Bless Unleashed is a game that I have been watching for awhile since I first heard about it at Pax West 2018. A friend of mine appears to be doing some work with the game and hooked me up with closed beta test access along with a few keys to hand out to my readers, but we will talk about that specifically later. First lets clear up some confusion, because I can see that you might be thinking… but wait Bel didn’t this game release in 2018? The answer to that would be no but also sorta yes? Bless Online and Bless Unleashed are two different games in the Bless series, with the first being a traditional hotbar combat style MMORPG and Unleashed being more of a action combat limited hotkey affair. Last night I spent several hours playing around in the Closed Beta and immediately it feels like a mix of TERA, Neverwinter and Skyforge.

The bulk of your combat takes place with the left and right mouse buttons with some longer cooldowns existing on four buttons bound by default to numeric keys 1-4. The game uses an auto combo system similar to TERA where if you hit the left mouse button once you get a specific ability, but if you hit it again in rapid succession it actually performs a different ability. Combinations of left and right mouse clicks can be chained together to do specific combos, and there is an in game guide to these. By default your evade button is bound to the spacebar and jump to control, though the longer I played the more likely I was to swap these because I am a jumper in MMORPGs.

You start the game by choosing from one of the five classes and four races, but really… class is the piece you have the most control over. Thankfully this is not a game with gender locked classes like Black Desert Online, but each class does have a very limited choice of the four races of Human, Elf, Varg (big cat people), and Ippin (think Asura from GW2). For example I rolled a Crusader and had the ability to create a Human or an Ippin. When I went to create a Ranger later, that specific class was locked to only being able to play as an Elf. Race appears to strictly be a visual choice because I did not see any real difference between them.

You are given a number of presets that you can start with and then modify further. I hate futzing with faces in these sort of character creators, so I ultimately went with the face that I liked the best and then started customizing from there. You have a pretty wide range of options and almost all of the color pickers employ a full color gamut slider system allowing you to have purple skin and flame orange hair if you so choose it. For me I largely tried to create “Belghast” which regardless of the game has certain specific sensibilities. So I went with the dark hair, ponytail, full beard thing that I have done since World of Warcraft, and the closer a game gets to allowing me to do that thing the better.

For the most part Bless Unleashed passed with flying colors when it comes to the character creation system. There are some quirks I have encountered so far in combat. For example there are attacks that will stun your character and you have to mash spacebar, left and right mouse button at the same time in order to break free. My instinct is to stay holding on the movement keys while doing this so I will move out of the effect as fast as possible. However it seems that you have to ease up off them and re-engage them in order for the game to acknowledge that you are wanting to move now. That feels off but once I realized that was what was happening I adjusted.

The story being told is not the most engaging in the world, and if you have ever played ArcheAge, Blade & Soul, Black Desert Online or TERA you are likely going to be familiar with the style of questing that I largely associate with South Korean MMORPGs. There is a lot that is supposedly aiding the people and leading towards the core story of the game, but really it just feels like busy work. There is partial voice acting where the NPC says something… but it is completely unrelated to the dialog that is actually being said on screen. Essentially this is the modern equivalent of the Orc Peon cycling through a series of lines when you click on it in Warcraft 2. Instead of “Zug Zug” you get some comment about the festival that is going on, or that the weather is looking nice.

So far the moment to moment gameplay feels pretty enjoyable and combat feels fluid. You are going to spend most of your time attacking with dodges happening at specific times when the mob is very obviously building up to some bigger attack. I am curious to play the game when there aren’t quite so many people in the same area because since the game has open tagging and instanced looting… everyone was basically just attacking everything and getting credit for it. I mean don’t get me wrong I greatly prefer open tagging to strict encounter tagging, since the later is miserable when there is mob contention. However I would like to see how the questing flow feels once I am having to stand on my own two feet a bit more.

As of now I am not really seeing much in the way of telltale cash shop monetization. Things like bag space for example are slowly earned over time being doing stuff in the world and then trading in these scraps to NPCs for additional space. Mounts similarly seem to be permanently unlocked and not the nonsense of 7 day licenses as is the case in so many South Korean free to play games. Doing a bit of research it seems that they may be going down the Battle Pass route for monetization, which I am absolutely fine with. It could however just be that we have not reached the phase of testing where they are working in the Cash Shop. Whatever the case at this very moment there doesn’t seem to be any signs of this.

