Blade and Soul has plenty of content to enjoy

Blade & Soul is visually striking right from the beginning. Sure, Unreal Engine 3 shows its age here with relatively poor textures if you look at anything closeup, but the general art style is wonderfully unique. This is a Korean MMO and that culture is painted upon every surface, alongside some heavy influences. Mountainside cities stretch into the clouds, waterfalls dot the landscape, and vast deserts stretch out before you. Blade & Soul has some stunning vistas. It depends on what you're looking for in your MMO.

Servers are crowded, and most people are dicks. Having been an MMO player for more than 15 years, I’m used to a certain degree of courtesy between players. If you see someone else going from a creature, you let them have it. Not in Blade & Soul. The rule here seems to be do whatever you can to get the first hit. During peak times there aren’t enough critters to go around in crowded areas, and it’s frustrating as hell.

I love that you can morph your gear from the beginning to the end. It is a great system a lot more games should have. Not only does your gear change in stats, it changes looks. Don’t worry if you don’t like the new looks you can always skin it to what you like. What we consider crafting in other MMOs is not in this game. It really doesn’t fit as much as other games, but it would be nice to grow crops or live on a farm pimping out my giant breasted daughters. When I play MMOs I always like to have a place I can call home to craft.

Visually the game looks quite good for its actual age, as it was released several years ago in South Korea, the home of many MMOs, and uses the Unreal Engine which enables it to be easily run by most machines. If you like your MMOs to have an open world, this game is not for you as environments are tunnel like and separated by loading screens. The largest area I’ve encountered so far is the Scorching Sands, a large desert, which you reach in the late level 20s.

Blade & Soul is well balanced and has plenty of content to enjoy, but there is a problem that causes one major part of the MMO to be almost unplayable. This is with world based resources known as Quartz and how it respawns. Quartz is required for almost all major crafting items in the game including keys for opening weapon boxes and unsealing charms for equipment. Crafting in MMOs has always been a fundamental part of what players can do to enhance their experience. But the game has this specific mineable resource as a world-based entity and not instance-based.

In other words, if there are a thousand players on a map and there is one source of Quartz on that map, the first person to find, mine and gather the quartz will get it whilst everyone else has to wait. This wouldn’t be a problem if the respawn times were reliable, but they are not. Quartz roughly respawns every half hour with the rare alternatives ranging from an hour to two hours before they spawn back in. This has caused the player marketplace to go crazy with one single piece of this material selling for around ten silver, which is almost equal to buying a key or unsealing charm from an NPC.