Bless Unleashed PC Review

Is it Worth Playing Bless Unleashed?

Will This Bless Be Another Flop?

Bless Online was a Buy to Play Model which completely backfired on Neowiz. Despite their admirable persistence on constant attempts to relaunch their Bless Franchise, it was a failure after failures. Finally with decided to revamp the game using Unreal Engine 4 and launch it on console, which show mediocre success, but it was enough for Neowiz to attempt to bring it back to PC once again. This time around, this version is called Bless Unleashed and it is a free to play model. Will Neowiz hit the jackpot this time or will it be another flop?

Bless Unleashed PC

Publisher

Bless Unleashed for PC is developed by Round8 Studio and published by Neowiz. Neowiz is a online game publisher under it’s own gaming portal called Pmang, it is a South Korea publishing company servicing over 41 games of various genre from sporting to MMORPGs to board games. Despite the huge collection of titles it has shown, it showed relatively little to no success in the Western PC MMORPG genre. So will Bless be any good?, In my honest opinion, not in the slightest, Neowiz or rather the Bless franchise became a meme in the MMORPG community, largely due to Neowiz poor management and greediness.

Combat

Bless Unleashed PC is an action combat MMORPG, however the gameplay and controls still feel quite unpolished and clunky and no way on the level of other action combat games. This is no different from when the original Bless came out which was a tab-target game yet it felt inferior to other tab-target MMORPGs on the market. In fact, Bless Unleashed was released on the console a year prior and the combat system felt completely horrible to many players. During earlier this year, the same combat system was inside Bless Unleashed Beta and it showed slight improvements over it’s console counterpart. While they have improved it once again for release, it still feels quite unpolished compared to another MMORPG with a similar combat system for example New World.

Gameplay

Features

Bless Unleashed has no real unique elements that makes it stand out from another Theme-Park MMORPG. Instead, it focuses on what it currently can do and attempts to polish it instead.

• Five Classes under race lock
  • Berserker
    • Available for the Varg Race only
  • Crusader
    • Available for the Human and Ippin Race only
  • Mage
    • Available for the Human and Elf Race only
  • Priest
    • Available for the Human and Ippin Race only
  • Ranger
    • Available for the Elf Race only
• Regional Quests
  • This is a fancy name for the “Rifts” in Rift MMORPG or World of Warcraft’s Daily Regional Quests
• Prestige Quests
  • This is a fancy name for your dailies quests
• Estates
  • This is essentially a housing system which is locked behind a questline; “Old Friends and Allies” in “The Armies of Chaos” campaign
• Life Skill System
  • Gathering (Mining, Herbs, Logging)
  • Crafting
    • Forging
    • Shaping (Gear Crafting)
    • Enchanting
    • Alchemy
    • Cooking
  • Fishing
    • There is a Fishing Competition
• Player vs Player
  • Open World PVP
    • Must be Level 30 to Enable PVP
  • Infamy System
    • High Infamy have penalizes such as
      • Unable to join groups
      • Enter major cities without being attacked by guards.
    • Killing Infamous Players will earn honor
  • Arena System
    • Must be Level 20
• Enhancing System
  • Three types of equipment enhancement: Common, Unlicensed and Master
    • The Common Enhancement Specialist offers moderate prices, it has a chance to damage your gear if they fail to enhance
    • The Unlicensed Enhancement Specialist has higher prices, but still has a chance of destroying your equipment if they fail to enhance your equipment
    • The Master Enhancement Specialist only works for Star Seed, making it very expensive compared to the other 2, but it does not break or destroy your equipment
• Blessing System
  • Different types of blessings that grants the player different abilities, Combat Blessing includes
    • Gift of Valor
    • Mark of the Wolf
    • Night Wind
    • Centurion’s Command
  • These abilities may different depending on your chosen class
• Arena Challenges (PVE)
  • This is not a PVP option, but a Player versus Boss
  • Level 5 Requirement
  • Must be in a party of 2
• Dungeons
  • Level 18 Requirement for the first dungeon
• Cosmetics/Wardrobe System
• Title System

PVE Gameplay

Bless Unleashed showed a very traditional level path where it’s story quest after story quest to reach maximum level. At the same time, lots of discussions has been brought up on how “slow” the leveling process would be and how engaging it really is. Unlike many MMORPGs, instead of focusing on something “new and exciting”, they attempted to stick with the core roots of the an MMORPG.

Customization

Character Customization

Bless Unleashed has a very well designed customization system. It is up-to-date and in-depth, you are able to create the perfect character and not just another “base” model with slight color changes. It is comparable to the Black Desert character customization system.

