Recent reviews by Reaper

Adequate.

Spent 20 minutes hitting a barricade to get some mokoko's.

10/10 will play again.

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Bless Unleashed is an open world MMORPG, as you probably already know, it's published by NEOWIZ, same publisher that devoloped and published the "infamous" Bless Online that was known to close and leave a bunch of players empty handed. I didn't play Bless Online so I'm gonna skip that, you have plenty of other reviewers talking about it already.

PROS:

- Character Customization is quite good, there's a lot of options to try out;
- Graphics are good looking, nothing too out of the extraordinary;
- I liked the combat/combo system and skills;
- The story, if you have patience to read the dialogs can be enjoyable;
- There's a "Blessing system" that further enhances your combat abilities or crafting and changes your playstyle;
- The costumes look good;
- Huge open world bosses;
- Monster variety and different mechanics;
- Landscape variety;
- You can buy real money purchased costumes and other items from market;
- You can get free inventory space by exploring the map;

CONS:

- Progression system, gear wise on the start is pretty good, though it dies out later while your only upgrades are either market or dungeons small drop chances - then there's the skill progression, as further you level up a skill the more points it will take, later taking a crazy amount of points;
- Besides already being monetized with cosmetics and battle pass plus optionally buying "Founder's Pack" granting you premium bonuses, such as increased XP, currency etc, the game still sells on their "Lumena Shop" more bundles with currency used on market (star seeds), gold, inventory space. I believe it's over monetized, plus anyone can just buy star seeds and buy a bunch of gear to have clear advantages;
- Matchmaking is awful on PVP plus it takes ages to get into the 15v15;
- PVP is overall bad, plus classes are unbalanced;
- The battle pass "Bless Pass" if you buy it, the only way to complete it is by completing missions, which will require you to do boring stuff that either takes too long or you don't like it, I believe it should level regularly while you do content you want;
- You bought a costume from the in game shop? Great that will only work for the character you activate it, you want to use it on another character? Buy it again, hugely anti-consumer;
- Targetting system is not so good, make it hard to notice incoming AOE skills or even dodging;
- You can't changing the "Cycle target" hotkeys;
- Some cutscenes are voice some are not, plus they are very choppy;
- Although playable, the performance isn't the best, the Lightning option isn't at all optimized, and playing without it just makes the game look terrible;
- There's no really early use of the market, you can only sell gear later on which kinda sucks;
- Some bugs that required to actually restart the game two or three times;
- Crafting is bad too, overall, the amount of materials you'll start needing to eventually get something you want is just too much;
- Sometimes you're out of combat for a while, yet you're still "in combat" and can't sprint/call mount;
- 300 users block limit;
- No pre-notifications of Crusades/Invasions;
- No direct trading with players;
- There's pretty much no roles at all, I thought playing as a crusader you would at least be able to taunt;
- You have to re-add friends on alts plus re-block spammers.

Verdict:

Although early levels you'll clearly have fun and feel constant progression this later on will just get clouded by the other issues the game has, tons of microtransactions, not that good PVP (plus it is kinda pay2win), not interesting enough crafting system, bad matchmaking, unbalanced classes, bad battle pass progression/system, over expensive founders pack or/and other microtransactions, bad/laggy cinematics/scenes either voiced or unvoiced and so on.

EDIT: In the current state of the game I would avoid getting into this, uninteresting new battlepass, unfixed issues still within the game, nerfs that make you change your whole gear because it has a bad rune system, can't get into battlefield queues, the list goes on and the player number keeps decreasing, I don't believe the game will last much longer honestly, and things will only change for the worse each update.

I know my computer is getting old, but the performance on this game is just terribly bad for me, and I can still manage to play most, if not all, games to date. Similar problems with Rage 1 too.

Anyway the game seems good, but performance being so bad even though it shows I have around 40 to 50 frames, it just feels like it's stuttering bit by bit. Plus two times crashing when I went to the advanced graphics options on the main menu is just a no for me.

Beforehand, I've played this on microsoft store PC, around 35 hours, MY opinion of the game remains the same, it's a good looking game, the exploration and questing are so fun to do and rewarding, for me the best part of the game, and you can cooperatively do those which makes it even more fun with friends.

There's a lot of customization (ship, character,..) that makes you and your ship look good and unique, sailing mechanics are great and fun to use/learn, there's hidden dangerous everywhere, kraken, skeleton ships, forts, tons of islands and so on. The weather and atmosphere in the game are amazing, it really makes you feel like a pirate sailing seas, which is great. Menus look well designed and user friendly, the game looks polished overall.

