The Positive: Dungeon Finder and Zoning
I was positively surprised by the dungeon finder in Blade and Soul. It starts somewhere at level 15, when Blade & Soul says: Here’s a quest, it’s in the mini-instance over there, find yourself companions for it. You can switch to a cross-server lobby, and once partners are found, you’re sent to the instance, and off you go.
The first instances are not terribly complex affairs, but wholesome chunks of content – a heavily armed hero team runs through the instance with 2-6 people and cleans up. The individual fighters get their loot, can try out a bit of combos, and complete the quests. Really a good thing – and also a desperately needed change from the linear gameplay.
Also well done are the pesky zoning problems. There are hardly any load screens (only at the outer edges of a zone), usually, at the inner edges, you pass through a kind of “invisible door,” then the game hitches for 2-8 seconds, and – magic! – you stand in another instance, in another section. After a while, I hardly noticed the zoning anymore.
The Negative: The Missing Comforts
While Blade and Soul is up to par in some areas, it has other issues that fail to meet today’s standards – it’s a different design philosophy. In the “normal world” of Blade and Soul, you don’t get excited when you see fellow players because they take away your mobs and quest items.
There’s still the old “tag” system. When 5 people stand around a quest mob, it means: Tough luck, wait until you’re up next. Or better said: Push your way forward, be the first to hit faster than the rest. Only the world bosses, as far as I experienced, were exempt from this rule.
Inviting others into a group is a solution, yes. But it’s rarely done in practice. A typical homegrown player problem. Moreover, party members can loot quest items from each other. It happened to me. I kill a mob, it drops a quest item, my party member loots it before me: I’m left standing there looking stupid.
These “Oh, the spot is overcrowded, this sucks, now I’m stuck here” moments have been well solved in other games these days. That’s something I personally wouldn’t want to miss anymore. But well… hardcore Asia fans who spend 3 hours farming some rare mob before breakfast are probably different.
What is our conclusion? Read it on the last page of our Mein-MMO check for Blade & Soul.
