a F2P player I get three character slots. I only used one when I played at launch. After tonight, I can really see Syp's point about it being easier to start a new character when you go back to a game than to try and pick up where you left off with an old one.

On the other hand, If I make a new character it's an odds-on certainty I'll stop playing that one, this time, before it gets to the level the other one got to, last time. So next time I come back I'll have two characters I don't know how to play.

Nah, I'm going to stick with what I don't know for now. I'm sure it'll all come back to me. If I hang around long enough.