In Bless Online, one of the missing classes is now coming to Early Access. The Assassin is expected to arrive in August. However, the bite-sized tactic of Bless seems to have failed. What was successful in other Asian MMOs is becoming a problem for Bless, according to our author Schuhmann.
What has happened now? Neowiz announces a major update for their MMORPG Bless on Steam (via Steam Community). The Assassin update is scheduled to be released in the second week of August (August 6-12). Producer Sungjin Ko says they are aware that many are looking forward to the update.
What’s included in the patch:
- The new class Assassin will be available for Hawks, Sylvan Elves, Amistad, Water Elves, Pantera, and Mascu
- The siege of Castra is a new PvP content that allows a maximum of 70 players versus 70 players
- Additionally, there will be the Dominance Contract System and Territory Wars
How are the players reacting? The reactions are divided:
- Many players on Steam are responding cynically to the announcement. Some are calling it a “Dead Game.”
- Others are irritatedly asking when promised localizations will come, such as for German or Russian.
- Some also inquire when Bless will finally become Free2Play.
- However, there are also voices that are looking forward to the update. They say that they have a stable player base on the new server and are looking forward to the update.
Bite-sized tactic seems to have failed
Bless in Early Access: The MMORPG Bless has been playable in South Korea for several years. Here in Germany, however, it launched in Early Access on Steam – without any form of public beta.
The Steam version of Bless for Europe and North America excluded content from the supposedly finished game. Among them was also the class Assassin, which many wanted to play.
It was said: The classes Mystic and Assassin would only come later to the Steam version. They needed to be revised.
The idea of Bless was apparently to gradually release the excluded content with several weeks and months of delay. Like now, the Assassin is expected about 10 weeks after the launch in Early Access.
The advantages of the bite-sized tactic of Asian games
Other Asian MMOs have demonstrated this: Following a similar system, the bite-sized tactic was also adopted by other Asian games like Blade and Soul, ArcheAge, or Black Desert, which came to the West late after their Korea launch.
Instead of launching with all the current content of the original version, they excluded later updates and released in a trimmed down version.
This ensures that the MMORPG is simpler and thus easier to understand. Instead of overwhelming the player with all features, they are slowly introduced.
This bite-sized tactic also guarantees a steady flow of content after the release in the West. Because in South Korea, development progresses only slowly, it is a method to make an MMORPG seem alive.
The impression is created: there’s a lot going on, updates are coming one after another, they are really trying hard.
Even ArcheAge collapsed under the update frenzy
Did it ever work in the past? While this tactic worked more or less in Black Desert and Blade and Soul, it led to a catastrophe in ArcheAge in 2014. They wanted to strike while the iron is hot. Trion Worlds and XLGames set a crazy pace with the patches and updates. After all, ArcheAge was still considered a hugely popular MMORPG in September and October 2014, with huge queues.
They wanted to make use of the time window before Warlords of Draenor was released on November 13, which was the then new expansion for WoW.
Ultimately, the West version of ArcheAge nearly collapsed under the pressure of pushing out these updates quickly. The new versions were not properly checked and caused catastrophic problems.
Since the crash after the decisive Auroria Update in November 2014, ArcheAge has never fully recovered. Furthermore, the rapid update tempo caused constant fluctuations in the balance, and they carried over issues that ArcheAge had in Korea years ago.
Update for Bless likely comes too late: This tactic seems not to work for Bless either, but for different reasons. Here, they did not expand too quickly, but started with too weak a base version in Early Access.
The launch of Bless was poor. Players complained about the missing content. Others criticized the performance so harshly that Bless has now lost its player base and the reputation of the MMORPG seems to be at an all-time low.
It might have been better and more serious to wait longer with the launch and hold a beta on Steam to foresee some issues.
Maybe it would have been possible to launch with a more stable and complete version of Bless. That might have worked better and would have been fairer and friendlier to the players.
