Blade & Soul reaches over 1 million users in first week

The martial arts-based MMORPG from NCSoft is off to a huge start out west.

3

Blade & Soul first made a name for itself in Eastern regions, getting a tremendous following in countries like Korea and China since its original 2012 release. Last week, NCSoft's martial arts-themed MMORPG made its North American debut and it looks to be well on its way to the same kind of success out here. Today, NCSoft reported back that over 1 million users have logged into Blade & Soul in the very first week of its release.

A number of Blade & Soul users are likely continuing on from the game's beta, which launched back in October. However, the early success of the game can also be attributed to the fact that NCSoft essentially has four years' worth of content ready to roll out to an entirely new user base, promising plenty to all users, regardless of whether they're premium members or not.

Of course, the challenge of MMORPGs out west isn't so much getting a user base, it's retaining that user base, so it'll remain to be seen whether Blade & Soul can maintain this momentum. There's certainly content on the way, as the teaser below indicates. Blade & Soul is available now and is free-to-play on PC.

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

Filed Under
From The Chatty
  • reply
    January 25, 2016 9:56 AM

    Ozzie Mejia posted a new article, Blade & Soul reaches over 1 million users in first week

    • reply
      January 25, 2016 10:20 AM

      how heavily pay-gated is this?

    • reply
      January 25, 2016 10:21 AM

      What kinda mmo is this, typical Korean grindfest? or a more western MMO like WoW or StarWars:TOR

      • reply
        January 25, 2016 10:23 AM

        Not sure about grindy, but it's much closer to an action RPG style and its martial arts theme has you performing a lot of fighting game-style combos.

      • reply
        January 25, 2016 10:43 AM

        I didn't put too much time into it before getting bored of the questing. It wasn't grindy questing at all, but it was just more of the same. Quest hub -> Go to the circles on the map and kill/gather/talk to X -> Return -> Move to next quest hub.

        Combat seemed cool at first, but once you discover your combo of doom then it's literally repeating the same combo over and over.

        End game is PvP and I didn't do any of it. If PvP is your thing and you can tolerate the PvE to level, then it might be for you.

Hello, Meet Lola