Game Review - Bless Unleashed (Steam/PC)

on
Game Review: Bless Unleashed by Neowiz
Score: FAIL but it's free to try so you might as well have a look. And in fact there is actually a lot to like, but enough deal-breakers to fail it unfortunately. Unlike a lot of reviews you may see that pre-emptively sink the game because of it's history, I did actually put in over 130 hours to give the game a really good go, and I'll talk about some pros and cons.

Fail Combat is buggy. What you see is not always what happens.
  • When your reticle is over the target and red, it is supposedly an indication that you have that enemy specifically targeted and it is in range because the reticle completely disappears when it moves out of range.
  • However, your attack (even an area effect one) can travel right through the enemy and do nothing. This basic mismatch between what players see and can reasonably expect versus what actually happens is unacceptable. I sent the following video to bug reports and they insist there is no bug whatsoever.

-4 Even worse, if the target is not level with you but higher or lower, despite keeping the reticle over the enemy your attack can just shoot straight ahead instead of at the enemy.
You have to activate "target lock" on top of actually having targeted it. But target lock itself has problems. Often it will just pick the nearer enemy instead of the one you have actually targeted, or suddenly turn you to face nothing at all and lock on nothing. And it has a terrible tendency when you are dodge rolling to suddenly move you in the wrong or opposite direction because of a camera direction change.
Finally, even if you have the target locked, some attack animations are so slow that if the target moves even a bit, by the time your attack gets there, the target has moved away and it will do nothing.

Fail Character models are flawed. Even games over ten years old don't have the type of gross and obvious flaws for character representation.
Your character might look great in their underwear but once in-game they can look very different.
For female humans, there is an ugly distortion at the thighs which fattens it whenever you wear pants.
For all characters, how the game does lighting can change the colour of your lips from slightly glossy red (for example) into a white shining like a lightbulb. Even in-game NPCs might have eyebrows half one colour and half another radically different colour.

Fail Immediate fail for not being open about Open World Player versus Player.
  • Bless Unleashed gets an immediate fail for hiding the no-opt-out open world Player versus Player (PvP) system. At the time this review was written, their online game guide does not even have a section on PvP. On Steam where the game is available, there is also no information on it and players basically had to find out through forum posts and third-party information.
    • There is open world PvP. It can happen anywhere. Once you are level 20 you can turn on PvP mode and attack anyone. The later-game level 30+ zones are "disputed territory" and PvP zones.
    • There is NO opt-out. You cannot flag yourself to not want PvP. The story will take you to those "disputed territory" zones.
    • You can join one of three factions according to your playstyle, and one of them is specifically a PvP faction. There are non-PvP missions for them, but theoretically the focus for the Court of Ravens is PvP.
  • PvP -- especially the inability to opt-out and avoid it altogether -- is such a major decision factor that it should be stated clearly up front. Hiding it like this is unacceptable. (And kudos to Amazon for taking a stand against toxic PvP by changing New World to be opt-in PvP).
Probably should give a lot more points here since games like Elder Scrolls Online not only ignore player feedback but make changes in the opposite direction or that make no sense whatsoever.

-1 Combat is extremely cheesy
For most fights -- even against some "elite" or "boss" enemies -- you can basically cheese by dodging away. Even so, some people don't like the so-called "animation lock" that prevents you from dodge rolling/evading while you are committed to an attack or attack sequence/combo.

-1 Combat will destroy your spacebar
Some bosses have a move that incapacitates you and you have to mash your spacebar very quickly to "succeed" at getting out. The time you have to do it is very short so you have to mash it very quickly. You might spend more money replacing your keyboard than you spend on this game.

-1 Dungeons are too hard compared to their minimum rating
What they probably did was adjust downward the level and gear score requirement compared to what it should be. For example, the first 5-man instance, Infernal Kitchen, is extremely hard for players who are actually at or slightly over the level 15 requirement. There is actually a one-time quest for it, but you won't get it till much later in the quest sequence in the level 20's. This is the same pattern for most of the dungeons and lairs, suggesting that they tweaked it lower but didn't actually rebalance it to match the lowered entry requirements.

