-Character Creation-

In the Closed Beta, Character Creation was very limited. We only had the options of choosing between one of the 3 available Races (Amistad, Aqua Elf and Pantera) and one of the 4 playable Classes (Guardian, Paladin, Ranger and Berserker). Every Class has a preset design in the closed beta and there were no ways to customize your character’s looks. However, we’ve found some interesting strings in the game client. According to the Character Creation game files, you will have more than 100 possibilities to customize your Character!
Bless Online will offer many exciting ways to customize your character. To begin, you choose your character’s gender, one of the 8 Races, and subsequently, one of the 8 Classes, which is standard for many MMOs. After that, you can start customizing your Character and get to the exciting parts. Naturally, there are some different options between Males and Females, but there will be some features you might not have seen in an MMO before. Besides typical customization features like altering eye color, hair, the structure of the face etc, you can also change the make-up of your Character, as seen in the video below. Neowiz presented the make-up Customization system last year at the gamestar in Busan, Korea.

The customization system, combined with the make-up system, are very powerful tools in which you can alter the dimensions and personality of your character to your desire. In Bless, you will have hundreds of options to change the appearance of your Character. You can find a full list of all customization features here.

-Interface-

The User Interface of Bless is pretty much the typical UI you have already seen in other traditional MMOs in recent past. You got your Skillbar, Questlog, the World and Minimap, Character Window with your Stats and Gear and your inventory.
The maximal amount of skills you can put into your Skillbar is 12. Means even when you’ve learned up to 50 Skills, you can only use 12 of them at the same time. There is also room for 4 items lile Health and Mana Potions. The other UI Elements are pretty much the same as the ones you have already seen in other MMO’s.

-Gameplay-

Combat System

The combat style in Bless Online depends on the class you are playing. The Ranger, for example, follows the traditional MMO style combat you’ve already seen in games like Aion or World of Warcraft with the standard tab targeting system. On the other hand there are classes which are using the action combat system in known games such as Tera. You can freely use your skills without being forced to select a target. You can also use the left and right mousebutton to activate your first and your second skill. For now, range classes are generally using the traditional tab-style combat, and melee classes are using the action combat system in which you can freely attack. Both classes will have a mix of skills that require targeting and no targeting alike.

Skill System

The Skill System differs a bit from other MMOs. As we’ve already mentioned, the maximum amount of skills you can use is 12. One of these skills is your standard Auto Hit Skill. When you remove it from your skillbar, your Character stops Auto Attacking. You have more than one skill that can be set to auto-attack. For example, the Ranger has a fast triple shot combo, as well as a single Shot Autohit with true damage. Every skill without a cooldown and casting time can be used to replace your default auto hit skill. If you want to use Passive Skills, you have to put them into your Skillset as well. As you level, you will be able to choose up to 4 Passive Skills. Besides your Active and Passive Skills, every Class has it’s unique Aura and “Lifesaver” Skill. The Aura gives your extra Stats like 15% more Damage and 20% extra HP. The Aura system gives you the opportunity to change the role of your Class. You can play your Paladin as a Healer, Tank or Damage Dealer, if you so choose. Lastly, every Class has a unique ability you can activate by using shift. These skills typically increase your survivability. The Guardian has a skill to block incoming damage, the Ranger can evade attacks, and the Paladin is able to heal himself.

Progression

We came to Bless expecting a typical “Asian grindfest” and left feeling completely changed. Bless uses a traditional quest system with main important quests, and various sidequests, even more than you actually need! Bless uses the “typical” Questing Systems with quests like killing Monsters, Collect items, run from A to B etc. If you enjoy grinding, you can also Level your Character by finishing the Monster Hunting Quests. Whenever you kill a Monster, you get an additional Quest in your Monster-Hunting Quest-log. After killing the same Monster a couple of times the player receives EP, Gold and Item Rewards. Grinding seems to be the faster way to level up, but Neowiz did a great job by finding a perfect solution to satisfy the Eastern, as well as the the Western MMO preferences.

-Graphics-

Bless is powered by the 6 year old Unreal Engine 3. Despite it’s age, it makes the game run beautifully like new. Unfortunately, the Unreal Engine has it’s limits, especially when it comes to graphics and textures in the far distance, which are not rendered very well in the beta, or rendered slowly. Anti-Aliasing support also seems to be disabled in the beta. However, we assume that it will be enabled in future betas.

Regardless, Bless is still a visual Masterpiece. The character designs are articulately made; whoever designed the gear and the characters in Bless deserves a medal as the designs are very thorough and the designs contain many small details that still stand out. Overall, the graphics are great, and the game atmosphere is simply amazing and will captivate you from the start.

While running through the cities you will feel the love the developers just invest into the gamedesign. The Buildings are more than impressive, and extremely detailed and you can truly follow Zomblielands Rule 32, Enjoy the Little Things. We’ve seen a lot of cool stuff while going through the buildings like Paintings (new and old containing the game’s concept art), Statues, lovely bouquets, detailed rooms, flower gardens, etc. The cities truly capture the essence of their respective factions.These are all elements that even Roleplayers will definitely appreciate. Yes, it feels like Neowiz has thought of everything and everyone and catered appropriately.

Ah, and good news for people with older PC Systems! We’ve tested the game on 2 systems, on an Gaming System and an 5 years old Notebook. With the Notebook we had around 25 FPS on Max. Settings. That’s not even close to the 80-90 FPS we had on our Gaming System, but even with an old System you should be able to enjoy the full beauty of the game.

-Extra-

Channels

The Channel System is a little bit different from the System we know from games like Aion. Whenever there are to many players in the same area, the system automatically creates channel to distribute the inflow. You can change the channel by clicking the small symbol in the upper right corner above the minimap.

Sprinting

One of our favourite features we’ve discovered in Bless is sprinting. By double clicking W your character starts to sprint and moves much faster for 20 seconds.

Traveling

There are 3 ways to travel in Bless. You can either take the Wyvern or Airship to fly or just travel with the Boad from A to B. The upside is, that you actually travel over far distances and not just jump on the Wyvern and “teleport” from location to location.

Mounts

Having played games like Aion and GuildWars 2 for extended amounts of time and not having many mounts or no mounts at all to choose from, I’m happy to finally see a large selection of mounts in a MMO again. The first mount is a quest reward obtained at a relatively low level. Bless has some pretty cool and diverse selection of mounts like Trolls, Unicorns, and Lions.

Eastereggs

Yep, we’ve found plenty of eastereggs in the game. The Bless Development team definitively has a good sense for humor. So far we have seen stuff like a Quest called Spongebob Squarepants, Mario and Luigi in a Bar and some really weird dialogs.

Open System Files

First at all, thanks to neowiz for not encrypting the language files. Thanks to this we are able to work on an english patch for the non-korean Community. The system setting files are unencrypted as well. With the system settings we can tweak stuff like the graphics, network and gamesettings.

Real-Time Cinematics

Bless also has many pretty Real-Time Cinematics.

Our Verdict

We are more than impressed from Bless and we really have to commend the developers. You can truly feel the love the developers have invested into developing the game. The graphics are awesome and there is an insane amount detail, the game atmosphere is probably the best we’ve ever seen in online games, and they did an amazing job finding the perfect solutions between different tastes, play-styles, and preferences. We also have to admit that we love the flexible skill-system. The flexibility of the skill-system will definitely help keep balance in PvP, and being able to change the role of your class with the Aura System is pretty awesome. In our mind, Neowiz has developed a game which is already ready for the western market. We can only hope that they will find a western Publisher as soon as possible. Trust me, dear Publishers, all you have to do is translate the game.  The game not require any gameplay localization.