Now we are at the point of talking about access to this Closed Beta test. This current testing phase started last night at 6 pm PST and will conclude on Monday the 18th at roughly 6 pm PST. During that time I believe the servers are up 24/7 and you will have full access to the game. Right now the testing phase is being run through steam, and as I said at the beginning of this post I have been given a handful of keys to give away. I am going to be doing these on a first come first serve basis and in order to get one, drop a comment below telling me you are interested. Past that I will sort out a way to get you one of the keys privately. I will likely be dinking around in the test throughout the weekend. I am over on the North American server and shocking to no one my primary character is the sword and board class named Belghast. If you make it into the game ping me and say hello. The post Bless Unleashed Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yesterday I ranted a bit in a twitter thread about how generally bad of a steward Electronic Arts has been over the Star Wars licensing. From 2010 to 2020, Lucasfilm had granted Electronic Arts the exclusive rights to develop video games for the Star Wars brand. At the time this maybe seemed like a good bet on the side of LucasFilm because Bioware was just about to released a Massively Online Roleplaying Game based on the wildly popular Knights of the Old Republic setting. However over the years Electronic Arts held the license they really did not do much with it. Here is a quick rundown of the titles that were released under this license agreement.

• Star Wars the Old Republic – 2011 – Started prior to the agreement
• Star Wars Battlefront – 2015
• Star Wars Battlefront II – 2017
• Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes – 2015 – Mobile Only
• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – 2019
• Star Wars: Squadrons – 2020
• The Sims 4 Star Wars: Journey to Batuu – 2020
• Star Wars: Rise to Power – 2021 – Mobile Only

Of those titles other than SWTOR there is only one that I would really consider to be a great experience, but I’ve heard good things about Squadrons and the Sims pack but those are not really in my wheelhouse. What makes this extremely criminal is the fact that they held the reigns to this license during one of the most prolific periods in the history of the Star Wars brand. Let’s take a look really quick at the other Star Wars content that was released during this time frame.

• The Majority of the Star Wars Clone Wars series – Seasons 3-7 – 2010 > 2020
• The entirety of the Star Wars Rebels Series – 2014 > 2017
• The entirety of the Resistance series – 2014 > 2020
• Star Wars Episode VII – The Force Awakens – 2015
• Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – 2016
• Star Wars Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
• Solo: A Star Wars Story – 2018
• Star Wars Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker – 2019
• Forces of Destiny micro series – 2017 > 2018
• Galaxy of Adventure micro series – 2018 > 2020
• The Mandalorian series – 2019 > 2020

If you look at the past list of games from the Star Wars franchise you will realize that more than likely every single one of those major touch points of film or media would have had some sort of game released for it. Instead we got two shooters, a really solid soulsian game, a space dog fighting game and an asset pack for the Sims. This all comes up because Disney just announced the creation of Lucasfilm Games and in doing so more or less verified that EA would be losing their exclusivity deal. Yesterday it was announced that Ubisoft Massive is working on a new open world Star Wars game just to further drive that point home. I am certain that EA will still be able to make games in the franchise, they are just going to have to compete with everyone else at the same time. In light of all of this… I thought I would spend a little bit of time this morning talking about some of my favorite Star Wars games.

Star Wars: Yoda Stories

We are going to start off with what is likely the worst game on the list. Yoda Stories came out in 1997 and was in the weird category of desktop games. This was meant to compete with the likes of Minesweeper or Solitaire, but offered a small randomized adventure that you could flip over to and play while doing other things. There is just something nostalgic about this title and while it was arguably not great I still love it. It did so poorly that right now the game is largely considered abandonware and has made several worst games lists. That said it holds a special place in my heart. This came from a company called Torus Games.

Star Wars Arcade Game

Going back old school now, I remember the first time I experienced this game in the arcade. It had this sit down cabinet that made you feel like you were in the cockpit of an X-Wing and had voice sampling that I had never really experienced to that point. It felt like I was in the movie and I loved it… even though it cost two whole quarters to play it as opposed to the usual single quarter games. I was never terribly good at it because just the act of going to an arcade was rare enough, let alone going there with enough quarters to be able to play this game and practice on it. This was published by Atari.

Star Wars: Dark Forces

It was Doom… but Star Wars and while there were unofficial conversions of Doom that let you do the same basic thing I was completely hooked on this game. The graphics seemed amazing at the time and the storytelling was considerably better than most shooters that were available. It even had fully rendered spaceships… even though they were mostly just made out of the same blocky chunks that the texture mapped terrain was. It felt like I was legitimately on a mission to save the republic from the empire. This game hails from the Lucasarts era.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II

Sure this game is the direct sequel to the game I just talked about, but it was so much more. While Dark Forces was a Doom like game that used 2D sprites to represent 3D enemies, Jedi Knight was rendered in low polygon glory with actual 3D models. This also allowed the player to shift out to the third person giving me my first taste of what it would be like to wield a lightsaber like a proper Jedi. This game also gave me my first real tastes of Nar Shaddaa, because while the first game allowed you to go there you didn’t really spend a whole lot of time exploring it. It also had an expansion to the game that featured Mara Jade which at this point was one of my favorite Star Wars characters. Again this is a title from the classic era of Lucasarts.

