This.. is Blade & Soul in the first quarter of 2021. Followed by Blade & Soul in the fourth quarter of 2021. I don’t think I need to spell out exactly how bad that is for the game. Here’s another graphic to further drive the importance of this reveal.

In light of this.. and the imminent and impending closure of Blade & Soul on PC, a new Blade & Soul MMO is already on its way and poised to make up the financial loss of the franchise on PC. Yup, let that sink in for a moment.
Blade & Soul – an MMO with what is arguably one of the best combat systems currently present within the genre. An MMO that has a larger world, better customization options and generally a more stunning graphical style than almost any of its competition.
This game is getting a sequel. A remake. A complete overhaul in the form of a brand new game. You’d think this would be cause for celebration. But it isn’t.

Today, I want to talk about a game that should not exist: Blade & Soul S – a brand new Blade & Soul MMO.
Blade & Soul S was announced all the way back in 2018. Yes, this MMO has been in active development for over 4 years now. And all we have to show for it is a single trailer – the very trailer you’re watching in the background.
This game was announced simultaneously with Aion 2, Blade & Soul 2, Blade & Soul M, Lineage 2M, and Project TL. All of which have either already launched, or have planned launches this year.
After seeing the horrendous decline in terms of active players and revenue, it’s evident why NCSoft are trying to push out a new Blade & Soul title. But what exactly is it, and is it going to effectively replace what we all know and love on PC?
Honestly? No. The only way this successfully replaces Blade & Soul on PC is if NCSoft opt to shut Blade & Soul down. Which at least as of the first quarter of 2022, is not looking to happen.

Blade & Soul S is the – and I know this is going to shock some of you.. THIRD mobile game based on the Blade & Soul intellectual property. Yes, there are already several mobile Blade & Soul titles currently available, including Blade & Soul 2 which I have a review of for those of you interested.
And where Blade & Soul 2 actually looks good – visually there’s no denying the sequel to Blade & Soul looks anything other than stunning – Blade & Soul S has taken a completely different approach.
Blade & Soul S is.. chibi. Distorted. Cute-ified. They turned what was once a video game aimed at teens or adults into what seems to be a childrens game. The kinda game my little nephew would play. And it looks absolutely horrible.
If I didn’t know who the characters were in the trailer, I’d think this was a game specifically targeted at children. Yes, it looks and feels that bad.
However, much like its predecessor on PC, Blade & Soul S is going to feature a completely dynamic open-world that is going to supposedly change in real-time.
Something that isn’t done in MMOs – due to the nature of large-scale multiplayer functionality. Will NPCs walk around? Move from their pre-designated areas? Will monsters spawn in different locations? Will villages be established, and vanish just as fast?
Unfortunately nobody knows, but having a “dynamic world” means a world that never becomes repetitious – never grows stagnant. That is always changing. And I just don’t see how that’s at all possible for an MMO.

This game is going to take place 3 years before the events of Blade & Soul, which means… we already know the outcome of the story. Unless they plan on taking the story in another direction.
If not, we’ll quickly arrive at the same point in the story we’re at in the PC iteration of the game, and will be essentially playing out a game we’ve already played, but with chibi graphics and worse combat.
And given this is going to be a prequel, it’s highly likely they plan on retconning events, which will end up ultimately angering players. Where Blade & Soul was an MMO – and presented players with a single character that they could create, level and customize, Blade & Soul S is going the Gacha route.
While still an MMO, you’re going to be able to recruit – and subsequently purchase via the cash shop different characters found within the franchise. Meaning you’ll buy someone like Jinsoyun and send her into battle alongside you.
I get it – they’re desperate for money, but if this isn’t the dumbest thing I’ve heard all year… and what’s worse? They plan on adding new characters into the game. I get it’s a prequel, but these characters are going to have an impact on the story – and will likely be present throughout the game, altering the course of the game even further.
What’s weird, is that the game, once more, is entirely open-world. Which means these characters you’ll be capable of deploying.. will be fighting alongside you out in the world. With other players using their own selection of characters as well.

