Our new Game Director knows Bless better than anyone else! Jae-hoon is also the one who guides the future development direction and points of focus for Bless. Recently, he presented a big development roadmap regarding Bless Online’s Steam release. We thought that it would be a good idea to share this with you guys so we asked him for an interview.
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Q Jae-hoon! Please tell us about the development direction for Bless Online in 2018.
- A. First, I want to say how happy I am to be able to meet everyone through Dev Talk. While we were deciding on and preparing for Bless Online’s Steam service, I thought that the most important thing was to be clearly aware of Bless’ strengths and points for improvement when deciding on the big picture for development.
Therefore, we tried to find Bless’ strength and weaknesses by looking back on our past service experiences through various kinds of research, such as NA/EU community feedback and focus group interviews. Using this as our foundation, we ended up deciding on the development direction after much consideration.
To summarize Bless Online’s development direction for 2018: we aim to fix problems that many have identified as we lead up to Steam Early Access. We want to ensure smooth gameplay and develop and polish new and current content to allow players to experience Bless’ transformation. In the long run, we will present new core content that expresses Bless’ strengths and uniqueness.
Of course, as we aim to launch Steam EA as soon as possible, we may be criticized for trial and error during the development progress. However, we think that communication with players and providing quick responses is the most important thing in game service. Thus, we will make and grow Bless Online together as we listen to the feedback of players in North America and Europe.
We will do our best to improve on all Bless’ shortcomings before Steam Early Access!
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Q According to the above direction, what is the most important feature in the Steam version that you are currently improving?
- A. As I mentioned above, as part of our short-term goals, we are currently focusing on the development of four components that will transform Bless before Early Access.
– Growth: in addition to providing further vertical growth for players, we want to provide goals for horizontal growth (exploration of new content rather than just leveling upwards, etc) while minimizing repetitive experiences
– Optimization: provide a pleasant gaming environment
– Combat: break away from repetitive combat patterns, making combat fun and rhythmic
– UI/UX: provide an intuitive and unified UI that creates a positive user experienceIn the first build that will be unveiled on Steam, we will present you the new Bless, including the growth, improved optimization, and noticeable changes in the improvement of combat and UI/UX.
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Q Can you please tell us about the main content that is under development and in particular, provide detailed examples regarding combat?
- A. To give you a brief description of what we’re developing: We are redesigning the arrangement and connection structure of the game content to improve the flow, and we are revising the game guide as a whole. We will also improve the current UI / UX to make it easier for players to understand what is going on in the game without any inconvenience.
Combat is the area we focus on the most because it comprises of the majority of gameplay. However I am confident that you will feel considerable change in Bless’ combat as we have been working very hard to improve it.
The main goal of the combat change is to make a system of rhythmic combat that is fun in regard to skill building, and battling solo or with party members.
In order to provide tempo-based (rhythmic) combat, we are re-adjusting the monster difficulty and adding skill combo effects for more efficient and interesting combat. Additionally, with the skill customization system, a skill’s effect or the whole impact of the skill itself can be changed depending on the path you choose. It will definitely provide more depth to growing skills and will enable more strategic combat in PVE / PVP situations.
The current skill system works through players improving their skills by investing skill points, but in the future players will be able to diversify their combat style by choosing which skill effects to grow and how to make their skill combos.
In addition, the cooperative aspects will be more interesting with the addition of special buff effects that vary depending on the party members’ classes.
We are also preparing a lot of other content not mentioned above, and we will share further details on improvements through later Dev Talks.
Lastly, many fans in the community are wondering about the release schedule. There will be a chance to tell you what you are looking for soon.
Everyone in our company is working hard to develop the game you would like in EA, so please be patient and give us a little more time!
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