Amazon repeats its Lost Ark playbook to bring another international MMO to the West
Amazon Games will publish NCSoft's Throne and Liberty in the West, continuing a trend it started with Lost Ark and Blue Protocol.
Blade & Soul: Table Arena Was Not The Game I Was Expecting It To Be
At first glance, I thought Blade & Soul: Table Arena was doing everything it possibly could to repel me. NCSoft’s VR debut is based on an MMO that I’m told is hugely popular over in Korea. It’s also billed as a card battler with scores of units. In my head, I was picturing a stat-filled slog with matches that would last much longer than my interest could muster.
As it turns out, I was very wrong; Blade & Soul’s multiplayer competitions are short, sharp and sweet. In other words, it’s everything I wasn’t expecting.
Every time you boot up the game you’ll be introduced to a lobby-like area in which you can pick up your characters, represented as toy-like statues, and assemble a deck that’s suited to your play style. A press of a Touch button brought up stats to read through, while the unit in question animated itself in colorful ways. I felt like I was digging through a toy box. Once you’ve got your line-up you’ll find an opponent and have a brief few seconds to stare them in the virtual eye as your match loads.
Matches are very easy to get to grips with. Both players face each other, looking down on a map from behind a fort. The object is to bring down the other player’s fort by sending units in to chip away at its health. If units meet on the field that’ll do combat, and various defenses will also distract them before they reach the wall. Each match lasts just a few seconds and you’ll have to balance deploying units with a regenerating meter that dictates how many can be used at a given time. If the meter’s low, you’ll have to wait for it to build up again to send out your next wave. Units have varying values so you’ll have to wait longer to bring out the big guns.
I quickly learned that it was best to send units out in batches rather than deploying whoever I could quickly. As the same time, the units I could use were randomized, so I’d occasionally send out the less useful, cheaper warriors to serve as fleeting distractions. It was a tactic that won me the battle and scores of loot, but I feel like the game’s intricacies can’t really be discovered in a quick hands-on session. I’d want time to get to grips with each unit and discover their strengths and weaknesses before I was really to proclaim any tactical prowess. What I played, though fun, felt a bit more on the side of anarchy.
“We wanted a sensible amount of session time,” the developer told me when I asked about the decision to go with shorter matches. “Basically for one single match, you don’t want it to drag to long. We wanted to give more variety to gamers in the sense that every opponent you meet would come up with a different strategy.”
Blade & Soul looks to be a case of not judging a book by its cover; I had a lot of fun with the madness of the game’s multiplayer battles, and could see myself playing more than it releases in the future.
Tagged with: Blade & Soul Table Arena, Ncsoft, oculus rift
GDC: 2017: New VR Strategy Game Blade & Soul Table Arena From Ncsoft
The most memorable part of Blade & Soul Table Arena wasn’t the game itself — which is a lot like Dragon Front if it leaned toward real-time strategy more than a trading card game.
Blade & Soul is a massively multiplayer online game that premiered in Korea from Ncsoft. This Table Arena game, though, is said to be using intellectual property from that world but is otherwise unconnected. The space where I picked out my creatures for battle is filled with a bunch of Amiibo-like figures. It is a rich and detailed area of the game that was an absolute feast for the eyes.
You can pull one of the figures off the shelf and place it in front of you to use as part of your team. Hold one creature in each hand and move them close together to watch them do battle. You can also power them up. It’s a very cool thing to see for anyone who likes small figures or remembers the holographic chess game from Star Wars. All of the figures on the shelves were eye-catching and uniquely designed, and I wanted to pull each one down and examine it.
The game itself was structured somewhat like Dragon Front in that you are dueling with another player and arming yourself with a set of creatures you can send into battle. I enjoyed winning a few matches as I powered up my creatures to much higher levels in the lab before each subsequent match.
Dragon Front is a cross-platform title available on both Gear VR and Rift, which can help with match-making as it widens the pool of possible players. It is unclear whether we would ever see a mobile version of Blade & Soul Table Arena — it was shown on Rift with Touch. For a game like this, launching with enough players so everyone can find challenging matches is important. Developers gave me no timeline for its possible release.
Tagged with: Blade & Soul Table Arena, GDC, Ncsoft, Oculus Studios
NCSoft Announces Blade and Soul: Table Arena
South Korean developer NCSoft have announced that they are developing a spin-off from MMORPG Blade and Soul, which will combine the essence of a collectable card game (CCG) and real-time strategy (RTS) genres.
NCSoft are largely known for their work on popular MMOs such as Guild Wars and City of Heroes. They are now venturing into the virtual reality (VR) market with Blade and Soul: Table Arena.
The game will be set in the same universe as the main Blade and Soul universe and gameplay will feature characters and settings from the MMO.
Use of the Oculus Touch controller means the player can use gesture control to summon creatures and units and choose a strategy. The player also has a ‘lab’ area which is used to customise and upgrade your units before taking them into a match
You can find the GDC launch trailer below. VRFocus will keep you updated with more new from GDC over the coming week.