Bless Unleashed formally launches on PC today, counting 40K players in final test

It’s launch day for Bless Unleashed – the PC version, that is – and it’s been a long, long time coming. Readers will recall that Bless Online originally launched in the west on PC back in 2018. It didn’t go well, and after several server closures and a corporate merge, Bless Online itself was sunsetted in 2019. But just a few months after Bless Online launched, Neowiz and Round8Studio announced a console version of the game that shared the IP but little else. That version of the game launched in early 2020, and then the company spent the better part of that year and this one testing and retesting a PC version of the console one that was spun off from the closed PC MMO. It’s been a ride.

Round8 told players on Steam today that it’s “preparing various updates in the future to keep up the expectations of [its] users,” such as “new characters, dungeons, regions, and contents such as Guild Vs. Guild.” The studio also maintains that “over 40,000 global users” joined in on the game’s final test, and that includes us. MOP’s own Chris found the game to be surprisingly decent and an improvement over the original game, although he also didn’t find much to recommend it over other titles. “It’s a decent and routine little themepark MMO that doesn’t really buck a lot of trends, and on PC it looks great while feeling a tiny bit weird in some places in terms of controls,” he opined.

We’ll be streaming the game this weekend, so stay tuned to OPTV for that. In the meantime, preloading began last night; servers are expected to go live at noon EDT.