Something New – Bless Online

All aboard! Honestly I had written Bless off due to the negative comments. I shouldn’t have done that. Not because Bless is some awesome hidden gem, but because I don’t really believe in writing something off without experiencing it myself.

I saw some posts over on The MMOist(1, 2) and Inventory Full(1, 2) and thought it looked better than I’d heard, so I decided to take a look and see. Judge it for myself, properly.

I wasn’t immediately thrilled right out of the gate. I was locked into a specific faction because everyone apparently likes the other one? Then I wanted to make a Paladin, but it wasn’t available to my chosen race, the Leonid. I didn’t feel like being a human or an elf, so I made one of the cute little animal people.

The tutorial was blessedly short, though instructions for some tasks, like equipping a second stance, were not very clear. It said something like “add X to the stances hotbar” but it’s a submenu accessed by clicking on an “equip” button not a drag and drop sort of situation.

Once I got past that I was on a blimp/airship thing which I quite liked. I think I have a soft spot for airships. I assumed it was just an opening cutscene that would result in us landing in town right? Nope, we get attacked. I think in my head I was expecting attack planes piloted by orcs or something.

Nope, it was beetles. It kind of makes sense I guess, but I was kinda like “really? beetles?” Between that and me not really having been pleased with my character choices I just logged once we were done with the beetles. I just wasn’t feeling it.

When I came back I decided to try something different. I figured I liked my Charr Warrior from GW2, so I’d try the same thing here. Went with Leonid Berserker. So far, I have found this to be more to my liking.

The quest line is sort of odd and tribal in the beginning. Some human poachers attacked me and I killed them in return. This made me go through wolf-man puberty early and I had to do a coming of age ritual only for the humans to end up stealing the soul of the forest or something? It’s okay, not super enthralled but it provides some direction to the experience.

Yeah, this tunic disguise is totally fooling those humans into thinking I belong here!

Now, I can see why many people aren’t super thrilled with this game. Optimization is an issue. I’m constantly tweaking settings trying to get it to run smoothly. I suspect it may be more a resource loading issue, as it seems to develop a stutter randomly and for no apparent reason.

Translation seems to come up a lot as well. I honestly haven’t run into to many issues. It’s way better than some of the other games I’ve tried, and usually shows up as odd choices like “check attendance” above. Another I can think of is since the login bonus is sent to you via mail, the remove attachment button simply says “gift.”

I haven’t really got a good handle on the combat yet. It has a combo system that so far seems to be things like 1->R->R->R, where the number is a hotbar slot and R, T, or Y right behind it to select the… tree… and again for the final hit. The tiers in this tree from top to bottom are:

Stance – You can have two equipped? Switch with ~ key

Hotbar Skill – 1, 2, and I presume 3

Subskill? – R, T, and Y from left to right. One press for top, second press for bottom.

I did enjoy the little taming minigame. I quickly found myself using all my scrolls to tame every random critter I came across, including this wolf mount. That… doesn’t look like it’s good for the wolf. He’s gonna have some back problems.

Off-brand Chocobo?

I really only have a few hours in this, and I feel like half of that is load time. I’m sure it’s not quite that bad, but some of the loading feels like it’s excessive.

If I catch it on sale again I might grab a copy for some friends, but other than that I don’t know that I’ll be playing much more of this one. I feel like my time would be better spent elsewhere.