After an arduous journey from Beta to Beta, Bandai Namco has officially launched their flagship Fantasy Open-World MMORPG, Bless Unleashed, today on the Xbox One first. Though it remains to be seen whether or not the game will suffer the same fate that the previous Bless titles had to deal with, from terrible frame rate, combat issues and server instability – one thing is for certain, the developers of Bless Unleashed must be well aware of this. After all, even though it’s not the development team working on it (Neowiz), Round 8 Studio is still a subsidiary of the original team. Still, Bandai Namco hasn’t ever let us down, so if they truly believe in this product, there must be something to it. Even with Bless Unleashed, Bandai is already working on their next MMORPG Blue Protocol.
Just recently the team at Bless Unleashed finally released their Discord Server, which players can speak with the rest of the community, get news directly from the team and ultimately offer feedback on the game. It is encouraging to see that the Bandai team is open to receiving feedback and wanting to better the game overall. Regardless, moving away from the Bless Online fiasco and all the issues that brought with it – I am well aware that this is an entirely new game, using Unreal Engine 4, a new combat system and still using some of the assets that the original title had, all while focused in the same “Bless Universe”.
The team did have an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit a couple of days ago, to address any questions or concerns that the community had. The one question that drew me in, was why the game had Race-Locking, especially now in 2020 when that feature is so outdated. According to the team however…
“The Classes in Bless Unleashed are race locked for story purposes. However, we are always listening to user feedback, and no that there are people who would like this removed. We’ll consider it for a future update, but not likely one that will come any time soon.”
I won’t comment on the fact it says no instead of know, but on a final note, I do wish the team a fantastic launch and hope it does go well. We all know how MMO launches can be.