I dunno, man. This all sounds kinda ridiculous to me.
We don’t need a new Blade & Soul MMO – least of all on mobile devices. Rather, we need NCSoft to realize that they need to fix the already existing game. That’s much more important.
Blade & Soul S looks horrible. The cheap looking graphics, the potentially retconned story, the likely auto-play, dumbed down game overall is not the logical next stage of the game we need. It’s a step in the complete wrong direction, and will hurt the franchise more than it’ll help it.
How many people do you hear positively, and actively speaking about any of the other Blade & Soul mobile games? Go ahead, I’ll wait. Exactly.
This is not the future Blade & Soul deserves, but crappy Korean developers like NCSoft are going to take every IP they hold and flush it down the toilet. Because it’s what they do. All they care about is money, and they don’t realize that players will spend money on a game they enjoy – that is handled well. Like Final Fantasy XIV.

I recently played through Blade & Soul 2 on stream. It was a much better looking MMO than I had anticipated it being, and admittedly I had some fun with it.
After posting my video on it, I had repeated questions pertaining to how I went about downloading and installing it. As this is.. actually a little more difficult to figure out on your own.
I spent 2 entire days messing around downloading different files, trying with different VPNs. It was torture, but I refused to give in. I wanted to see what this game was like.

With this in mind, I’ve decided to put together this guide, so you don’t have to go through what I did.

Alright. To start this off you’re going to be required to download and install the Purple Client. This is NCSoft’s in-house platform that allows you to play games like this on your PC.
You could download it via their website, but I’d advise against doing so. The download from their website also installs one of the Lineage Mobile games onto your PC instead of Blade & Soul 2.
To download the correct Purple Client, and subsequently Blade & Soul 2, you’re going to be required to click the link below:

After clicking the link and navigating on over to our website, scroll down until you see the download link. The file in question is BNS212_PURPLE_Installer.exe and is 390MB.
This file is 100% safe, as you can see if you watch the video above, and is absolutely necessary to download and install the game. Without it, I was not able to play the game. So be warned.

So, run through the normal installation process. Set up the correct pathing for the game and the Purple platform. This should only take a moment.
After it’s done installing, you’re going to see a popup window asking you to log in.

You can sign in with an email, phone number, social media accounts or your Apple account. I personally opted for my iPhone account as I wanted to be able to play the game completely cross-platform whenever I wanted, so connecting via that worked perfectly for me.

Now before we go any further, stop. To be able to successfully see, download, install and play the game – you’re going to want to boot up a VPN.
The one I use is ExitLag.

That link above will allow you several days PREMIUM access completely free to test this out. So click it, sign up for an ExitLag account, then boot ExitLag up.
You’re then going to want to locate both the “NC Purple” and “Blade & Soul 2” options in the list to the left, and have them added as active connections.

This means that when you boot Purple up, it will connect via a Korean IP, and when you log into Blade & Soul 2, it will do the same.

Now, relaunch Purple, and choose an option to log in with. Purple is going to run a fairly large update on the client, but if you used the VPN correctly you’ll see a list of the games on the left in Korean, including Blade & Soul 2.
Again, you’re going to have to wait out the update, and depending on your connection, this can take a while. I believe it took 15 minutes? Maybe a little less for mine to complete.

And yes, you can see my character over there – TheStiffenator. She actually, legitimately looks incredible. I created quite the masterpiece in-game. It’s okay to be jealous.

After the patching is complete, Purple is going to require a restart to apply the changes. Make sure your VPN is still open when reconnecting to Purple.

If all went well, you should now see, once again, the game selection over on the left. However this time it will be in English.

If you used the installation file from our website, then Blade & Soul 2 should already be installed, and should have the option to “Update.” If you did this incorrectly, you’ll see the option to “Install” the game instead.

Which, if that’s the case, uninstall everything, and start over, as this WILL NOT work. You’ll receive crashes and won’t be able to log into the game.

Begin the update, and… wait. A long time. My update took 3 hours? 4 hours I believe. The update is really quite large, so you might wanna find something to do in the meantime.

