Bless EU/NA Status Update 8/5/16

    • Bless EU/NA Status Update 8/5/16

      Hello all,

      It has been a while since we, as Aeria Games, made official statement about what is going on and where do we stand with the release of the game. We have been delayed slightly due to the merger with Gamigo Group. As you can imagine or already experienced in first hand, a merger is a quite complicated thing to pull through, with turbulences and a lot of thought on the new organizational structure. The important thing though is that we have a strong team and enough resources to bring Bless to the western market and I am sure you are looking forward to hear about what was happening with Bless during the past month and what the status is :) .

      Our new COO, Jens has flew over to Korea to meet the C-Level executives of Neowiz Games and Neowiz Bless Studios to get in first contact with our new management as well as to talk about the milestone planning for Bless. I can say the meeting was quite successful and the trust, which has been built between two companies continue to exist. We will be meeting with them during the Gamescom again to continue talking about the milestones and hopefully finalize the release date in NA/EU.

      So what have we been doing during the previous month? Well, me and my boss Jerome, who is the Director of Launches, have been taking the project over from Chrizzz B and we are currently working on the project planning and scoping of the project. We also play the game in our test servers (yes, we finally have the Bless test servers installed in our data center), gain game knowledge, explore anything and everything the game offers. I wasn’t able to find party to play 5 man dungeons in Korean servers but now we are playing through the dungeons with appropriate level and gear. It’s been very enjoyable and we had a blast! We aren’t doing this to only have fun though. We are constantly analyzing the game mechanics to figure out how to improve the game further by playing every day.

      On the IT side, we are trying to figure out the server specs for the amount of users we are expecting during the launch. Our IT team and the IT team from Neowiz is also working on the game launcher concept. As you know, launching the game from the browser is not an optimal way to start the game in EU/NA and we will be definitely changing the workflow for game start as well as a couple of tweaks to the game launcher itself.

      On the localization side, things are on track. Our localization team is working on the Korean to English translation as of now and we have been going through the game design documents. I was very pleased to see that the game has an immense lore and background information which created the beautiful world of Bless. Not a lot of MMORPG developers put a big emphasis on game lore nowadays and I am happy that Neowiz is not one of them…

      One more thing: I would like to thank all of you who participated in the survey. There were more than 100 participants. We read through all of your comments to understand what you like and what you dislike about the game. The results were very interesting and highly informative. Larek will share the results with you guys next week and I really appreciate the time you took to fill out the survey. Please note that we believe that the community feedback is going to be the key factor to make Bless successful and sustainable in the west and we rely on honest feedback from all of you for further surveys.

      Have a nice weekend and best regards,
      Carsomyr
    • Carsomyr wrote:

      As you know, launching the game from the browser is not an optimal way to start the game in EU/NA and we will be definitely changing the workflow for game start as well as a couple of tweaks to the game launcher itself.

      First of all, thank you for the update! I didn't have much trust in AeriaGames in the past, but you guys surely changed that.

      I was wondering, how much influence can a game publisher actually have? What are you able to change?

      Another thing that I dug up from my memories when I was reading your post about tweaking the game launcher was the tweaking of game files. I remember a guide to edit game files in order to increase FPS and performance. Here it is: bless-source.com/forum/index.p…ad/3068-FPS-Fix/?pageNo=1
      Will AeriaGames be able to make this a default setting so that everyone has the best gaming experience?
    • No HackShield/GameGuard shizzle please!

      Please don't make use of any constructions like HackShield or GameGuard. Since you will not be releasing this for the Linux platform, Linux users would have to try and make use of Wine to be able this game. Most MMORPG's seem to work through Wine, unless it has something like HS/GG. Wine does not know how to cope with that. There's a lot of Linux gamers out there ,since it's beginning to become more accessible through platforms like Steam, for instance. I can play WoW, Rift, Tera, LOTRO to name but a few easily online. So please no HS/GG so Linux users can play as well :)
    • Thank you for keeping us updated on this. Personally I like the news about potentially updating the launcher so it might not be an internet browser launcher thing, and I am REALLY look forward to Larek's survey analysis. :D

      EDIT: Since there are a lot of "tl:dr" people on the internet, here's some bullet points:
      Display Spoiler

      1) - The Gamigo merge delayed things.
      2) - Their COO Jens made first contact with the new management, which went very well.
      3) - They will talk to them again during Gamescom to "hopefully finalize the release date".
      4) - They have already done a significant amount of internal testing.
      5) - They will try to NOT use an internet browser launcher (like the KR version unfortunately uses).
      6) - Survey had 100 participants, and Larek will comment next week with the results.