Star Wars Rebellion

This game comes from an era when maybe the licensing had loosened up a bit too much. There were several games that came out in the 1998-2000 era and not all of them were winners. This one however I thought had a lot of promise. Essentially it is a game that could be described as what if Civilization or Master of Orion were a Star Wars game. It came from the folks behind Civilization II Test of Time and essentially brought you into galactic conquest with a 4X style map. It wasn’t near as polished as Civ or MOO but it was still enjoyable because it let me do things I had always wanted to do with my then favorite franchise. This came from Coolhand Interactive which far as I am aware only really created the two games mentioned here. It however is still available through steam and gog.

Super Star Wars Series

I am going to lump the three games in this series together because effectively they were direct continuations of the same game and same mechanics. I probably played Super Empire Strikes Back the most of the three, but I loved them all the same. They were published by JVC but were developed by Acclaim via Sculptured Software and featured a very loose retelling of the original three movies in side scrolling 16 bit form. The biggest thing I remember about them is that they were extremely tough and had several moments that you just sort of had to memorize a pattern. None of that mattered because it let me run around with a lightsaber in a 16 bit game and it was my beloved Star Wars. There was a cycle of Nintendo Entertainment System games that predated these but I never really spent much time playing them.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic

There are not words enough in the galaxy to fully explain just how much I love this game. During the prequel era I had started to fall out of love with Star Wars as a construct. This means I missed a lot of games that were probably pretty solid, because I felt betrayed by those movies. Looking back in hindsight they are far better than I gave them credit for at the time, but I was a jaded GenXer mad at them for fucking up my Star Wars. Knights of the Old Republic brought me by to the fold by fully realizing the comic book setting in glorious 3D roleplaying action. This is still my favorite setting in the entirety of Star Wars and now that we are entering this time of boutique Disney Plus series, I am hoping that maybe just maybe we will get something in the Old Republic Bioware setting. Star Wars the Old Republic is also phenomenal, but I largely think of it as a direct continuation of this same game. I do hope at some point we will get a KOTOR 3. I don’t consider any of this an EA game even though EA gobbled up Bioware, because KOTOR and SWTOR date back to a storied past of Bioware that I don’t think exists any longer.

Jedi Fallen Order

I’ve talked a lot about this game recently, and as such I am probably not going to talk at length about it right now. Suffice to say this is the only Electronic Arts Star Wars game on the list. Even at that this is probably a game that should not have existed were it not for the willpower of Vince Zampella and Respawn Entertainment. This game breaks all of the things that EA was setting out to do at that time. It is not a service based title, it has no micro transactions and it tells a single player narrative story. However it is probably the best game to come out of the Electronic Arts hive mind during the last decade. My hope is that the overwhelming success of this title along with the critical acclaim it garnered makes EA rethink their business practices.

A Bright Future for Star Wars

I hope we are just about to enter a new era of greatness for Star Wars games. I am giddy at thinking about what the team at Massive can do in creating a vast open world Star Wars adventure. I love the detail of the world of Division 1 and 2 and could see that applied to a gritty Star Wars setting. Image a game like Cyberpunk set in a setting like Nar Shaddaa where you operate in an out of all of the gangs in that city as a free agent ultimately carving your own path through the city. That seems like an experience that would be firmly in the wheelhouse of that team and I would absolutely be excited to play it. What were some of your favorite Star Wars games that I missed on my personal list? Drop me a line below and let me know. I realize there are a lot of games that I never touched during the prequels era due to general fatigue in the franchise. The post Lucasfilm Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

It is funny how some things get stuck in your life because you are used to doing them. One of these is the concept of preordering video games. I remember a time not all that long ago, at least in my span of time when I never ordered a game ahead of time. There was almost a thrill of the chase on release day, of trying to go out and find the last copy of something available in town. I remember when the Shadows of Luclin expansion for Everquest launched frantically spending my lunch hour trying to find a copy. I ended up going to three stores and finally found a copy at the Software Etc. in Woodland Hills Mall, where it was one of the last three copies they had. Similarly I remember scrounging around desperately trying to find a copy of Trials of Atlantis for Dark Age of Camelot a few years later. I wound up picking up the very last copy they had at the EB Games in Promenade Mall and feeling like a freaking champion for snagging it. When Battlefield 2 released, the entire office was playing it and I remember my friend Chuck and I making a trek across town to pick up the last few copies at a Game Stop. There was something about the struggle of acquiring a game that added to the experience and to be truthful all of these years later I still remember these moments so there must have been some truth to that.