Build Customization

Build customization shown is very limited in Bless Unleashed, out of the 10 basic skills you have, you can only use/quickslot 4 of them. Picking your skill set will automatically customize your “Combo System”. This can either be very engaging or very boring depending on the player. For me, I do not particularly enjoy being told which skills to use after each skill, especially in a PVP scenario, it should come off as experience of knowing which skill to use in what situation instead of attempting to force a combo for more damage or an certain effect. This also becomes much harder to balance for the developers as they will have to be faced with millions of variables.

UI Customization

I hate it, I completely hate it’s UI system, it’s a direct port from the console game with minimal to little changes to it. It reminds me of Elder Scrolls Online, another UI system that was a port from the Console version. The UI itself is uncustomizable in terms of placement. You can only turn some features/elements off or on and change the HUD size. I absolutely hate it and it feels so off during combat when needing to find something, feels super unnatural.

State of Game

Playerbase

Bless Unleashed was officially launched on 7th August 2021. It attracted a peak of 61,000 players. Which is amazing, as other titles exclusive to steam platform only such as Albion Online never reach reach close to those numbers. Currently, as of this review, which is day 2 of Bless, it has an average player base of 31,000 players. Let’s see if these numbers stick in a few months time or fall off.

Updates

Despite only launched 24 hours ago, the Neowiz team has already mentioned the new summer Update, Awakened will be coming soon to bless. It’s original date was 19th august, which was 12 days after launch but now has been indefinitely delayed due to crash and bugs.

Awakened update was rumored to have upcoming changes to UI/UX which includes fix for lock on camera movements. Better chat display and emoticons support.

Further, we were teased about a new form of Field Boss and improvements to dungeons, crusades and open world PVP. Neowiz has also promised to make changes to Blessings, Skills, and Combos and introduce a costumes fusion system.

Cash Shop

Free to Play Players Friendly

This section will be short because it the game is not Free to Play Friendly. The only Free to Play thing about Bless Unleashed is that the game is Free.

Premium Subscription

In Bless Unleashed, there is a Premium subscription model which includes the following benefits

Pay 2 Win Elements

The cash shop of Bless Unleashed is littered with Pay 2 Win elements. From Epic level mounts to DPS buff scrolls in the forms of “Attack Speed, Defense, Crit damage and Attack”. You can also buy straight out in-game gold and currency.

Further the Bless Pass that includes Mythic Level equipment upgrade stones, 70% HP recovery potions, XP and Gold boost ticket just to name a few for the “Paid” option only. Each Bless Pass season lasts roughly 90 days.

There is also a Bless Breath Gachapon System that grants higher grade Bless Breaths when using the premium currency.

Graphics

The game has the same aesthetic feel as it’s predecessor Bless Online. It’s dark, gloomy and an medieval feel to it. The graphics option system itself feels flawed, low systems makes the game completely blurry and pixelated and unplayable, while max options has said to put a minority players at 100% GPU. Overall, normal setting does look neat and it’s FPS does not drop even with high cluster of players.

Windows	Minimum	Recommended
Operation System	64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10	64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10
Processor (CPU)	Intel Core i5-4430 / AMD FX-6300	Intel Core i5-6600K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Memory (RAM)	8 GB RAM	16 GB RAM
Graphics (GPU)	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 2GB / AMD Radeon R7 370 2GB	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB / AMD Radeon RX 580 4GB
DirectX	Version 11	Version 11
Storage	50 GB available space	50 GB available space

Is Bless Unleashed Worth Playing

Fun

So… Is Bless Unleashed fun to play? A very hated and a “meme” MMORPG with very little promise lets the player explore in an medieval fantasy era with magics and knights. This could very well be the next best thing until New World gets released. Or it could stay as the next best thing, despite it’s hate, it still had 61k players log in on the first day and retaining at least 30k of it.

Right now with New World’s delay, this could be the thing the community wants to muck around on while patiently waiting, it’s combat is similar and let’s be honest, no-one expects Bless Unleashed to stick around for long.

Fayiette still personally think the whole Bless franchise is a complete meme now, Neowiz ruined a perfectly decent Korean MMORPG when they changed it up for JP release and then outdid themselves again for Western Release. Now they mucked around with it even more making it an “exclusive console” game before going back on their word once again and making in half-hearted port attempt from Console to PC with limited UI customization. I will recommend give it a try for what it is worth as it is free and you are most likely hungry for something new to play, and let’s be real here, within the next 6 months, it probably might not even be around anymore.