Bless Unleashed Thoughts

Bless Unleashed is a game that I have been watching for awhile since I first heard about it at Pax West 2018. A friend of mine appears to be doing some work with the game and hooked me up with closed beta test access along with a few keys to hand out to my readers, but we will talk about that specifically later. First lets clear up some confusion, because I can see that you might be thinking… but wait Bel didn’t this game release in 2018? The answer to that would be no but also sorta yes? Bless Online and Bless Unleashed are two different games in the Bless series, with the first being a traditional hotbar combat style MMORPG and Unleashed being more of a action combat limited hotkey affair. Last night I spent several hours playing around in the Closed Beta and immediately it feels like a mix of TERA, Neverwinter and Skyforge.

The bulk of your combat takes place with the left and right mouse buttons with some longer cooldowns existing on four buttons bound by default to numeric keys 1-4. The game uses an auto combo system similar to TERA where if you hit the left mouse button once you get a specific ability, but if you hit it again in rapid succession it actually performs a different ability. Combinations of left and right mouse clicks can be chained together to do specific combos, and there is an in game guide to these. By default your evade button is bound to the spacebar and jump to control, though the longer I played the more likely I was to swap these because I am a jumper in MMORPGs.

You start the game by choosing from one of the five classes and four races, but really… class is the piece you have the most control over. Thankfully this is not a game with gender locked classes like Black Desert Online, but each class does have a very limited choice of the four races of Human, Elf, Varg (big cat people), and Ippin (think Asura from GW2). For example I rolled a Crusader and had the ability to create a Human or an Ippin. When I went to create a Ranger later, that specific class was locked to only being able to play as an Elf. Race appears to strictly be a visual choice because I did not see any real difference between them.

You are given a number of presets that you can start with and then modify further. I hate futzing with faces in these sort of character creators, so I ultimately went with the face that I liked the best and then started customizing from there. You have a pretty wide range of options and almost all of the color pickers employ a full color gamut slider system allowing you to have purple skin and flame orange hair if you so choose it. For me I largely tried to create “Belghast” which regardless of the game has certain specific sensibilities. So I went with the dark hair, ponytail, full beard thing that I have done since World of Warcraft, and the closer a game gets to allowing me to do that thing the better.

For the most part Bless Unleashed passed with flying colors when it comes to the character creation system. There are some quirks I have encountered so far in combat. For example there are attacks that will stun your character and you have to mash spacebar, left and right mouse button at the same time in order to break free. My instinct is to stay holding on the movement keys while doing this so I will move out of the effect as fast as possible. However it seems that you have to ease up off them and re-engage them in order for the game to acknowledge that you are wanting to move now. That feels off but once I realized that was what was happening I adjusted.

The story being told is not the most engaging in the world, and if you have ever played ArcheAge, Blade & Soul, Black Desert Online or TERA you are likely going to be familiar with the style of questing that I largely associate with South Korean MMORPGs. There is a lot that is supposedly aiding the people and leading towards the core story of the game, but really it just feels like busy work. There is partial voice acting where the NPC says something… but it is completely unrelated to the dialog that is actually being said on screen. Essentially this is the modern equivalent of the Orc Peon cycling through a series of lines when you click on it in Warcraft 2. Instead of “Zug Zug” you get some comment about the festival that is going on, or that the weather is looking nice.

So far the moment to moment gameplay feels pretty enjoyable and combat feels fluid. You are going to spend most of your time attacking with dodges happening at specific times when the mob is very obviously building up to some bigger attack. I am curious to play the game when there aren’t quite so many people in the same area because since the game has open tagging and instanced looting… everyone was basically just attacking everything and getting credit for it. I mean don’t get me wrong I greatly prefer open tagging to strict encounter tagging, since the later is miserable when there is mob contention. However I would like to see how the questing flow feels once I am having to stand on my own two feet a bit more.

As of now I am not really seeing much in the way of telltale cash shop monetization. Things like bag space for example are slowly earned over time being doing stuff in the world and then trading in these scraps to NPCs for additional space. Mounts similarly seem to be permanently unlocked and not the nonsense of 7 day licenses as is the case in so many South Korean free to play games. Doing a bit of research it seems that they may be going down the Battle Pass route for monetization, which I am absolutely fine with. It could however just be that we have not reached the phase of testing where they are working in the Cash Shop. Whatever the case at this very moment there doesn’t seem to be any signs of this.

Now we are at the point of talking about access to this Closed Beta test. This current testing phase started last night at 6 pm PST and will conclude on Monday the 18th at roughly 6 pm PST. During that time I believe the servers are up 24/7 and you will have full access to the game. Right now the testing phase is being run through steam, and as I said at the beginning of this post I have been given a handful of keys to give away. I am going to be doing these on a first come first serve basis and in order to get one, drop a comment below telling me you are interested. Past that I will sort out a way to get you one of the keys privately.

I will likely be dinking around in the test throughout the weekend. I am over on the North American server and shocking to no one my primary character is the sword and board class named Belghast. If you make it into the game ping me and say hello.

4 thoughts on “Bless Unleashed Thoughts”

  1. I (now, regrettably for obvious reasons) bought Bless Online initially and did play that quite a bit. It seemed promising at first but always felt lacking (as well as the more common instable servers for… very long time) so I’m looking forward to a HOPEFULLY more polished experience. Varg ftw as well. Which means I’d love to give the beta a try to see if it did change for the better ‘w’

  2. I’ll take a key if they are still available. Unless I’m getting my Blesses mixed up I believed I played the Xbox One version of this for a short while. I eventually stopped just because I don’t enjoy playing MMOs on a controller. I’d like to give this a try on PC.

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