Something shifted along the way. Stores became more reliant on preorder numbers and midnight launches, making it a bit harder to get a copy of the game. I remember with World of Warcraft I walked into Walmart at midnight and snagged a copy off the giant display kiosk, and when Burning Crusade came out expecting to do the same. Difference being there was not giant kiosk and copies were delayed and I remember it being a few days before I could track down a copy and join my friends playing the new hotness. Getting a late start in an MMORPG expansion felt crushing, but I didn’t really learn from my lesson and I was back at Walmart at midnight for Wrath of the Lich King and managed to walk away with one of only two collectors editions they had. At this point I was getting older and decided that the bullshit of trying to get to a store at midnight was nonsense so I just started placing a preorder online whenever they opened up, expecting that magically on release day a copy would show up on my door stop. Around this same time Digital Downloads were becoming a thing and I remember that Mass Effect 2 was one of the very first games that I purchased and downloaded. It was through a service called Direct 2 Drive, and they only had a handful of offerings but had Mass Effect 2 on day one. The problem being that I also had a 2 meg DSL connection and it took for freaking ever to download anything.

I am pretty sure that it was the a Steam Christmas sale circa 2007/2008 that converted me to the digital lifestyle that I have now. There was something about being able to purchase an entire publishers catalog of games for $50 that was way too appealing to ignore. I remember doing this for THQ and I still have games in my library from that one purchase that I have never played. Now I still had a shit internet connection that I think at that point had been upgraded to 6 meg but was still sheer misery as game sizes increases. I would set something to download before going to bed and in theory when I got not the next morning it would be ready to go. Thing is if it was a game I was interested in and wanted to play on that first day, I would still pre-order the game because Steam introduced the concept of preloading. This would allow you to download almost all of the game save for a few critical bits that would patch in as the game officially released. This would allow me or anyone like me on a crappy connection to be on a level playing field with everyone starting at midnight or whatever the launch window happened to be. This began a habit of just locking down a purchase of any games that I was super into and wanting to play immediately.

The problem is that what used to be necessity, just turned into another habit that I followed without thinking about it. I’ve long since had reliable and fast internet and can download most games in a matter of minutes. Yet I still have continued the practice of locking in that pre-order as though there was some scarcity associated with it. I’ve realized that there are games in my library that I preordered and have never actually played. Doom Eternal for example, I locked that purchase in months ahead of time and never actually got around to playing it since I had never finished the original 2016 release. So it is sitting there on the digital shelf waiting on me and cost me a premium to do so. There is a mindset that I developed of maybe missing out on something, because for the longest time there were tangible bonuses associated with getting you to lock in that purchase. This might have been the case that there was something worth having that you got exclusively through a pre-order. However in my experience these items tend to be largely throw away, as they might be useful for a few minutes upon immediately starting the game but will ultimately be trash after thirty minutes of gameplay. Additionally on the cosmetic front it seems that most games ultimately sell the preorder package after some time as a “priced to own” DLC.

Then there is the other side of the coin, that preorders support the hype fueled system of game marketing. Everything seems to be focused on getting you to lock in that purchase and often times had you just waited you would have realized that it maybe wasn’t a game you were willing to gamble full price on. Marvel’s Avengers and Godfall for example are poster children for games that I probably should not have preordered because as soon as they released the writing was clearly on the wall that there were issues. However there would also be gems that I love like Cyberpunk and Mass Effect Andromeda that I maybe would not have purchased given equally bad press. So I guess it is a bit of a double edged sword, but at a minimum I wouldn’t have been out full price for when I eventually experimented with them. I get the concept of physical preorders because there is legitimate scarcity there. This has been shown clearly this year with the PlayStation 5 and them being nigh impossible to purchase. However for me at least I am beginning to realize that there is zero point to preordering a game I am going to purchase digitally ahead of release day. There are so few games that I am absolutely going to be trying to play at midnight as the servers click on, and even then… with my internet connection pending I go through a reputable broker like Steam it is highly likely I will still be able to download that purchase within a reasonable time frame. There is an anachronism associated with the digital pre-order that I think I am going to stop supporting.

There are a whole slew of games that I am super interested in playing, but my goal for 2021 is to preorder none of them. This is going to go against years of built up instincts, but I am going to wait and watch and then download it as the game actually releases. I am not going to allow myself to get caught up in the hype machine of a preorder going live six months before a game is going to release, regardless of how cool the sizzle reel ends up being. We live in this wonderful time when at the push of a button I can have pretty any bit of content delivered to me on a whim, and it is time that I start treating it as such. There is no scarcity in this system and I am not going to miss out on getting access to something, so I need to push down that FOMO and behave in a sane and rational manner. So there you go. This is my year of no preorders. I hope I keep to that goal. The post Anachrony of Preorders appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.