Of course, I haven't played any B&SNeo since the day I installed it around the end of February. That doesn't really have anything to do with the quality of the game or lack thereof, more the plain fact that for the last three months almost the whole of my available free time has been spent on Suno.
Making music with AI has effectively replaced playing games as my core leisure activity and seems likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I'm putting almost as much time into it now as I used to put into MMORPGs ten or fifteen years ago, although that's still nothing close to the time I would have spent in virtual worlds a decade before.
But for that, I like to think I would at least have given B&SNEO a few sessions and written a few blog posts about it. I really like the original game, into which I must have put a few hundred hours over the years, and I was curious to see how the updated and supposedly improved version might stack up. Not curious enough to actually play it to find out, though, apparently.
It seemed at least a possibility that, if I had the thing on Steam, I might get around to playing it once in a while. I'm in my Steam library every day, looking for something or other, so anything that's there gets brought to my attention a lot more effectively than if it's sitting in the forest of icons on my desktop, especially if it's something I've played recently. There's a cruel synergy in the way Steam displays recently-played games that means the more I play something, the more likely it is to get played again, while the games I neglect slip further and further down the stack, probably never to be played again.
I didn't get around to doing anything about it yesterday, what with babysitting my Overseer missions in EverQuest II and spending eight hours working on one song on Suno (And still not getting a final version I was completely happy with...) but this morning almost the first thing I did was fire up Steam and go to the B&SNEO store page, where I was greeted with this:
In the case of Blade & Soul NEO, the reason for the downvoting is very clear. People think it's a rip-off:
Extreme Pay-to-Win: if you don’t swipe, you don’t play.
The cash shop’s so predatory it makes casino slot machines blush
AVOID this clear cash grab and play something else
This game is the largest pay2win dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life.
Some of the reviewers get quite eloquent about the game's predatory tendencies:
Costs a paycheck to get enough gear for content that's 1 patch behind and a brand new car to almost do the current content
You can only like this game if you want to try fent4nyl, while being in an abusive relationship with someone that empties your credit cards, hits and mistreates you, giving you nothing back but misery
I hope you have a solid job and no family, no debt, no vacations planned so that this game can become your second, third, and fourth job.
They're also very articulate in explaining exactly why. So much so, in fact, that in some cases the detailed analyses of just what NCSoft did wrong when they gutted the original to pump and dump NEO run to more than a thousand words.
Someone did a nice list though:
10 reasons to not play and quit Blade & Soul Neo
1) DDOS or just sh!t servers
2) Bots everywhere
3) P2W/Whales
4) Useless Devs (No real fixes or bans)
5) TP Cost/Channel Change Cost/Lack of Gold
6) Cheating (Xml modifications already available)
7) Boring & Repetitive (Same sh!t everyday)
8) Time consuming (Ritual/Boss Timer sucks)
9) RNG (Loot/Skillbooks/Fusion/Enhancing...)
10) No arenas No Costumes (too expensive)
The tl:dr of all of them is
this is a giant nostalgia bait cash grab, very heavily monetized and falsely advertised as a classic experience that plays nothing like the original release
and
Everything in the game is RNG! Even RNG is RNG, so RNG is the game, and thats no joke.
Now, to be very fair, the game has only just arrived on Steam and there are only about 160 reviews so far, but I've read over half of them and they all tell the same story: former B&S players came back to try the game out of very fond feelings for the original and found their beautiful old home burned to the ground with a gaudy, tasteless shopping mall and casino built on top of it.
Even the "Mostly Negative" rating is doing game a favor. Several of the positive reviews are actually ironic negatives like this:
I love this game. Been playing everyday since the launch in february.
I also like being in an abusive relationship where my partner doesnt listen to anything I say and just takes my money so i can stay with my partner <3
Ah, where do I even begin? This game is truly something special! I’ve never felt so empowered by random chance before. The RNG system is a masterclass in how to keep things exciting - and by exciting, I mean completely out of your control. Every time I want to get a new skill, I love the suspense of knowing that my 20% chance is definitely going to work out. It really keeps you on the edge of your seat, and who doesn’t love a little uncertainty in their life?
Or they're from people so worn down by the process they can't even bring themselves to complain any more:
The negative reviews are valid. The game is a massive cash cow, but its NCSoft.. All NC games are cash cows, it's always been that way, always will be.
