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Blade & Soul

Blade & Soul

Hands-on with the kung-fu heavy MMO.

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The name Blade & Soul will likely be passingly familiar to you. The MMO has been up and running out east for several years, and a western adaptation was announced back in 2012. It's only now reaching the end of the development cycle; tackling several encyclopaedias worth of text and voice-work, simultaneously across English, French and German, takes time.

But now NCSoft are winding up the marketing push to herald the arrival of a short beta this fall and a full release this winter, that short space of time due to most of the heavy testing work being done through the original Korean version. The argument is that while we're jumping in late, we're landing in a much more stable, fleshed out and feature-heavy MMO than the title's pioneers entered three years ago.

We got hands-on with a pre-alpha build of the game, sampling the opening tutorial and story setup before jumping ahead to freely explore one of the open valleys that was riddled with enemies and quest lines.

The big differences from other genre entries is fairly immediate. Graphically this is more FFXIV than WoW, and visual inspiration as well as story stylings are built on Wushu. If you caught any of martial arts-heavy movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and their ilk that came into vogue in the early 2000s you'll know what we're talking about. Characters than can leap buildings and glide through forests, fighting styles that are deadly ballets. While combat is still hooked around multiple moves with cool-downs initiated through button key taps, there's a fluidity to clashes that emphasises visual language to time follow up moves and combo chains.

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This means two basic moves are mapped to a mouse button each. Click - and strike - with one, and you're instantly offered the ability to follow up with another, and another. The developer maps the next move icon to beside your character rather than the lower screen panel to make it easier for you to see what comes next. As with fighting games, fast reactions are a virtue. A sweeping kick, for instance, that downs foes can be followed up with a stomp if you hit the F key faster than your target can get themselves back up on their feet. Of course, you can also fall foul of the move and end up on your ass.

The other difference is the geography. Both the two areas we explored - a training dojo that we're violently ejected from as the main story arc begins, and the valley - are places many kung-fu flicks wish they had the green-screen budget for. Floating islands, cliffside temples, plunging waterfalls. The distance between the valley bowl and the top vantage points are several buildings in height. It's why one of the very first moves you learn in the game is the glide.

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The heavy emphasis on verticality means you'll need to pan the camera round as you glide to work out the best island-hopping path to get where you want to go, though there are dedicated wind streams to activate and ride that'll offer a cut-scene shortcut between locations. Dropped as we are right into the middle of a game, we're continually lost trying to find the next quest start point on the map. Hopefully a non-issue once we get our bearings and settle into the mode of traversal.

Elsewhere, Blade & Soul keeps with genre tradition. You've four races to choose from, and can bind your character to one of six classes. There's the likes of hand-to-hand specialists, sword masters, hulking axe-wielders, ranged warriors and mage-like characters to pick from. We rolled with a swordsman to begin, enjoying the ability to time blocks of enemy attacks before testing our collection of blade attacks, while our second run had us juggling the fire and ice combos of a spell caster.

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The game's trying to install a sense of grandeur to weapons and armour, letting you hang on to your chosen blade and upgrade it rather than sell it off for a pittance. Clothing has been made separate from armour as well, letting you tailor your look to how you want it rather than give in to the demand of better defensive buffs. It plays a secondary, potentially divisive role; you, or anyone else's level isn't so immediately obvious. How this'll impact PvP, we'll have to find out.

While the pre-play presentation highlighted the game's own twist on the MMO HUD system and thereby keeping the player's eyes on the action and not the bottom row of on-screen icons, we felt it necessary to glance between both. Potential follow-up attacks are too diverse to keep your options limited to the mouse buttons, though likely experience and key customisation will make you as proficient in keyboard kung-fu as downing zombies come a Typing the Dead marathon.

Along with free-roaming, there'll be dungeons, of which you can search for two-player, four-player or six-player variants of through the UI. There'll also be 24-player endgame dungeons on offer. We only did one with our brief time with the game, a solo expedition to prove our worth to guild masters by downing multiple rooms of wooden, but aggressive, training dolls.

It's an enjoyable taster. The enlightenment and world-saving through kung-fu puts a different filter on the well-worn MMO setup, and the two player factions fighting for dominance as you progress has potential for some massive Raid-like rucks. With three story acts available at launch and improvements and tweaks made before the game even reaches these shores, it's an MMO offering a lot out of the box from day one. But as a result, there's added pressure that the game should be the best that it could be. We await fall then to see if Blade & Soul can offer up a flawless victory over its competitors.

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