Once the update is complete, you’ll be able to click “Start Game.” Again, make sure your VPN is on when you do this. Now at this point, you’re going to need to do one additional step before logging into the game.

Navigate on over to the PlayNC website, and log in to your account. Use whatever method you used when signing into Purple for the first time.

Make sure your Country is set to Korea, agree to all the terms, and then log in to your account. Make your way on over to your profile, and go to your Contact information.

Here you’ll want to set up your Recovery Phone Number. This will allow you to get into the game in a moment.

After saving your information, go back to the game, and click “Start Game.”

Give the game a couple minutes to boot up. After clicking on the screen, you’re going to get a notification requiring you confirm your identity via SMS. This is why you added it to your profile.

Click confirm, then type in the confirmation code you received via text. That’s it, now you can successfully log into the game.
The launcher should be entirely in English, but unfortunately the game right now isn’t. That doesn’t mean it won’t be translated soon enough however.

Now if you attempt to play the game without a Korean VPN, you’ll encounter crashes. Simply boot up a VPN, once again, one like ExitLag, and you should be more than capable of logging in and playing it to your hearts content.

Now if this guide was helpful, consider letting me know in the comment section below! Alternatively, if you’re experiencing any issues, let me know and I’ll do what I can to help.

I’m gonna be 100% real with you guys here for a moment… I thought, going into Blade & Soul 2, that it was going to suck. Be absolutely trash. And you know what? Okay, so that may have been partially true.
But – and I never thought I’d say this. I legitimately, wholeheartedly never thought I would ever make this claim. But my god, Blade & Soul 2 is gorgeous.
The environments. The character models. The animations. Everything about how this game LOOKS is something else all together.

Now welcome back to another episode of “Is it worth playing” – where we sift through every MMORPG available right now in an attempt to find the best MMORPG in 2021. Today, we’re taking a look at what was arguably supposed to be an absolute pile of stinking garbage: Blade & Soul 2.
Why is it considered as such? Because NCSoft took what was unique about Blade & Soul: Its combat, its unique designs, and.. well everything else, and decided to throw it all out the window.
But just because they’re doing something entirely new with the game doesn’t inherently make it a bad game.

Let me start this off by stating that I’m doing this episode from the perspective of a PC player. Not from the perspective of a Mobile player. I played this on the PC, therefore I am classifying it as a PC MMORPG and subsequently comparing it to other PC MMOs.
I am not going to be holding it to the standards of a game like Honkai Impact or Black Desert Mobile.
With that being said, as a PC game.. this honestly wasn’t bad. At least, not nearly as bad as I had anticipated it being. Quite the contrary.

Blade & Soul 2 is a South Korean MMO that released just a couple months ago. It has no confirmed English version to play, and thus getting the game downloaded and installed via the Purple Platform, NCSoft’s new software that allows players to play all their upcoming games across both PC and Mobile devices, proved to be quite the ordeal.
I think I wasted 4 hours total trying to get this game to work – a game mind you that was 400MB in total. With this in mind, I feel like I should do a guide video on how to get it working on this channel sometime in the next few weeks, if this is well enough received.
After getting the game into a functional state, the game worked almost flawlessly. Sure, it was entirely in Korean, but I feel as though I’ve played enough MMOs to know exactly what does what and where each function is located.
So, with a rudimentary level of understanding of the game, I dove right in.

I instantly realized that there were only 3 races to choose between, and no classes to choose upon selecting my race.
After which I proceeded to create my character, and, admittedly, the options were enough where I feel as though I can make a unique character that I’m satisfied with. Except for the body. There wasn’t much in terms of customization for the body, which was highly disappointing.
I also noticed that the outfits present within the game were.. very different to its predecessor. Blade & Soul is known for its.. over the top levels of perversion. Blade & Soul 2 on the other hand, was much more.. conservative. Very little was shown. Ever. In any of these outfits.
Which really wasn’t an issue for me, but I know will most definitely be for a lot of fans of the.. grotesque monstrosities people made in the original.

