Blade & Soul

Developer: NCsoft (Team Bloodlust)
Release date: TBD, 2012 (Korea)

Blade & Soul MMO 2012

Fans of notable game art and titles like Magna Carta should be familiar with Hyung-Tae Kim, whose art style is immediately recognizable. It was only a matter of time before Kim became associated with an MMO, but Blade & Soul’s awesome anime-inspired art design is not the only thing going for it.

Blade & Soul adds a bit of kung fu to the standard MMO formula, allowing for more interesting combat as well as some unique Crouching Tiger-esque travel that’s never before been done in a game like this. Like with Guild Wars 2, there will be no dedicated healer class as Blade & Soul places a major emphasis on dodging and countering enemy attacks rather than the back-and-forth slapfest with standard MMO combat. If you find yourself getting floored often, you’re doing it wrong.

Unfortunately, Westerners have a long wait ahead ahead of us for the official U.S. release of Blade & Soul. An international release hasn’t been confirmed at this time, but with publisher NCsoft backing the project, the unique gameplay style, and the superb production values, I’d be willing to bet on a English localization a year or so after its Korean release.

What’s unique?
Since the game has yet to be localized (or even released anywhere) and the dev team is all Korean, I’ll let this trailer do the talking for them:

Minimum system requirements:

  • CPU Intel Dual core or AMD Athlon64 X2 or better
  • RAM 2G or more
  • Video Card nVidia Geforce 8600GT/AMD Radeon HD 4600 or better
  • Hard Disk 15GB or more
  • OS Window XP, Vista or Window 7(32/64bit)
  • DirectX 9.0c

Recommended system requirements:

  • CPU Intel Quad core or AMD Phenom II X4 or better
  • RAM 4G or more
  • Video Card nVidia Geforce 8800GT or AMD Radeon HD 4850 or better
  • Hard Disk 15GB or more
  • OS Window XP, Vista or Window 7(32/64bit)
  • DirectX 9.0c