Neowiz: Bless Players "Didn't Share The Team's View" Regarding Early Access
Bless Online's launch and free-to-play implementation is just around the corner, and today the dev team at Neowiz reflected on the game's early access period and what went right and what went wrong. Spoiler: If you played Bless and didn't like it, that's your fault.
Neowiz stressed that early access was a "chance to continue engaging with the player base" and that the game "was not finished," with the goal being to gather more feedback from NA and EU audiences. One of those pieces of feedback clearly didn't include the frequent realization that early access is often viewed as little different from a launch and that, if you're paying for a product, you expect it to be more or less finished. As the blog states:
However, many players didn’t share the team’s view that Early Access was still a time for development and changes. Bless Online wasn’t a final, polished product as much of the community had believed it would be, leading to a mismatch of expectations for Early Access between the development team and the players.
So you see, the issue was that players didn't understand what early access was. Neowiz attempted to communicate this as such, but large swaths of the player base ignored it because that's how it is in the West. Perhaps that should have been gauged prior to the early access launch, rather than figuring it out "in retrospect."
The blog further states that free-to-play was chosen as the payment model "to provide the best experience," despite the team's earlier misgivings about it. The game "will be releasing in a completed state for official launch" on Oct. 23.
Related Articles
About the Author
Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.
More Stories by Jason WinterDiscussion (17)
Read Next
Community Development expert Michah Whipple (known to some as Bashiok from his Blizzard days) has left his position at NCSoft.
You May Enjoy
Take part in a cyberpunk Christmas, a World of Tanks: Modern Armor crossover, and more.
No, we still don't have updated timing on the game's publisher transition.
Log in to get your Midwinter gifts.
New sponsors, a new "Clubs" feature, and gifting arrive in time for the holidays.
This trend has been around for far too long and people get what they deserve for jumping the gun and buying games in a haste.
What they did was blatantly release a broken game for full price and now act like the victims. Go to hell Neowiz.
That's what beta is for FFS. Early access is the paid "privilege" to play a finished product early.
There is no development of the game we have now. It is just a scrapped korea version splitted in parts called update which pretend to be major patches. Whats more how studio which spended so much time working on Bless online came up with Bless unleashed in almost no time on completly new engine ? Players with early acces basically crowdfunded their new title while bless online will stay in maintance mode getting updates from time to time from ripped korea version.
You can compare what we will be getting with what Korea had and draw your own conclusions.
Dont try to waste your time and money in this game like i did
If you followed the whole incident then you would agree with it, expectations were high, and they didn't match, what is so complicated about it to understand? Perhaps don't post articles written by your Intern's without reading them first Jason.