ZAM's E3 2015 Wrap-up

Blade & Soul Comes to the West

Released in South Korea back in 2013 and since expanded to Asia, Taiwan and Japan, Blade & Soul, developed by Team Bloodlust, is an action-based martial arts wuxia MMO, with its gameplay, business model and more adapted to its respective territory. Since its release, NCSoft has received petitions, emails, PMs and more from western players wanting to be able to play the game. Today it has been announced that Blade & Soul will be coming to both North America and Europe this winter.

We spoke with Blade & Soul Producer Nicolas Coutant and NCSoft Community Director Omeed Dariani earlier this week about the game and its readiness for a western audience.

The Console Movement: The Future Of The MMORPG?

As the MMO industry gets stuffed with more and more competition, and World of Warcraft keeps eating that competition (kidding!), it seems that all developer eyes are now focused on new paths of innovation to reach different demographics of the gaming world. We've already seen CCP's EVE Online suck up the unemployed Math graduate demographic, SOE's Free Realms and Kingisle Entertainment's Wizard101 are both steadily converting all of our younger gamers to MMO fiends, and I'm sure between BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic and Cryptic's Star Trek Online, most sci-fi gaming fans will be mighty pleased (this could have been you, Star Wars Galaxies!).

Interestingly, however, as other MMO developers think of some great new innovations to stay in the industry, like Funcom's The Secret World and Icarus Studios' Fallen Earth, there is another barely tested demographic that bigger game companies have now set their sights on, and it goes by the name that Final Fantasy XI players have rallied against every time they hear the dreaded issue of "PS2 Limitations." What we're talking about is the console MMO and how it seems to be the trendy new thing for MMO developers.