We spoke with the producer of NC America on Blade & Soul Heroes, Evan Hill, about the reception the game has had with this new entry, supplementary and additional improvements for the non-Korean release, and more.
Veerender Singh Jubbal: What made the team want to pursue Blade & Soul Heroes alongside tackling it very differently, both stylistically alongside genre-wise from the previous Blade & Soul entry?
Associate Producer of NC America Evan Hill: One of the cool things about it is that they are set in the same world. It’s set three years prior to the previous Blade & Soul entries. One of the cool things players will get to explore is some of those heroes’ backstories that they’re familiar with from the Blade & Soul franchise, but its art is stylistically and artistically quite a bit different visually than what you would be used to in Blade & Soul or Blade & Soul Neo. So it is kind of cool to see. Places that I’ve spent several years playing Blades & Soul, and then reseeing that reimagined, the various regions and locations that you’ve spent before. One of the coolest things, at least for me personally.
Veerender Singh Jubbal: Since Heroes is a prequel, were there any difficulties in making sure nothing overtakes differently in the world or the story’s timeline? I haven’t played it, but I’m familiar with it enough. I know some characters from Neo in Heroes.
Evan Hill: Quite a lot of them, actually. Yeah. Quite, quite a lot. There’s a system in the game that’s called Chronicles, and as you unlock characters. Yura is an example; she’s one of the main villains in Blade & Soul and Neo. Once you unlock her, it unlocks her Chronicle, which is just like a story-driven event where players will go in, and they play as Yura. You kind of get a good backstory of why she ends up the way that she is in Neo. Kind of like a neat little thing.
Veerender: How has the reception been for Heroes, and has the reception been different from Neo? Because Neo did come out this year, as well.
Evan: Neo, I think that was like one of the first titles that we put on Steam. That was kind of one of the big things is we wanted to really start branching into Steam a little bit, because we either have our own launcher that’s called PURPLE.
I think that there were some difficulties with that, just development-wise. That was something new that, as a studio, we were endeavouring to go to. The reception for Heroes has been genuinely positive overall. Most of what I’ve seen from YouTube comments or interactions. I was lucky enough to get to go to Gamescom and like interact with a bunch of people about it. I’d say it’s been very, very positive. I know Neo has not necessarily had the most positive reception, so there have been, I don’t wanna say challenges or anything like that, but it’s a strong IP, and it’s an IP that we’re happy to have in front of Heroes’ name. But you know, it is a different game.
One of the biggest challenges for us is that we have to show people that this is very different in multiple ways. Combat-wise, is a lot more intense and very action-based in Neo; Heroes is a little hard, but it’s not as intense. When you’re playing like Blade & Soul, it’s gripping the mouse and keyboard 100% of the time, right? Heroes is a little bit more relaxed, I would say.
Blade & Soul Heroes’ Public Reception, Future Updates, and Characters
Veerender: How was the Gamescom reception, since that’s in person, and that’s a very different sort of scope when you’re seeing players in real life.
Evan: Personally, that was my first time going to Gamescom. Fantastic experience. Absolutely loved it. I was worried ’cause we had a pretty big lineup. We had seven games, as a company, that we were showing, and Heroes was the most recent one. I couldn’t believe how positive it was. Having wonderful interactions with players, especially once they got to sit down and play with it. We had like a bunch of influencers and media come through and get to try it out. You look at it at the surface, there’s a lot of different systems and mechanics and things that are going on in the game. It’s not super obvious right off the bat. Once they got their hands on it, two or three minutes in, they’re like, “Oh, like this is a lot cooler than what I thought. This is really neat.” I was fairly confident it would be received well, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well it was received. Honestly, it did a lot better than even I was expecting and hoping for.
Veerender: Since many prolific MMOs continue to have a sunk cost fallacy, since people will continue to play an MMO just because they’ve already put in hundreds of hours previously, what is the team aiming for in trying to get more players to involve themselves with the world alongside its characters this time around?
Evan: I don’t want to call it an aggressive-like approach, but it is there. I’ve seen the content lineup for the first year, and there’s a lot of content coming. One of the cool things that this game launched in Korea about a year ago. For me, here in California, we’re launching on a global scale now, is that we’ve had a full year of being able to play, have feedback from them.
We’re gaining content. They’re constantly developing content in Korea. Now we have this massive backlog of content that we get to like, so it’s like nice to know that we can release it at a nice steady pace to hopefully keep people engaged for a long period of time.
Veerender: Will the events or the content be expedited in the sense that banners will be timed out? One of the issues with another recent live service game that came out was Persona 5 The Phantom X, with the biggest issue for that game being that they already had a year or two of content. On the English side, some of the events and banners have made them go quicker, or they gave less in-game currency as another issue that they had. How are you folks going about handling it on the English release? Are you making banners shorter or longer, alongside changing any of those things? If you have holiday events coming up, is that hard to facilitate those timings as well?
Evan: First, the banner heroes that are coming out, not all of them, but some of them, once their period is done, are going to actually be put in the greater pool. So, just because we don’t want that to be a problem, some of them are just gonna be on a rotation. There’s a little bit of a mixture of both to kind of go about that. As far as holidays and setting up those particular events, we’ve got the first year pretty well planned out. It’s not set in stone. Obviously, we have to have room to change if things go wrong or if we wanna add something or if something needs to be adjusted.
Veerender: If you could divulge more into the free-to-play aspects for players that don’t want to spend real money, will they feel very left behind, or are they able to catch up to players that spend money for the characters in the banners, as well?
Evan: I can tell you I’ve played through the game in its entirety. Probably 10 times without ever having given, I mean, obviously I can give myself however much currency on our developer build, but I have gone through multiple times. It is much more about strategy and a skill level to it, so you know, if you are better at it, you can do better.
We give you an exalted character, which is basically the same as an S ranker, an SSR, or something like that. Right off the bat, we give you one of those so that you have a strong character that goes with you. That was like one of the big changes we made from the Korean version to our version.
We wanted to give players that, and they have an option to choose which one they want. It’s not like a random thing. They get to pick that. That’s like something that they can really stick with and hopefully build. A style that they really wanna play with. It is absolutely something that you can go through and play as a free-to-play player.
The monetization is more for, “I want to try to collect everyone.” Then you probably would have to spend some money on that. If you’re just playing for free to play, you’re gonna get enough of the currency to fill out your team to get all the power you need because the currency, the monetization, isn’t actually really tied with what we call growth as levelling. You can’t buy anything that makes your team stronger. You can pay to get cosmetics, and you can pay to do more pools and try to get different characters.
Blade & Soul Heroes is available to download on Steam with more than 40 playable characters, all with their own backstories in a colourful and gorgeous cel-shaded world, in an intense and rewarding battle system.