-1 The game systems encourage illicit Real Money Trading (RMT), which is basically banned in every online game, and is related to money laundering and account theft.
  • From day 1, RMT accounts billboarded chat channels selling the time-limited "Starseed" currency. Literally every half second someone would be posting and the global chat was just a fast-scrolling advertisement.
  • We'll talk about various systems later, but the developers should really have known better as there's nothing really new in what they are doing, so this is a very old problem -- with very old solutions that have worked in other games like Neverwinter Online and Secret World Legends.
  • Basically, instead of trying to stop RMT, let players have an in-game exchange between cash shop currency and in-game currency. In the case of Bless Unleashed, this would be the ability to exchange between Lumens (cash shop currency) and Starseed. Players can buy Lumens with money and put it on this exchange market to acquire Starseed from players who want to sell Starseed for Lumens. Legitimate players will not want to risk an account ban from using RMT, or account theft / identity theft from using some shady third party website.
  • An additional measure to limit RMT is to limit cash shop access until an account has a certain amount of play time or a character developed to an advanced level.
-2 You cannot trade directly with other players.
  • This is apparently a basic feature which was turned off to thwart RMT, but which in fact encourages it even more. And has another side effect of shifting the focus of playing an online roleplaying game into playing a marketplace simulator.
  • When you cannot trade directly with players, you end up accumulating items. We'll talk about crafting separately later, but for now, let's look at Blessings.
    • Blessings are a type of item that you need to upgrade your skills. You get low-grade white-tier Blessings for the type of character you are playing, but when you Fuse them into higher-grade green-tier Blessings, the result is random and you can get it for any of the five character types as well as any of the four Blessing types -- potentially a total of 5 x 4 or 20 inventory slots used up and there's not a lot of inventory space to go around.
    • It wouldn't be so bad if you could trade with others and get what you need in exchange, but the main alternatives right now are to hold them or sell them on the Marketplace, which uses Starseed.
    • Players who want to hold these (and other things they might need) go to the Marketplace to buy more inventory space. Which are probably sold by RMT so that they can have a good stock of Starseed to sell back to players.
    • Because inventory expansions aren't cheap on the Marketplace, players might get desperate for Starseed. Either they work the Marketplace if they have anything to sell, or they resort to RMT. The only guaranteed legitimate way to get Starseed is the daily exchange allotment players get, so it is extremely time-gated. Hence the allure of buying a large lump sum of Starseed from RMT.
-3 Crafting is mostly useless.
  • A huge grind for materials, and this also takes up a lot of inventory space with materials you are waiting to accumulate enough of.
  • Most of the crafts produce items inferior to what you can get from doing quests.
  • You cannot produce many useful things with basic items you harvest. For example, you can make your Priest or Mage some pants but you can't make any other armor without special materials (and why not?).
  • Furthermore, they require many different types of materials, in medium to large quantities, and all of them "rare" because there is only a low chance whether you get them or not.
  • Some of them even require you to defeat world bosses ("field bosses") that need a couple dozen players to defeat, and you need 20 units and it's not guaranteed you will get even one unit each time.
  • Materials from fishing are also a big component of crafting, but there are different types of fish according to what waters they swim in, and when you salvage them all you can end up with literally a dozen different types of materials.
  • All of this adds up to a very inconvenient experience if you wanted to pursue crafting at all. It would not be so bad if you could trade with friends and thereby help each other get required materials and craft them (thereby getting them out of inventory) -- but you can't. You have to go through the marketplace.
-2 Upgrading gear is very badly thought out.
  • The probability of the process breaking or destroying your item is so great that really you don't want to do it at all unless you have Starseed to spend on repairs (again, driving you to the time-gated currency). So all the materials and special currency for upgrading gear is just a useless inventory space waster when you instead just do more quests and fight more overland bosses to hope for a slightly better item in the reward boxes each time. And slowly the game will give you something better than what you have now.
  • But eventually you will have to do it and you may want to because you've found one very good weapon you'd like to invest in. However like many Korean online games, they feature a failure-breaks-your-weapon scheme that somehow ends up with you spending more money.
-1 Gear Score is obviously flawed
Sample Gear A: Base Defense 100, item bonus is Defense +20 for a total of 120.
Sample Gear B: Base Defense 105, item bonus is a bonus to harvesting speed
Because Gear B has a higher Base Defense score, it has a higher Gear Score than Gear A. However, why would you wear Gear B into combat if you can choose Gear A? At the same time you need Gear Score to qualify for some combat such as dungeon requirements and it probably relates to what gear will drop for you as well.

