Last week, both Neowiz and Aeria Games confirmed that Aeria is no longer serving as the western Bless Online publisher — worse, Bless appeared to be entirely canceled for our region. “Gamigo announces that the MMORPG Bless Online will not be published in Europe and North America,” read the formal announcement. “The collaboration had to be cancelled because after extensive testing the game did not meet the quality standards of both Neowiz Games and the gamigo group. […] Together with Neowiz we have come to the conclusion that the technical difficulties cannot be overcome, so we agreed not to complete the game for our respective markets.”
Done deal, right? Apparently not so much. “The game will not be published” turns out to mean “we will publish the game ourselves.”
“You must be curious about future Bless in EU/NA as we ended our contract with AG,” Neowiz told MMORPG.com. “NBS believes the EU/NA Bless fans are very valuable to us so we commit to deliver game updates directly to you. We will surely present you with improved Bless in the future.”
The series of announcement this month wasn’t entirely unexpected; there had been little public progress on the western version of the game since last autumn’s announcement that Aeria was completing gutting Bless’ combat system for a do-over, which Neowiz acknowledged it was still working on, along with performance issues.
“Last September, our partner Aeria Games (AG) shared two major concerns: Ingame performance and combat system. We believe these two need to be polished before coming into the western market. We, Neowiz Bless Studio (NBS), have been working on the two issues, but figured out that more time is required to achieve the satisfactory condition.”
Neowiz also suggests that the extra development time to bring Bless up to snuff “was not aligned with AGs’ business milestone,” hence the end of the partnership.
Bless was intended to release here this year, but we’d seen far more movement from the Japanese and Russian branches, the latter of which is apparently still in limbo.
