There is no doubt that Blade & Soul and Archeage were once the most anticipated MMORPGs. They all caught global players’ attention when they were announced and remained in the center of spotlight until they were launched.
Blade & Soul is developed by NCsoft, the developer behind many famous MMORPGs like Lineage, Lineage 2 and Lineage Eternal. With Blade & Soul, NCsoft wanted to offer something different from the Lineage style MMO. Archeage, on the other hand, is developed by Jake Song’s XL Games. Up to date, Blade & Soul was just announced to go west and set to kick off the first closed beta test on October 30th. Archeage was released in the west in late 2014.
I am sure that many players will make some comparisons between the two games.
1. Blade & Soul is linear with less freedom
What players could feel while they are playing Blade & Soul is that they become the protagonist of novel or movie, because players could step by step experience game contents that players provided. It is believed that the quantity and quality of Blade & Soul are full of fun. Comparing with current MMORPGs, Blade & Soul made great progress. However, experiencing prepared content will not make you feel that you live in the world. You will just feel that you are travelling by train to enjoy the beautiful scenery along the way.
Giving up the freedom, Blade & Soul lays stress on storyline. In order to unfold the story, it uses a lot of dungeons. Most of important Blade & Soul story will take place in main city or caves. In the village, key NPC are almost in their room. When you enter the room, you will become the only one protagonist in Blade & Soul.
After all Blade & Soul is a MMORPG, so players are easy to fell into contradictions. There are other interesting elements in Blade & Soul, besides its storyline. But, it is a pity that Blade & Soul takes storyline as the main content. If you choose a new character to play over again after you have played Blade & Soul for a few days, you will dislike the story plots that you feel interesting in the beginning, because the game progress is almost the same as the previous and only character is changed. It is just like traveling the same places twice. The biggest disadvantage in Blade & Soul is lack of freedom.
2. Change the world freely! High freedom in Archeage
Comparing with Blade & Soul, Archeage has disadvantage in performing quests and deducing plots, because the quest narrating and performing pattern is a little classic. In Archeage, most of quests should be gotten via quest window. In order to use a certain item, players should probably line in a queue. Sometimes players should wait for a long time to hunt elite boss monsters. Comparing with Blade & Soul, Archeage requests players to explore the world and find out the hidden beautiful scenery.
Although Archage allows players to level up via doing quests, Archeage provides players with more contents. Because there is not set goals in Archeage, players should set goals for themselves and choose the way to reach it.
In Archeage, players should earn a lot of money to build their own city. In order to earn enough money, they should build a house and take the house as stronghold, then accumulate experience by building ship and sailing to obtain war trophies. For solo player, it will cost them a lot of time to build house or build ship, due to the limited labor force. However, if players team up to do this, it will be easy and save a lot of time. That is to say, most of current contents in Archeage are ultimate contents. Players could decide how to use these contents. With the different choices made by players, the contents will be changed.
3. Visual feast in Blade & Soul
The graphics in Blade & Soul shows Korean famous artist Kim Hyuntae’s charactis fully. Most of female characters are sexy and male characters are full of power. The color and design of characters’ fashion are dazzling.
4. Enjoy the graphic in Blade & Soul and the freedom in Archeage
Comparing the core contents in the two games, you will see both of them have own evident personality. The gorgeous game scene is the biggest selling point of Blade & Soul. Players can search more information in the following website to begin your own journey.
It could bring strong impact to players even by only one screenshot.