Blade & Soul 2 is a Beautiful Sequel to Blade & Soul’s PC MMORPG

I feel as though this is a week dedicated to NCSoft games. 8 days ago I did a video on Lineage 2M, 3 days ago I did a video on Aion 2, and here we are today doing a video on Blade & Soul 2.
I’m excited for Lineage 2M because it’s going to be the very first mobile game developed by NCSoft utilizing their new Purple platform, and I’m highly anticipating Aion 2 because.. well I’m a huge Aion fan, having played it for years in the past.
I’m also quite a fan of Blade & Soul – it has some of the best action combat in a PC MMORPG and has almost unrivaled graphics. There are 2, maybe 3 MMOs currently on PC that are as good if not better than Blade & Soul.
And there are equally as many games that have as interesting of a story to play through, which gives me high hopes for the Blade & Soul mobile port along with this Blade & Soul 2 sequel.

Blade & Soul 2 and Aion 2 were both announced back at G-Star 2018 – well over a year ago. I’m aware NCSoft were working on both games at the time, and I’m well aware of your typical mobile games development cycle.
They’re churned out at a significantly faster rate than a PC game – and by that logic both of the aforementioned games should be well into development by this point, which I’m honestly sure they are.
However, with the recent focus shift towards Lineage 2M my guess is that Blade & Soul 2 is most definitely on the back burner.
Unlike any of the other Blade & Soul mobile titles, Blade & Soul 2 is a direct, official sequel to the PC iteration of the game.
NCSoft went on to detail that the game will look even better than Blade & Soul on PC, have even faster, even higher quality, more “stylized” combat, and work on optimization.
If you ever played Blade & Soul for PC you’d know how poorly optimized that game was for the first few years of its life and how poorly optimized the game still is even after their supposed fixes.

The sequel takes place after the events of the original game in a future where the characters that fought alongside you in Blade & Soul have all become legends.
Blade & Soul 2 will introduce an entirely new cast of characters to aid you in your journey, along with altered areas affected by the difference in time, along with expanding into areas that aren’t found in the PC game.
Additional details were announced for the sequel, including smarter AI for enemies. Supposedly, enemies will react according to individual player actions, as opposed to repeatedly meleeing you and using a skill whenever it comes out of cooldown.
I don’t know really what they mean when they say that enemies will react smarter.. but NCSoft are claiming it’ll offer a brand new combat experience and require you adapt to monsters adapting to you adapting to their adaptations of…. yeah. I dunno.
It’s a weird feature they’re claiming they’re implementing. But with smarter enemy AI comes smarter NPC AI.
Blade & Soul 2 won’t have NPCs just standing there hanging out waiting for you to complete quests, instead, they’re going to be out exploring the world themselves.
Yup – NPCs will be roaming around, no longer being traditional static quest givers, instead, NPCs are going to be “part of the ecosystem,” and like enemies, will adapt and react to how players interact with them.
They went on and elaborated further on this stating that it’s akin to a relationship system, with different users triggering different quests and events with the same NPC.
This will no doubt require additional work for the devs and kind of segregate the community as different players will be doing different things and might not be able to party and quest with their friends in the same way as we do now, but it’s an interesting route to take.

If you watched my Aion 2 video, I went on to discuss PvP and how in the PC version of the game we had faction wars between the Elyos and Asmodians. That was a core part of the game.
But in Aion 2, the mobile prequel, they’d done away with faction based PvP and I thought that was a move in the wrong direction for a PvP oriented game.
If you play Blade & Soul then you’ll know there are various factions scattered around its large world. Equipping different faction outfits allow for players to engage one another in open-world PvP – a highly enjoyable aspect of the game.
Blade & Soul 2 is aiming to have a “free community” system, however, where players are no longer bound to separate factions, which means.. well, I dunno what that means.
They haven’t really elaborated on what form PvP will take in Blade & Soul 2 so this could mean that PvP is open and free to take place between any and everyone, or it could mean that PvP is exclusively limited to instanced PvP, I guess we’re gonna have to wait and see.

I’m a little skeptical regarding how good Blade & Soul 2 will be, especially with all the other Blade & Soul mobile games coming out in the next year or two.
This is probably going to be one of the closest mobile ports we’ll get to a real, accurate Blade & Soul title though as it’s actually being developed under NCSoft’s watchful eye.
It might turn out incredible – it might turn out terrible. Only time will tell.
Regardless, I’m still kind of excited, not nearly as much as I am for Aion 2 but being a fan of Blade & Soul and its story has me curious of the setting and what happened to all of the characters I’ve grown accustomed to playing with.

The engine both Blade & Soul 2 and Aion 2 are being developed on is currently unknown – I’m guessing Unreal Engine 4 since that seems to be the default these days but the trailer itself looks damn good.