Hello, friends, and welcome to the fourth and final installment of Choose My Adventure with Blade & Soul. Last week, as you may recall unless your memory is somehow worse than mine, I asked you to cast your votes to make two decisions about how I should go about wrapping up my time with the game: First, I asked which tradeskill guilds I should join in order to take the game’s crafting system for a spin. The Merry Potters and the Soul Wardens beat out the rest of the competitors with a fairly decisive 39 and 34 votes, respectively, while the next-runner-up, the Acquired Taste, garnered only 21. Second, I asked y’all to choose whether I should spend my last weekend in the game taking part in structured arena PvP or running the game’s first six-player group dungeon, Blackram Narrows. Based on the poll results, however, I may as well have asked whether I should punt wombats into a crocodile-infested lake or end world hunger; the vote wasn’t even a contest, as Blackram Narrows earned its victory with a resounding 114 votes to the arena’s 28. And before anyone says anything, don’t even try to pretend there aren’t at least 28 people on the internet who would vote for the wombat-punting.
Over the course of the weekend, I did as I am programmed – I mean, as you voted for me to do, and… Well, let’s just say this: If you were hoping for an upbeat ending, I’d recommend that you pretend this column was never published. If, however, you’re interested in reading along as I spend several paragraphs balking at dubious design choices and bemoaning wasted potential, then you’ve just hit the jackpot. Either way it’ll be cathartic for me, if nothing else, so let’s dive in.
I ended my adventure last time with my arrival at the serene Jadestone Village, home to the first crafting guild representatives I’d come across during my time in the game so far. So since I was already in the neighborhood when I logged back in, I decided I’d go ahead and do some crafting. I was expecting nothing more than the usual “gather mats, click button” style of crafting that you folks are almost certainly getting tired of listening to me whine about. To my astonishment, though, Blade & Soul‘s crafting system isn’t the same bland and boring one that I’ve come to expect and loathe, oh no. It’s much, much worse.
Yes, that’s right: The devs of Blade & Soul, through some kind of dark alchemy and/or infernal pact with demonic fiends, have somehow managed to take what I previously thought to be the least-engaging form of crafting ever contrived and stitch it together with a time-based component a la Facebook games, creating a fun-devouring abomination that even Frankenstein’s creature would claim is an affront to god and nature. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how it works: Each character can be a member of four trade guilds — two gathering guilds and two manufacturing guilds — at any given time. As the voters decreed, I chose the Merry Potters and the Soul Wardens as my two manufacturing guilds, and I accordingly chose the Green Thumbs (who harvest clay used by the Potters) and the Tree Fellers (who harvest sap used by the Wardens and Potters alike) as my two gathering guilds.
Once I had declared my allegiance to my crafting guilds of choice and completed some short introductory quests that involved retrieving wood and soil samples for the Tree Fellers and the Green Thumbs, it was time to get my hands dirty. Wait, I’m sorry, did I say, “get my hands dirty”? I meant to say, “get someone else’s hands dirty.” My mistake. See, with only two exceptions (which I’ll get to shortly), you aren’t actually going to be harvesting any of your crafting materials yourself.
Instead, you put in a work order with a gathering guild (which requires paying a few coins), and then you wait while they send someone — probably an unpaid intern — out to do the dirty work for you. Manufacturing works the same way, only you have to provide the materials in addition to the coin that will never make its way into those poor interns’ pockets. Now, I don’t know about you folks, but even though I’m not necessarily the world’s biggest fan of resource farming, I’d rather do that than sit around and wait for an NPC to go fetch my crap for me.
I can already hear some of you shouting at the screen (or more pragmatically, typing in the comments section) that part of the point of the Facebook-game-style click-and-wait system is to keep you from having to spend hours on end running all over creation in search of just one more iron vein so you can craft this worthless sword, level up, and go craft more, slightly-less-worthless swords. And I get that, I do, but here’s the thing: That’s basically the game admitting, “Yeah, I know my crafting system is boring; here, I’ll do it for you so you can go do fun things instead.” Also, the whole, “at least it keeps you from having to farm mats for hours on end” argument kind of falls apart when you consider the fact that some professions actually require you to, you guessed it, farm mats for hours on end.
