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Blade and Soul Trailer Released
Kung-Fu, magic and full-on Manga-esque action in NCSoft's latest project.
Written by Chris Joyce, 01 December 2009
NCSoft has released quite a few big hits in the Western MMO market, with titles such as City of Heroes/Villains, Guild Wars and Aion to name a few, but back in Korea where the developer holds its main base they are very popular.
Blade and SoulCurrently they are drumming up excitement over their next project, Blade and Soul, and presented the latest trailer at GStar 2009.
The trailer can be found over on the official Blade and Soul site (http://www.bladeandsoul.com/global/en) or you can click the link on the right-hand side of this page.
Blade and Soul is currently aimed at NCSoft's Korean playerbase, which is evident from the cutesy, anime style and over the top effects in combat, but visually it does look impressive.
The oriental-style MMO focuses on martial arts combat, and Ancient Myth, using the Unreal 3 engine, and featuring characters designed by the illustrator HyungTae Kim.
The trailer, which is a whopping 11 and a half minutes long, showcases four playable races, and four classes and their various skills.
The four races are Jin, Gon, Kun and the Lyn, with the Kun and Lyn races involved in a chase scene at the start of the video.
Class selection in MMOs usually tends to be quite similar, with slight variations - such as warriors being named gladiators, rogues as assassins - but Blade and Soul has four interestingly named classes on offer - Blade Master, Kung-Fu Master, Force Master and Destroyer.
The video presents the classes well in very fast paced scenes, demonstrating their powers with magic, grapples, aerial juggling and beautiful swordplay in combat that looks more at home in a console beat-em-up.
The Blade Master, as the name suggests, focuses on combat using swords, with stunning attacks, both grounded and aerial, accompanied with quick attacks and heavy blows.
The Kung-Fu master is an interesting class as it relies on melee combat without much use of weapons, other than heavily armoured gloves. Fast, strong punches and kicks, accompanied with charged attacks, sweeps and grapples, the Kung-Fu Master looks like it could be a lot of fun to play with their stylish combos.
Force Masters are the magical class of Blade and Soul, with what seems to be the ability to control gravity, lifting their opponent in the air before assaulting them with powerful elemental attacks. There doesn't seem to be much casting time involved, so if this is representative of in-game combat, this could be a very dangerous class, indeed.
The Destroyer appears to be the 'tank' of Blade and Soul, able to withstand massive amounts of damage, and slow movement, but still able to hand out the punishment when needed, wielding huge weapons. In an impressive scene the Destroyer picks up his fallen opponent by the head, and swings him around on his axe before flinging him off into the distance.
Based on the trailer there may be one or two more classes to be announced, with a gun wielding combatant being shown halfway through, and finishing moves look to be a possibility.
Overall the trailer certainly impresses, but whether this fast paced combat will transfer well to an MMO we are yet to see.
Release is currently scheduled for 2010, with no specific date and no word yet on a US or European version, but if this takes off well in the Asian market it may well make it to our shores following the initial success of Aion.
