Round 8 To Offer Beta Access And "Look Into" Ways To Compensate Bless Online Players In Unleashed

Round 8 Studio answered players' questions about Bless Unleashed coming to PC with an FAQ and video last week on the game's Steam page. Production Director Koven Park explained that the name of the studio came from a saying: "For a righteous man falls seven times and rises again, and the importance of the 8th round, where winners are usually decided." The translation might be a little off, but you get the idea.

Getting to the meat of the FAQ: Two closed betas are on tap for 2020, with an official launch planned for early 2021. The first beta will be on Steam, while the second will require Round 8's official launcher. As will be the case with the console version, fishing will come to the game with the PC release, as well as language support for English, German, French, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. More languages, new classes, and colorblind mode are also in the works.

What about if you were burnt by the PC release of Bless? That's not me using harsh language -- the question in the FAQ is literally "Any plans on compensating the community burnt by the last pc release of Bless?" The response is that while Bless Unleashed is "an entirely different game from it's predecessor, Bless Online," Round 8 will try and get former Bless Online players into the Steam beta (dependent upon "assistance from Valve") and that the team will "also look into other ways to hopefully adequately compensate the players as well." My suggestion would be not to hold your breath.

And will the cash shop be pay-to-win? As usual, when posed with that question, the response is unequivocally "no" ... wait, no it's not. Here's the full question and answer:

Read into that however you like -- and the answer reads more like it's in response to asking about similarities between the console and PC cash shop than the P2W issue -- but coming from the company that said it wouldn't make Bless Online free-to-play because it didn't want to be "tempted" into making it pay-to-win, it raises a few red flags.