Remember those two exceptions I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back? While most of the primary crafting materials you’ll need can be acquired by way of crafting guild work orders, there are two that cannot: water and quartz. For these resources, which are required to complete many higher-quality crafting recipes, you’re going to have to go out into the world and find a wellspring (for water) or a stone deposit (for quartz) and, using a jug or pickaxe, gather them the old-fashioned way. But hey, it’s not like I’ve never had to farm mats before, so why am I making a big deal out of this? Well, where do I even start?
For one, wells and stone deposits are static; they’re marked on the map, and they always spawn in the exact same places, give or take a few yards. Oh, and it’s not like the zones are just chock full of these things, either; throughout the entirety of the first region, which consists of four individual zones, there are an average of five of each node per zone. That number isn’t rectally derived, either — I did the math. Four zones, twenty wells and twenty stone deposits total, ergo roughly five of each node per zone. I’m not a mathematician, but I think that checks out. And, as a nice little cherry on top of all that, the respawn rate on depleted nodes is unbelievable. I mean that sincerely: It is literally beyond belief. I’m not personally sure what the exact respawn time is because I lacked the patience to stick around and find out, but I can personally confirm that it’s over 30 minutes (the official limit of my patience), and many knowledgeable players I spoke to estimated it somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour.
I eventually resorted to just hanging out by one of the node markers in a high-traffic zone and waiting for a new channel (i.e., instance of the zone, a new one of which is created whenever the others get too populated) to pop up, at which point I’d try to switch channels — which you can only do every so often, though I’m not sure what the exact cooldown is — and hope that I was the first one to arrive in the fresh new zone with its freshly spawned nodes. It wasn’t a unique idea by any means, and I was frequently beaten to the punch by other players with better network connections, but I did manage to get a few quartzes this way. Still, it was an outrageously tedious and frustration-inducing process because even if I was lucky enough to be the first one to the node whose spawn point I was hanging out at, the other nodes in the zone were scooped up just as quickly, so it was a whole lot of waiting for new channels to open so I could swoop in and, if I was lucky, get my hands on a single piece of quartz.
About now, some of you may be saying, “Wow, OK, yeah, that is pretty bad,” and you’re right, but hold your horses because I’m not even done yet! Each “region,” which I’m using in this context to refer to a group of zones given a collective name — like the first region, Viridian Coast, which as I mentioned consists of four individual zones — has its own particular varieties of quartz and water. For instance, quartz mined from the Viridian Coast is called Viridian Quartz. Anyway, the quartz and water from higher-level zones are generally used in higher-level recipes, but the reason I bring them up is that, in order to gather a given zone’s water or quartz, you have to use jars and pickaxes specific to that zone: Continuing the previous example, in the Viridian Coast you would mine Viridian Quartz using a Viridian Pickaxe. You get the idea.
Although you’re given a fair number of pickaxes and jars over the course of each zone’s questlines, you’re eventually gonna need more. They’re created only via crafting, so you’re either going to have to craft them yourself, buy them from another player on the market, or you can pray to RNGesus that you pull some from the daily quest reward boxes I talked about last week. Based on my experience, your odds of pulling a pickaxe or jar from a reward box are better than your odds of pulling a zone-specific weapon chest key, but not by a whole lot.
So in case you need a recap of why this is a terrible system, let’s review: The nodes are outlandishly sparse and outlandishly slow to respawn, and they can only be harvested if you have the appropriate gathering tools, which can only be (reliably) acquired by crafting, meaning that, assuming the most dystopian possible outcome, the people with the money to buy pickaxes and jars will be the only ones who are able to consistently gather water and quartz in large quantities, and because these resources are incredibly rare (and therefore incredibly valuable), they can sell them (or the products they are used to craft) for ludicrous sums, thereby allowing them to effectively dominate the market. Yes, I know that’s incredibly farfetched and unlikely, but I’m trying to make a point, and that point is this: Blade & Soul’s harvesting and crafting systems are without a doubt the absolute most tedious, frustrating, and outright boring that I have ever encountered.
