You’d be forgiven for having forgetten about Bless Unleashed – its last closed beta was way back at the beginning of July, and we haven’t heard much else about this Xbox One exclusive since then. But there’s good news today, as the Neowiz and Bandai Namco have explained their silence (they were retooling the game) as well as announced an open beta running from November 7th through 21st.
“During our first Bless Unleashed closed beta in April we set out to gather feedback and data related to overall game performance and crashes we could not find during smaller internal tests,” Neowiz’s Jason Park explains. “[The] second closed beta test saw significant performance improvements and minimal client crashes compared to the previous test. We did, however, struggle with server crashes during the first half of the test, which we were able to get sorted (mostly) toward the end of the test weekend. The July closed beta also allowed us to get community thoughts on our combat system, overall pacing, early game difficulty, and progression.”
The new test, therefore, wll see major performance improvements, a combat overhaul to make it speedier and make combo chains work better, tweaks to the tutorial Dream Dungeon, and a rebalance for the newbie game’s progression and flow.
As we’ve previously covered, the game is a Neowiz/Round 8 Studio collab being published by Bandai Namco expressly for the Xbox One. It’s not a direct port of the now-failed Bless OnlineMMORPG PC, as both of our previews to date demonstrate; the game has been built for console as an action-combat MMO first and foremost, with little more than the setting and some art assets being shared between the titles. The PC version of Bless, unfortunately, is still due to sunset on September 9th.
