PVE in Blade and Soul is a lonely and antisocial experience

The story of Blade & Soul takes us on a journey with the Hongmoon, a group of talented martial artists learning the ways of fighting high up in the clouds. You join them as a new recruit and begin your training, but before long a mysterious group, led by an enigmatic black-dressed woman called Jinsoyun, attacks the training camp. The Hongmoon are wiped out and you, as the only survivor, must find your revenge and save the citizens of the world from the coming evil.

Along the way you will meet up with the various groups fighting back the darkness, each comprised of colorful characters who will help you throughout the journey. As the narrative goes, it is very well portrayed. This is due to the setup which fits well within the tutorial experience, as you learn to fight alongside your rookie character. After all this time in development I expected the localization for the game to be far better quality than it is. The voice acting for non-player characters is incredibly poor, possibly the worst I’ve ever heard in a game but luckily you can swiftly skip through the dialogue.

Otherwise game sounds are done very well and the soundtrack suits the game perfectly. If I was going to start picking holes we could argue as per the normal with MMORPG the public chat is full of people trying to sell you stuff for real money, there no live or automated moderation carried out in the chat from what I can see, I know it hard to moderate especially when there so many servers and so many local area chats going on however it something that really should be getting snipped out in this day in age (more of a moan at the industry then this game as it affect all the games of this genre).

I’d like to comment on the story but after the first hour I completely lost interest in it, which is voiced like a badly dubbed kung fu movie. I doubt the voice actors even knew their characters or what context they fit in. And so my travels through the world of Blade & Soul continue. Over the next week I plan of getting deeper into crafting (I never do) and attempting what I hear is one of the game’s core draws - PVP combat. I’m going to suck so hard, just you wait. Regardless of nationality, players can also expect the game to further improve in the coming months. Along with the one million player milestone NCSoft promised “a regular cadence of content updates and patches” in the future.

PVE in Blade & Soul is also a lonely and anti-social experience. No one really talks or communicates much, the mob tagging system means you’ll actively avoid other players so they don't take your quest kills, and the dungeons are a free-for-all experience. You might have a poor player or two, but you can still complete the experience on your own if you’re good enough. There’s really no reason to care about the team. Rag on the holy trinity all you want, but it makes certain facets of a party needed and that need makes people more predisposed to things like communication.

I could keep talking about different aspects of this game you should see, but that is just wasting your time you should be playing it. I fully recommend this game. You have nothing to lose it is free to play, beautiful graphics, dynamic combat, strategic PvP, raids, top-notch cash shop and easy ways to get gold from thousands of illegal sellers. What more could you want in a F2P MMO? Did I mention it has controller support for faster controls? Don’t take my word for it, GO PLAY IT NOW!