Now at its core, Blade & Soul 2 is an MMORPG developed for mobile devices in mind. I’ll admit, this definitely felt exponentially higher quality than the titles I’m used to. Probably because the UI, the textures, everything about the game felt much more oriented towards PC players when played on PC.
But while it felt much more like a PC MMO than any other cross-platform MMO I’ve played thus far, unfortunately the features – auto-combat, auto-routing, auto-play in general were ever present.
And let me stop you there. I know I don’t NEED to utilize those auto-features. I do. But if they’re available, then people will use them. It’s just easier to.
While streaming this to.. about 500 people last week, I asked what people’s thoughts were on auto-play in their games.
Specifically pertaining to auto-play in their PC games, and then auto-play in their Mobile games. The general consensus was that auto-features do NOT belong in PC games, but depending on the type of game, it’s useful in mobile titles.
Again, this is from the perspective of a PC player, so with this in mind… the auto-play features within Blade & Soul 2 – once more, on PC, were highly unnecessary.
Yet in combat – the AI could utilize my abilities much more efficiently than I could. Granted, the AI couldn’t dodge or parry, but I guess that’ll make it much more of a necessity at later levels to be present, especially when engaging boss monsters or doing dungeons and raids.

Blade & Soul 2 offered me more features than I thought it would going into this.
There was a Gacha system present in the game that provides players the opportunity to equip heroes or monsters – enhancing their statistics quite significantly.

Graphically, I feel as though this is perhaps one of, if not the best looking Mobile MMORPG to date. I genuinely do not think there’s a better looking Mobile MMO out there. This is something my viewers continued to point out repeatedly over the course of my stream.
Even more so when we saw a fully CGI cutscene. The attention to detail that NCSoft put into this game is unparalleled. Kudos to them for creating something that looks and feels as high quality as this does.
Furthermore, there were so many unique monsters scattered around the environments. This is something that Blade & Soul suffered from: Regardless of where you went, you’d see the same reused models everywhere.
In Blade & Soul 2, not only were the monsters incredibly high quality, but they were so varied that I felt like I saw more monsters in my 4 hours playing than in all of Blade & Soul.

While I did note earlier that they changed quite a bit of what made Blade & Soul unique, there were some instances where I felt a connection between games. The water walking, gliding through the air. Even sprinting animations.
While so much of the game had changed, there was enough that remained the same that it still.. kinda felt like Blade & Soul? Just a little bit? I don’t really know how to explain it.

The narrative was also very present, and while I couldn’t understand anything going on, I could tell there was effort put into telling a unique story as well. This is one of the areas Blade & Soul really excelled, and it’s refreshing to see a strong focus on it here as well.

✔️ Blade & Soul 2 is an absolutely gorgeous MMORPG, even when compared to other PC-exclusive MMOs.

✔️ The world felt large and filled with unique, varied enemies to engage.

✔️ There were plenty of things to do while out questing.

✔️ The narrative felt engaging and the cutscenes present were stunning.

✔️ Animations were fluid, and the game, somehow, ended up not feeling like a mobile MMO.

❎ Yet while it didn’t necessarily FEEL like a mobile MMO, the number of features that were 100% mobile repeatedly reminded me that it was.

❎ The combat was mostly auto – with the exception of dodging, the AI utilized my abilities more efficiently than I could.

❎ Auto-routing isn’t a terrible feature, but the game auto-played for me so often that I’d occasionally forget I could move my character on my own.

❎ The Gacha system is severely pay to win, with the heroes you could equip providing substantial improvements over your character than their more common alternatives.

❎ The game is unfortunately only available in Korean right now, with no confirmed release date for Western players.

❎ And finally.. NCSoft is known to be a pretty crappy developer AND publisher.

