Choose My Adventure: Blade & Soul NEO doesn’t seem that different from Blade & Soul to me

I suppose I might have tripped myself up going into this month’s game in terms of expectations. See, I know that Blade & Soul NEO was kind of like a progression server kind of experience (though not exactly like that – Bree’s time at a press event spells it out better), so there wasn’t going to be any major shifts to how the thing plays or how the story moves, but… I don’t know. I was sort of hoping for more?

Either way, though, my initial time in the game so far hasn’t been bad. In fact I was quite surprised how easily I fell back into the game’s combat routines. But I also have to admit that I was expecting the “neo” in this one’s title to sort of hit a little harder.

The one thing that sort of stood out to me the most while I was in-game was that the visuals still look and feel a little dated, just cleaned up a little. It’s this weird mesh of visual improvements in terms of scenery and lighting while the character models still have very clear sausage fingers. This game’s character designs have never looked great in any version, in my opinion, so maybe there was only so much that NEO’s graphical improvements could do to help out.

I also have to say that something about the way NEO looks kind of makes the story cutscenes even more unpleasant to look at. I’m pretty sure I recall this game really, really, really loving to use depth of field effects for pretty much every scene in its presentation regardless of whether it made any kind of sense, but for some reason the visual updates seem to just make it look worse.

Also I still contend that most of this game’s character models are absolute horror shows of design. Get thee to a human female anatomy book. Study it. And when you think you’ve figured it out, study it again.

The story is also really just… missable. I’ve gotten into the early to mid-20s in the leveling path previously and never found a single thing about this game’s narrative any good, so it didn’t take me long to get to a point when I was just mashing the “F” key in order to get through the hokey plot that was being told. I cannot wait for Hajoon to finally die so he can leave me alone. I’m ready for Namsoyoo to finally go turncoat so I can stop looking at her barely human face so much.

So if I’m hating the story all over again and don’t find the visual improvements of any impact, what’s left? Well, the combat has always been the sauce in this game, and that once again holds true here. I started off as a Blade Master since I recall that one being one of the simpler classes to learn about the B&S combat rotation of blocking and counter-attacking, and sure enough, it all felt really tightly done and just as solid as I remember. I’m still going to miss TERA’s action combat the most, but B&S has always been an extremely strong second for the fight model.

I also must give a nod to the much, much cleaner-to-read character UI. I don’t think I’ve gotten too deep into the weeds yet in terms of how character progression goes in NEO, but almost immediately the UI layout felt better arranged, more legible, and a lot more streamlined. So if the game’s narrative and visuals hold no major surprises, I’m glad to say that the mechanical improvements that I’ve seen to this point felt significantly better.

It all kind of made me sort of regret the choice I made in class, actually. I’m not trying to present myself as a Big Deal Gamer™ and I also recognize that the lower-level enemies telegraph their big attacks to hell and back, but I also have to admit that maybe I played things a bit too conservatively in my returning class choice.

Even so, I am having some fun doing this right now. The combat feel remains one of the best features of this MMO and the little thoughtful touches to systems and progression appear to be quite well done. It’s not enough to make it feel like an all-new game the way, say, PSO 2 does when it went all New Genesis on us, but it’s fine. At least it’s fine enough that I do want to continue to investigate this more.

And that does lead us to this week’s poll choice.

See, B&S is obviously a themepark game – the themeparkiest, one might argue – meaning I’m on a rather pre-determined path, so that means making things a little bit more engaging in the parts that I care about might be in order. I also do have to point out that NCsoft’s press code gave my character a bunch of seriously powerful gear, which makes progressing through things even more like easy mode.

But then again, I also do not hate easy mode in MMOs. Sometimes you just want to rip through things to get to the endgame stuff ASAP, and while I don’t believe I’m going to get to that point, I also do wonder whether using this character will push me into some of the more involved parts of the game that much faster, like some of its dungeons. Maybe the Blade Master class will actually become more mechanically dense.

So basically I’m asking for everyone’s thoughts on this. Do we push forward, pedal to the metal and get as far as possible as fast as possible, or do we play this “normally” with a different and more involved class and without the purple-letter kit?

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As usual, polls will close up at 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, March 7th. In the meantime, I’m going to take a few moments to remind myself what this MMO’s different classes are like and both see what I might want to swap to and explore what the Blade Master offers later down the line. Gotta be prepared for both eventualities, right?

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.