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You can also just do the main scenario and class quests if you want, it’ll just be a touch harder. But that’s where the fun comes in. Since Blade and Soul NEO Classic Divine Gems is so skill based, you can tackle bosses and challenges at significantly lower levels and sometimes walk away victorious. It can take awhile to whittle these bosses down (which feel like they have inflated health pools in Neo), but it is possible. Better weapons do help, which can be obtained through quests or in-game gacha wheels that are littered throughout the handful of regions currently available in the game, along with Soul Shields. Soul Shields are where your stats come from, and you can customize what you want to prioritize, like attack and critical hits, and so forth. Sometimes Soul Shields from the earlier eras of the game might suit your playstyle more, and you can mix and match to varying effect.
And while you might be grinding for experience, the real grind is with the aforementioned gacha system. World bosses will spawn in each zone, and you’ll likely be able to find where that location is since players (and bots) will be camping the area. Deal enough damage to the boss and you’ll get a drop that will let you spin the wheel of fortune a prize. This includes Soul Shields, random weapon caches, and even cosmetics which is where the real end-game is. I cannot tell you the amount of time I spent in The Scorching Sands and Gloomdross Forest, not for weapons and Soul Shields, but for outfits.
Even if I wasn’t particularly interested in whatever dropped, I just wanted to add to my growing collection of cosmetics. You could say I was pulled in hook, line, and sinker, just like I was before, but it was genuinely fun grinding away with friends, even if we were waiting on timers, hoping we’d deal enough damage among the handful of other players desperate for a shot at a cool outfit. This does keep more powerful players coming back to old zones, though, so it does have some benefit.
Overall, Blade and Soul Neo is exactly as I remember Blade and Soul, just with a few minor improvements. The user interface is largely easier to get around, character traversal feels faster with the stamina bar removed, the game performs better and seems better optimized, and that’s really just about it. But it has all of the rough edges returning players will remember. A shoddy translation, shoddier voice acting, and a gacha system that can feel maddening to be at the whim of for more powerful weapons and cosmetics.
That said, I think this is the perfect time for new players to jump in and experience what I feel is a time capsule of what could have been a new step forward in the genre or at least a competitor to larger MMORPGs at the time, as Blade and Soul offered something truly unique.
Probably. It’s a way for me to relive the summer of 2014, hunkered down with my laptop, next to my partner, coordinating how to duo a boss we had no right fighting. And if I stick around long enough I might even get the chance to check out classes that were released by the time I dropped the buy BnS Classic Divine Gems game. I just can’t see the revival of this MMORPG being a particularly large success for NCSOFT, even if I wish it would be.
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