Now this is all great, but as many other players here have said, the PVP aspect of the game screws things over, meaning the following:

- If you don't come into this game with a PVP only mindset you're screwed, you want to do PVE? Alright, but after you do that and collect some treasures, you're at a disadvantage the moment that happens. Why? Because now you have something to lose, and a player who only comes to this game to PVP, will not. Understand? Good let's move on;

- Even if you take precautions and not hoard, you're always at a disadvantage, at the outposts where you deliver your goods, there might be players camping it, it's really simple, one stays in the outpost island, the other stays hidden with the ship, as soon as you think the outpost is clear and go for it, the ship comes in, of course if you didn't hoard you won't lose much. (this is of course assuming you're playing solo, because if you have a party, you can fight and win, it's a 50/50 chance if both teams are good/experienced with you having something to lose);

- Which brings us to the solo factor in the game, playing this game solo is harder of course, and some of the times your friends are not online and you might want to PVE (explore, do some questing puzzles etc, because it's fun and you like it) but the moment you do it, what's stated above might happen, it's not a big deal if you don't hoard stuff, but it's still counter productive and annoying to say the least, plus the enemies HP doesn't take in account that you're solo, so it stays the same, taking a lot of time/effort to kill mobs if you're soloing, another disadvantage of playing solo PVE, it should be adjusted. If you're going for solo PVP only, on the other hand it is ok, well you've got nothing to lose even if you're outnumbered and die;

- I had forgotten some of the mechanics and how the game works, so I tried the tutorial, and it's awful, incomplete, if you want to learn stuff, just watch some lives or youtube videos;

In the end the game is anti - single player for the most part, and should be treated mostly as PVP game, sadly my interest is more on the PVE aspect of this game, the exploration, questing, sailing etc. are the major aspects that I like in the game.

Of course I also like PVP, the ship battles, boarding and firing cannons are awesome as they should be, but you're constantly more forced and inclined to do PVP than PVE, due to the disadvantages and negative aspects referred above.

Aside from the ship battles, I can do PVP in any other game, what I can not do however is the awesome sailing isles exploration this game offers with it's amazing weather and random event system on open seas, which is the main reason I loved the game. Therefore I can not recommend this game, despite it's amazing positive aspects and being well developed, my time is more precious than affording to waste it by losing all my progress, I know there are survival games like this, but it's just not my cup of tea. I'm fine with the PVE and PVP aspects of the game overall, but the possibility of having more to lose than my opponent is not fun, unless I play strictly PVP and do the opposite of not having anything to lose.

PS: A comment I made on a random thread on steam, that I believe it reflects the whole PVP/PVE situation:

"The thing here some people don't understand, is that SOT is very unique even if it's either PVP only, PVE only or both, and the reason PVE players want it to be PVE only, is exactly because of those unique mechanics/features the game delivers to players, the sailing exploration discovering islands, the questing and puzzles, the ability to play with friends, the ship fighting, random events such as kraken, skeleton ships, etc; forts and so on. Plus the amazing weather and atmosphere that makes you even more immersed into the whole pirate thing.

Now name one game that is like sea of thieves and is strickly PVE. We don't have one, that's why you can find both types of players in these threads, casual players you like more the PVE part of the game and hate being ganked and losing progress, and the ones who launch the game just to PVP who go at it more competitively."

It's a nice game to complete so you unlock cool achievements for the steam profile showcase.

Played this on the ps4 and liked it, but never actually completed it since I don't play console that much, but the release on steam makes it great, I rather play my games on PC/Steam.

Port wise, the game plays impeccably good, better than some older games that look poorly compared to this.
Gameplay wise, I've loved it so far, will update this later, just highly recommend if you like zombie - open world games that look gorgeous graphically :)

This game is currently, terrible. More than half an hour to configure/fix issues by trying out stuff on guides but still ends up playing and looking awful.

- Textures taking longer than usual to load (might try it on the sdd later but still it isn't normal for a 2011 game);
- Performance wise is bad and stutters;
- Terrible mouse sensivity slider plus the sensivity on the menu gets broken (you can fix it with a launch command).

Will give any insight on further gameplay if I can manage to fix the textures pooping out. But way too much of a hassle to play.

Edit: Moving the game to the SSD seemed to help a little bit, though it's still noticeable.

For anyone that has these problems here are the launch commands that help:

+com_skipIntroVideo 1 +cvaradd g_fov 10 +cvaradd m_menu_sensitivity 0.20

+com_skipIntroVideo 1 (Skips intro video)
+cvaradd g_fov 10 (Adds 10 to the default 80 fov)
+cvaradd m_menu_sensitivity 0.20 (If you lower the mouse sensivity, the menu sens gets bugged, this fixes it)

Harder than souls like games.