Blue Protocol Livestream Provides Details On The Network Test And An Upcoming Benchmark

Early this morning Bandai Namco hosted a live stream for their upcoming MMORPG Blue Protocol. The stream lasted a little over 30 minutes. Okay… probably about 20 minutes or so as the first six minutes of the video are taken up by the pre-show banter and a trailer. Once they got past that, the devs got right down to business discussing two very important things: the network test and the benchmark.

The whole stream was done in Japanese and, unfortunately, Bandai Namco did not provide translations of their own. The good thing for us is that some content creators were already hard at work doing a little translating for us. Our sources of choice were a video Ginger Blue Gaming – seen below, and a translation from Blue Protocol Database. The Database post also contains translated videos, but it is a situation where the English translation voice is overlaid on top of the Japanese voice, so it may be distracting for some of you.

As mentioned above, this stream addressed two main things, the progress made on the Network Test fix and details about the upcoming benchmark. The one thing everyone will likely want to know right away is when the benchmark will be made available, and the good news is that the wait isn’t long – for Japanese players, anyway.

The software can be downloaded tomorrow. Interestingly, when they demonstrated the benchmark during the live stream, viewers noticed that there was a language option. The hosts did not show viewers whether an English option is available, but it seems the benchmark can be downloaded by anyone, so maybe you’ll want to try your luck.

The benchmark software is available tomorrow at noon JST and will take up about 3.5 gigs of space. It has the same character creator that will be found in the Japanese version of the game and players are encouraged to play around with it, testing everything from lighting effects to clothing. Players can also save presets of their character to use when the game launches. There are limitations, however. Names can’t be pre-saved and it limits creation to a single class.

Those who wish to can stream the benchmark software or share pictures, but the devs do ask that they be mindful of the user agreements and don’t go datamining it.

As for the other topic covered during the stream, the network test, it was explained that the developers found “critical bugs” at the last minute and are currently working to fix it still. They’re also working on secondary fixes before running the test. Before the network test can happen, another larger internal test will be run to make sure everything’s okay. They expect to announce the network test early to mid-March.