Remember that this is a Korean MMO. Its going to favor p2w heavily as well as have some rng systems added into it. I've seen this in most Korean MMOs.
I played the original Blade and Soul about 10 years ago. It was my formal intro to the most savage form of gacha p2w that I've ever seen.
Interestingly, that last one is from a player who makes a point that, I suspect, I might be making myself if I was actively playing and enjoying this new version of the game, namely that if you "Just play your game and have fun, leave the card in your wallet", you could probably do a lot worse than Blade & Soul NEO.
I enjoyed reading the reviews this morning. I was saying to someone at work the other day that video games have an undeserved reputation for fostering illiteracy, just as comics did when I was growing up. Anyone who spends any time on the forums or message boards or comment threads or review pages for either medium will find themselves disabused of that notion very quickly indeed.
Whether I'll take any notice of any of the complaints and accusations is another matter. In common with almost every online game I've played in the last decade and more, I'd be very surprised if any of the P2W or RNG or Gacha mechanics had much of an impact on my natural playstyle, just as very few of the issues that so concerned players back in the Golden Age of MMORPGs - camping, waiting hours in LFG, the endless grind - had much relevance for me.
When it comes to F2P, if you aren't interested in endgame activities or competitive PVP or leaderboards, most of the levers devs like to pull to get you to give them money don't have anything like the power often assigned to them. Or, to put it another way, no-one baits a hook for bottom-feeders.
Even so, the time I spent reading the reviews made me think again about installing the game on Steam. There's no realistic chance I'm going to start over in B&SNEO yet again and level up yet another new character. If I want a nostalgia hit and a quick run-around in the truly gorgeous world, the old, non-NEO servers are still up and running and I have a character in the mid-40s and another in the 60s, both just waiting for a chance to grab another level or two.
Instead of adding another version of Blade and Soul to the two I already have, I patched up the old one and I'm logging in right now to take some screen shots for the post. Probably going to be the only time I log in for a while but nostalgia, like Stamina in B&SNEO, (From what I read, anyway.) takes a while to regenerate.
Funny how AI is stoking the fire of the old passion of creating music. I wonder what passion it'd stir in me if I took the time to play around with it.
ReplyDeleteBjorn Ulvaeus from ABBA is apparently working on an AI-assisted musical now. He's quoted in Variety as saying "It’s fantastic. It is such a great tool", although I note he's mainly talking about using it to help with lyrics, which is not an area I ever have problems with. For me, it's like having a band that actually plays what I want them to rather than whatever the heck they think sounds good. Although there is plenty of that too...
DeleteI find it SO refreshing to come and read about all the fun you're having with AI. I am not as advanced as you are, but I'm also having fun. Today I had Gemini creating playlists for me like "Rock hits that launched during the summer months between 1975 and 1985" and things like that. I have also begun using AI search as my default and find it SO much faster and easier than traditional search.
ReplyDeleteBut everywhere except in my brain and on your blog all I read about is how AI is the devil and it is total crap and there are no good uses for it. It's so prevalent that I honestly worry about mentioning it. They come at you with pitchforks and torches!!
I think you just have to think of it as an app, or rather a whole load of apps. If most of the so-called AIs had been marketed as "apps", none of the hysteria would be happening. I also think that outside of a few bubbles, silos and niches, most people probably only care *whether* AI works, not how.
DeleteThe issue of scraping the entire internet to trian the models is a concern as is the use of copyright material without consent but that seems to me only to be diferent to previous waves of "borrowing" like sampling, photocopying or pirating in terms of degree, not principle. All of those got assimilated into the mainstream eventually, one way or another, and so will this.
I have to say, though, that my experience of using AI as a source of information has not been encouraging and still isn't. I never take anything Gemini tells me on face value, even when it gives links to its sources, as in that example I mentioned in yesterday's search. It is now "mostly right" but that's clearly not right enough for more than very light, trivial use.
That's interesting. I have really good luck with AI search. Maybe it is because of the things I tend to search for, which tends to be tech adjacent stuff like the syntax of a command in some scripting language I don't often use, or things like that. Also things that tend to be "Yes this works" or "No this doesn't work" without a lot of subjectivity (though in the former case I still have to be wary of security implications).
DeleteAnd then if you factor in the part about having to scroll past sponsored links and ads it just seems a lot faster and easier.
Anyway here's hoping it becomes more helpful to you!