      I do advise you to read Carsomyr's entire post though, since he took his time to post it.

      The post was edited 10 times, last by Zazaaji ().

    • Greetings.

      First, I should give a regard to Aeria games.
      They're really trying to westernize Bless online - thanks Aeria games.

      Sadly, KR server in Bless online going into dying level, While 101xp and aeria games do harder for make successful games.

      More Wide-Battleground, also interactive PVP contents.
      More strategic PVE contents. (Especially Field Raid.) what I'm eager to see.

      I hope bless online supports Dx11 options, but I know it's difficult (Since its optimization issues)

      The post was edited 2 times, last by Expereince ().

    • Metalfyre wrote:

      Please don't make use of any constructions like HackShield or GameGuard. Since you will not be releasing this for the Linux platform, Linux users would have to try and make use of Wine to be able this game. Most MMORPG's seem to work through Wine, unless it has something like HS/GG. Wine does not know how to cope with that. There's a lot of Linux gamers out there ,since it's beginning to become more accessible through platforms like Steam, for instance. I can play WoW, Rift, Tera, LOTRO to name but a few easily online. So please no HS/GG so Linux users can play as well :)
      since a lot of stuff is client side rather than server side we definitely need a anti-cheat tool since many big publishers have internal tools which do less than the common GG/HS tools so yeah.... rather keep them in though bypassing HS and GG is a piece of cake but well.....

      Anyway thanks for the update - looks/sounds promising. I just hope that we get a proper version of the game and not the KR OB version as already explained (in another thread though ^^)
    • Seems interesting that you guys take considerations about the fans feedback regarding the combat system , hope these consideration are still under the Dev team in South Korea since we pretty much haven't seen any updates regarding that .. hope this isn't just a PR talk .
    • It would matter as the combat system needs some tweaks mainly to the action targeting since once you are surrounded by a few mobs you can't focus on 1 mob - you target changes quickly and fcks up combos, etc.

      And since the PvE part is a significant one this should be fixed even with maybe quick and dirty approaches like fixing your target with a button (like Sky Forge).

      Everything which goes beyond that won't happen even if the developers itself promise it. I saw no game completely revamping their core system after years of development and already in commercial service. Expecting or hoping that they will revamp it would be kind of stupid.

      vegax87 wrote:

      I wonder what exciting news will come after Gamescom
      Maybe Tech. Alpha/Alpha near the end of the year or so.
    • sEEEEb wrote:

      Carsomyr wrote:

      As you know, launching the game from the browser is not an optimal way to start the game in EU/NA and we will be definitely changing the workflow for game start as well as a couple of tweaks to the game launcher itself.
      First of all, thank you for the update! I didn't have much trust in AeriaGames in the past, but you guys surely changed that.

      I was wondering, how much influence can a game publisher actually have? What are you able to change?

      Another thing that I dug up from my memories when I was reading your post about tweaking the game launcher was the tweaking of game files. I remember a guide to edit game files in order to increase FPS and performance. Here it is: bless-source.com/forum/index.p…ad/3068-FPS-Fix/?pageNo=1
      Will AeriaGames be able to make this a default setting so that everyone has the best gaming experience?
      We suggest changes based on user experience and quantitative data. Neowiz is a very reasonable developer with very experienced people working at their side. So as long it makes sense and is feasible, they are open to our suggestions. Also, thanks for posting the tweak for increasing the performance. We will bring this topic up to Neowiz.

      Metalfyre wrote:

      Please don't make use of any constructions like HackShield or GameGuard. Since you will not be releasing this for the Linux platform, Linux users would have to try and make use of Wine to be able this game. Most MMORPG's seem to work through Wine, unless it has something like HS/GG. Wine does not know how to cope with that. There's a lot of Linux gamers out there ,since it's beginning to become more accessible through platforms like Steam, for instance. I can play WoW, Rift, Tera, LOTRO to name but a few easily online. So please no HS/GG so Linux users can play as well :)
      Wine is so 2010... Go for GPU Passthrough, with which you can get around 98% of native performance :P . On a serious note, your remark duly noted.
    Peria Chronicles