When the first Blade & Soul trailers appeared, the game was a bit “science fiction” and hard to believe. Let’s put ourselves in situation, it was the end of 2009, WoW continued to dominate the Western panorama of the MMO without question and in general the genre danced to his son in terms of style, mechanics, combat system and other elements. Suddenly, from
Korea arrives a trailer that leaves many fans amazed to the genre, a certain ” Blade & Soul”“Of NCsoft that not only shows incredible graphics, with characters whose details leave everything that has been seen so far and that promises a fighting style that reminds
more of Devil May Cry than what we were playing at the time. The characters fight dynamically, dodge, block, counterattack … and also the blows have a palpable physical effect on the enemies, who fly away before the brutal attacks of the different classes that are presented, all inspired by wuxia martial arts movies.
The trailer has the effect of aging WoW and similar cutting games almost immediately. The fans were seeing a window to the future, the natural evolution to new horizons of possibilities. The specialized forums boil, the usual debates and speculations arise and, in general, cause a sound impact and draw a glorious future ahead for the MMORPG,
in which companies like Blizzard would have to take note and respond to the “Korean threat” raising the bar with Titan, the company’s new big MMO project and the “successor” of World of Warcraft. These were times of optimism and we could only dream of what would come in the immediate future. But, of course, as happens on countless occasions in virtually any field related to the
human being, things did not go as they imagined then. A year later appeared a game called League of Legends, while the MMO began to accumulate sounded failures as the catastrophic launch of Final Fantasy XIV or the obvious lack of future for Age of Reckoning. Other movements such as Lord of the Ring, which became a pioneer when going from subscription to F2P,
Already in 2016, it is evident that the genre does not go through its best moments. The mere fact that Blizzard has thrown in the towel with Titan and prefers to focus on more WoW, card games, MOBAs and an online computer shooter
before trying a new MMO from scratch says it all about the current state of affairs. And Blade & Soul? Where is that game that was going to shake the foundations of the combat in the massive games online? Well, the title of Team Bloodlust took its time to be finally released in its native country, albeit in a relatively normal time frame: 2-3 years from the first trailer.
But after that, NCsoftdecided that facing west was going to focus on two more “safe” bets for that market: Guild Wars 2 and a title of several ex-Blizzard grouped in a new studio with the mission of “reinventing the wheel” of WoW: WildStar. Blade & Soul as it expanded through China and Japan, taking advantage of its markedly oriental theme, obtaining a good recognition and frustrating the western fans, who either waited seated or paraded in a VPN to try to play, even in Korean.
Now, six years after that trailer, the Korean company has finally launched it in North America and Europe. It’s fun to watch that original trailer and its recent comments exclaiming just that, that six years have passed since then, an enormity of time where the MMO
has lost millions of followers in favor of alternatives like the MOBA. Those of us who remember the sensations of that first trailer and the desire to try it then, we must make an effort to try to remember that distant expectation. In addition, the approach is not so
groundbreaking once we have tested titles like Tera or Dragon Nest. On the other hand, it has the close competition of Black Desert, another Korean game that enjoys a more advanced technology and that has not taken so long to deign to appear in the West – it will do so in March.