That last sentence sounded awfully conclusive, didn’t it? It’s almost like it was a signal that I’m done railing against the game’s crafting system, like I’m finally going to shut the hell up about it and get on with my life so you can get on with yours. Unfortunately for all of us, it’s not. Listen, I know that it’s unrealistic to expect every game — or even most games — to put in the time and resources to design an interesting, active, and engaging crafting system, but if you’re going to distill it to the point that the most engaging part of the system is clicking a button and coming back in however-many minutes (or hours) to receive your order, it’s hardly worth including at all. The very least that Blade & Soul could do is make the tedium of crafting worthwhile. But not content with simply spitting in your eye, the game insists on kicking you in the shin while you’re distracted.
Before I launch into this, a quick disclaimer for those who missed it last week: I already have a max-level Blade & Soul character (who is, coincidentally, a Kung Fu Master and a member of the exact same crafting guilds as Aesong), and some of what follows is based on information and experience derived from my time playing him as well as my time on Aesong during this CMA. As far as I can figure, every crafting guild except for the Merry Potters and the Soul Wardens is almost entirely useless, especially at endgame. Now, I know that’s a very dogmatic statement, and dogmatism is something I genuinely try to avoid both in my articles here on MOP and in my daily life, but I honestly feel it’s perfectly justifiable.
The items crafted by every guild besides those listed above are either so situationally useful as to be practically irrelevant, or so readily available through other sources that players will rarely find it beneficial to craft them (or buy them from crafters) instead. But the Merry Potters make pickaxes and jars, which I addressed above, as well as a special crafting material required by the Soul Wardens to make transformation stones, which are materials required for item enhancement and evolution and thus in constant demand. I mean, sure, you could join the Forgekeepers, but who wants to make weapons in a game where you use the same one from start to finish? I’m sure some arguments could be made for a few of the other crafting guilds, too — the Radiant Ring, the Silver Cauldron, and the Acquired Taste, maybe — but ultimately, most of the stuff you can craft is pretty much useless, and it’s nowhere worth the tedium of actually crafting it.
OK, now I’m done talking about crafting, so I guess I can spare a few paragraphs to talk about my experience in the game’s first six-player dungeon, Blackram Narrows. Thankfully, a few paragraphs is all I really need because the experience was so underwhelming. While you might think that has something to do with the fact that I already have a max-level character and have run Narrows just shy of a dozen times, I promise you that it felt nearly the exact same as it did the first time I did it. The only thing that’s changed, really, is that I now know how to play my class (which is also Aesong’s class). While I may have felt at least a bit of excitement the first few times I ran it simply because I had no idea what I was doing, my runs over the course of the weekend led me to realize that there’s really not much more excitement to be had.
For starters, combat against trash mobs (which makes up a solid 70% of the Blackram Narrows experience) is, as they say, just one big Charlie Foxtrot. I don’t expect trash pulls to be especially challenging engagements requiring meticulous strategizing or anything of the sort, but the thing about Blade & Soul’s frenetic, action- and combo-oriented combat is that it makes large group battles (e.g., six players against five or more trash mobs) into just a big, flashy cloud of ability effects and flying fists. You wade into it, mash some buttons, and hope for the best. I know that trash pulls are just speedbumps, and they’re rarely interesting, but Blackram Narrows (in addition to many of the game’s other dungeons) has entirely too many trash pulls.
The boss fights, by contrast, are actually fairly interesting, and they can get pretty intense if you’re actually running with a group of level-appropriate players. For the most part, everything I said last week about the intensity of combat still applies, but when fighting bosses, an additional mechanic comes into play. In order to hit a boss with a CC effect like a stun or knockdown, players have to combine forces to perform joint attacks, which really just means that, if one player hits the boss with a knockdown attack, he won’t actually get knocked down, but an alert will pop up prompting other players to use knockdown attacks. If another player’s knockdown hits within a short window of time after the initial attack, then the boss is knocked down and the group can go to town.