-1 Jewelry runes are very badly thought out.
  • Quite early on you get a ring that needs runes to activate for it to have any use. But whether runes show up are random, and which ones show up are also random. You can craft items with runes but you can't choose the runes so it might end up being a very time-expensive time waster getting materials for it. Ultimately it is so random that it's probably a system designed to hook obsessive players into grinding the game to get items with the proper runes until they get it activated. For everyone else it's useless.
  • The flaw here isn't so much that jewelry is useless, but the design process and mindset that results in a system like this even being implemented. It's one of those "do they even play their own game" systems.
-2 Estate development (housing) drives players to RMT.
  • Trying to develop your estate is extremely tedious.
    • The basic materials you need are stones and lumber from your basic facilities on your Estate. But it takes almost three hours before your workers get you anything, and when they do, there is only a chance they will get you a very small quantity of these basic materials.
    • Luckily, there is merchant on your estate who can sell you the materials -- for Starseed.
    • Probably the system is set up so that your Estate will evolve over the lifetime of your time in the game and that may be a reasonable system. Furthermore, with Starseed being time-gated to a certain allotment every day, some acceleration through purchase is okay.
    • But simply placing the merchant there also drives players to RMT for a quick lump sum of Starseed to accelerate their Estate for in-game benefits.
    • Alternatively, you can of course play the Marketplace and try to buy and sell your way into Starseed profits instead of actually playing a roleplaying game.
  • And you can't put direct honest effort into housing. You can't mine anything yourself for it, or easily hire more workers for it. Even decoration plans are very-low-chance drops -- Again driving people to the Marketplace and the need for Starseed.
-1 Tooltips are severely lacking in useful information.
  • For example, there is no indication of the range or area of your skills until you actually acquire and use them.
  • Another example: In your Estate (housing), you can build various facilities and decorations. Early on you are given a freebie and it provides a small buff/bonus to your character once you build it. But the tooltip for structures don't explain anything, so you may well spend valuable resources building it, only to demolish it later because you really didn't want or need it at all one you discover what it does (if it does anything at all other than be a decoration).
+1 They aren't lax about action against cheaters and aren't afraid to publish a list of banned accounts as proof. This really should be a +0 basic requirement of every MMO, except a lot of MMOs don't do it well.
+2 Some common sense thought put into open world PvP that has PvE elements.
  • Although they have open world PvP, from the brief look I had in the "disputed zones" where PvP is meant to happen, quest-givers are typically in some kind of "protected zone" or at least near NPC guards that can complicate an attempt to attack a player while they are engaged in dialog with an NPC.
    • This basic thoughtfulness is severely lacking in some games, such as Elder Scrolls Online where they have many quests in their open world PvP zones of Cyrodiil and the Imperial City, but you cannot really stop to talk to anyone because the location is being camped and you will be attacked while in dialog.
  • As well, the seamless no-load-screen open world means you cannot be attacked while stuck in a load screen transitioning into open world PvP. Unlike, for example, Elder Scrolls Online where players camped doorways and killed other players while they were loading in. The situation was so bad that eventually the developers put in safe zones at transition points.
+1 Overland is dotted with quests that rotate over time. There's "always something to do" and you don't have to run back and forth to quest-givers (although in the case of fetch-this quests, that's not really immersive since you don't actually turn in the goods anywhere).

+1 Easy zones are still relevant later on.
  • A starter zone might have level 4 enemies when you were first there but when you come back at level 30, the enemies are levelled up to 23 so that you can still get some loot and experience (if there is more than an 8-level difference you get just a bit of gold). So it's easy but not too easy that you don't have to work.
  • Most of the items you get will not be useful to you when your level is high, but some once-per-day  / once-per-week rewards for killing a boss will be adjusted to your gear score. For example, Elite enemies give you a reward bag once per day and the gear inside is generally at or slightly higher than your gear score for that type of item.

Comments

Post a Comment