Ultimately, Blade & Soul 2 ended up being a better, higher quality title than I had originally given it credit for.
Is it a bad Mobile MMO? Not at all. I’d say this is one of the better Mobile MMORPGs currently available. Is it a bad PC MMO? Once again, that’s a negative. It’s not a great PC MMORPG, but it’s far from being as bad as some of the garbage I’ve played in the past.
Would I play this in my spare time? Probably not. Too many auto-features for me and I hate Gacha in my games. Would I recommend it as a successor to Blade & Soul? Ehhh.. no. As a standalone title? Sure, but as a direct sequel? No.

I’ve covered Blade & Soul II a couple times now. I thought that the development of a direct sequel to the popular Blade & Soul PC MMORPG for mobile was a terrible idea, as this is a title that has been readily available to PC players for  years at this point, with players having spent years accumulating gear, items and bonding with their characters and world.

Interestingly enough, it turns out that after years spent developing the game for mobile exclusively.. NCSoft have confirmed their intentions of developing and publishing the upcoming MMORPG on not only mobile devices, but also PC as well (with potential opportunities for console and cloud gaming support if the game is received well enough and warrants the time and effort spent on it.)

This is.. bizarre, as Blade & Soul II is still going to be a mobile game but a mobile game that is poorly ported on over to every other platform there is. Do we honestly need a mobile Blade & Soul to replace the PC iteration of the game? Why not just optimize and overhaul the PC game (we’re still waiting on that Unreal Engine 4 overhaul, NCSoft!) and port that on over to consoles instead?
Oh, right, money.

Additionally, for players interested in playing the MMO when it releases, NCSoft have opened pre-registration for the game ahead of its release in South Korea this year, but no date has been given for an international release yet.

Blade & Soul 2 was announced way back at G-Star 2018. Since then, a couple small trailers and teasers were released to attempt to generate hype for the game.
It was sorely needed, as since it was announced, any anticipation players had for the game has all but sizzled out.
Also note that Blade & Soul 2 is very different to any other Blade & Soul games in development, as this title in specific is aimed at being a direct sequel to its PC predecessor.

Yet since its announcement back in 2018.. while yes, we’ve received a couple teasers, there has been no confirmation of a release date for the game.
We’ve been left this entire time hoping, year after year that this would be the year we got to actually play the game.
As of earlier this week, it turns out that NCSoft may have actually given us the affirmation we need: According to their newest teaser for the game, Blade & Soul 2 will be coming in 2021.
Interestingly enough, this was released as a global statement as opposed to a regional announcement, so that means this could very well be their confirmation of a 2021 global release of the upcoming MMORPG.

Blade & Soul 2 takes place some time after the events of the original game, where each of the heroes that fought valiantly alongside you – as the hero – have all become legends.
Yet at the same time, we’re going to be introduced to a brand new cast of characters – characters that will not only propel your journey ever forward, but also aid you in accomplishing whatever the end-game goal of ours is.
Probably to silently move through a plethora of different zones, liberating the populace of each one as we inch ever closer to a brand new super-powerful evil that no doubt threatens the end of all life as we know it.

There are supposedly a plethora of different features in the works for the game: Smarter AI – whatever that means. Areas will be the same but they’ll be altered accordingly.
I’m sure additional areas will be introduced as well. Supposedly, the NPCs will also not only “adapt to their surroundings,” including the enemies that wander the zones, but they’re also going to – in their words – be “a part of the ecosystem.”
To me, this all sounds like they’re hyping a bunch of different features that they think will be next-generation when in reality, the NPCs are just going to be in completely unknown areas and will be a nightmare to locate due to pathing issues. This is a mobile game after all.

All in all, I think this could be a cool MMO to play, but at the same time with how MMOs out of South Korea are looking lately, I wouldn’t put my eggs in one basket. Instead, I’d buy like.. 5, maybe 6 baskets and fill each one with more than one egg. Different colored eggs, even. Different sizes, too.
This is NCSoft after all – when have they ever developed a game that was actually worth our time? Well, I guess back with Lineage and Lineage 2 for PC. But they have long-since passed their expiration dates for this current generation of gamer.

So while we’ll be getting the game next year – at an undisclosed time next year, granted – I’d hold off on getting overly excited until we actually get a solid, complete look at the game.

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.