It’s not particularly complex or difficult to pull off, but when you factor in that many bosses use powerful attacks that have to be interrupted by CC effects, it does mean that players need to coordinate at least enough to make sure that it’s possible to CC the boss at the right time. Other than that, boss fights in Blackram Narrows are pretty much your boilerplate MMO boss fights: Don’t stand in the bad stuff, interrupt when needed, don’t stand in the bad stuff, kill adds if they spawn, and don’t stand in the bad stuff, for god’s sake people. In short, they can be a lot of fun, but the proportion of time spent wading through trash to time spent enjoying challenging boss fights is unfortunately skewed significantly in favor of the former.
I’d be remiss if I concluded my discussion about Blade & Soul’s dungeons without mentioning one of their few unique aspects: the loot system. I’ll admit that my feelings about it are a bit mixed, but if I’m being truthful, I think I tend to hate it more than I like it. Basically, gone are the days of need-before-greed and begging the RNG to fall your way. Instead, the game implements an auction system wherein players bid against one another for loot drops. When a player wins a bid, the money they spent is split evenly among the rest of the group.
It’s an interesting way of doing things, but personally, I’m not a fan. For starters, it takes way too damned long. There’s nothing like that moment when you’ve just taken down the final boss and though he dropped the item you came for, it’s last on the loot list, and so you have to sit there and watch as your groupmates have protracted bidding wars with one another, raising each other a few copper at a time until they either run out of money or realize that they don’t actually care enough to let this go on for another second because oh my god, guys, we’re not getting any younger here.
I’m also concerned with what this will mean for new players who join the game when players with max-level characters are busy leveling up their alts. Obviously said alts will be loaded with cash sent from max-level characters, so the legitimate newbies won’t stand a chance of winning a bidding war against them if it comes down to it. Sure, if they decide to bid every last copper they have, they might force Moneybags McAltstein to spend enough money that they might get a reasonable chunk of change out of the deal, but at the level of Blackram Narrows, a legitimately new player who hasn’t been given extra cash might have somewhere between 30 to 50 silver to blow. That’s nothing to an alt funded by a high-level character, and even if they decide to risk it all, once that 30-50 silver is divided five ways, they’ll see about 10 of it on the high end. Even at higher levels, the average amount of money received from the winning bidder is nowhere near adequate compensation for knowing that you’re going to have to run the same goddamn dungeon again (and probably again after that, and so on) and hope that the next group doesn’t include some rich asshole who wants all the same drops that you do.
Anyway, I could say more on that matter, but I feel like I’ve drawn what should have been a 2000-word article, at most, into a monstrosity nearly twice that length, so I’m going to go ahead and wrap this up. If you’re looking for some kind of tl;dr to take away here, I’ll say this: Blade & Soul is an impeccable example of how to do action-oriented combat with panache, but it’s also an impeccable example of how to do just about everything else with utter mediocrity. I did spend enough time in the game to level a character all the way to the cap, so it’s probably hypocritical of me to advise anyone to avoid it altogether, and I really do think it’s worth dabbling in for the combat alone. However, going through the game again (or the early part, at least) on a new character has highlighted a bunch of flaws to which I was blinded by inexperience during my first time around, and if I’m being brutally honest here, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to uninstall as soon as I finish writing this. Sorry, Blade & Soul; I wanted to love you, and your flashy wuxia combat was enthralling for a while, but there’s just not enough depth here to keep me coming back.
And with that, Blade & Soul’s time in the CMA spotlight is officially concluded. Thank you for joining me on yet another journey, and I hope you’ll swing by again next week, when I’ll be doing something that may or may not be a surprise, but no matter how you cut it, it should be exciting. Until then, friends!
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Matt each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures — and you get to decide his fate. Be gentle (or not)!
