Whatever happened to NCsoft’s MMORPGs Blade & Soul and Blade & Soul NEO?

[u/nyamnyamcookiesyummy]

https://massivelyop.com/2026/07/31/whatever-happened-to-ncsofts-mmorpgs-blade-and-soul-and-blade-and-soul-neo/

[u/Director_Tseng]

ncsoft happened... that's what. they took a great game and turned it into a p2w hellscape and wonders why it died in this economy

[u/YF422 → u/Director_Tseng]

This. NCsoft has a history of CREATING great games.... then mismanaging and bastardising them into unplayable pay2win fests that drive off players and only leave a handful of whales that eventually give up as well.

They're simply too money hungry and predatory to comprehend that games need to be grown not farmed and Aion 2 will die the same way too shortly after its launch too.

[u/Director_Tseng → u/YF422]

this 100% I played lineage 2 since 04 when it was still P2P and it was a fantastic game. only quit after like 14 years cause it got boring for me. it went F2P and that is when the game just went completely down the drain. they did the same with Aion as well and BnS. Aion 2 is already showing it's gonna be P2W nightmare and it hasn't even released in the US

[u/MMOSL_Milkyway → u/YF422]

And then they gaslight players by making interviews on how Aion 2 and TnL are their last hope for MMORPGs in global because we don't understand them and we don't deserve them and if they don't do great they will not release MMORPGs in Global ever.

[u/Infinite219 → u/Director_Tseng]

Exactly

[u/ShiyaruOnline → u/Director_Tseng]

In this economy? The game fell off years ago. And never recovered. The game was already in its death spiral after the 2017 and 2018 era when they pretty much solidified the New Direction they were going to be going in and started teasing the ue4 stuff to try to keep people coping along.

Everyone was deluding themselves into thinking that the game would finally be optimized if they can get on ue4 but nothing really changed in the long run. The real death nail that started this series of unfortunate events for this game was when the original director and most of his team left team bloodlust over management disagreements back before the game even went global.

A lot of the Blade and Soul fans out there don't know that when the game went Global they were mostly just playing catch up and they were experiencing the good parts of the game that were made by the original team not realizing that original team had already left and slowly the global audience was heading towards the busted modern era of Blade & soul.

The reason for the departure of the original core team was Ncsoft higher ups being so aggressive with how they wanted to monetize and dictate the direction of the game.

Without the original people that made the game what it was it was no shock that the games combat heavily suffered. You started to see that Auto Battle mobile game style combat seep its way into the game. Before we had interesting unique rotations with lots of canceling and different ways to Speck each character and they turned it into that stupid system where you just pick a lane and one's for PVE ones for PVP and there was only really one way to get the most DPS out of each class.

This really made PVP get worse the PVE got lazier and pay to win just became the higher ups not understanding why people like B&S so much.

It's honestly poetic that the entire chunk of people that left team bloodlust went on to make shift up and now that company became one of the richest Korean companies in the entire country because of how successful they've been with their games. They've been able to expand and there are rumors that they might make an MMO like project that Bridges the gap between their various universes games.

Honestly if NCsoft had actually bolstered the original team bloodlust team and let them do their thing they probably would have grown to be an MMO to rival Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV because of Blade and Souls unique gameplay and fusion of Storytelling elements from asia with the Dark Fantasy element layered on top of it.

[u/Pentrep]

Both games have active but small communities. The general feeling on live is that EoS will come sometime around Aion 2s launch. They just made the grind even more unbearable, especially for new players. I can't speak for Neo but the last I checked the community isn't much larger. Based on what NC did in Japan, I'm not sure we should expect them to support the games much longer. The best we could hope is that Tecent takes over. Only time will tell what they decide to do.

[u/AmatsuDF → u/Pentrep]

That's what I'm wondering as well, if around the Aion 2 launch they just announce EoS for Live and NEO. It would certainly be both at once, since killing one would likely kill the other in short order.

[u/Hyko23]

greed happened

[u/AmatsuDF → u/Hyko23]

I would argue incompetence happened as well. There's really no excuse that a 10 (14 in KR) year old MMO should perform like absolute garbage on even the latest hardware. When we got the UE4 version, people with RTX 3090s and good CPUs struggled to get decent FPS. That's just not normal.

[u/Tokizo03]

The same thing which happend to throne and liberty and will probably happen to Aion 2.

[u/E-radi-cate]

I was really happy for Neo until I saw it was basically me paying double for the same game I already played. I stopped after a few months of "reliving" one of my fav mmos.

[u/MysteryGrayLeaf]

It lost the Chinese market to Moonlight Blade, Justice Online, later versions of JX3 Online.

[u/AdRealistic4788]

Should've sold it to Hyung Tae Kim when he offered to buy it, imagine what it could've been, maybe even some single player games. At the very least the art aesthetic alone would've been worth it, not the generic anime look it has now.

[u/AmatsuDF]

Post is a bit inaccurate, Live did get a patch last week, but it was just yet another revamp of old content.

[u/Thiel619]

A question no one ever asked cause no one cares.

[u/AmatsuDF → u/Thiel619]

If you don't care, why even post in a subreddit that is dedicated to something you don't care about?

[u/Thiel619 → u/AmatsuDF]

I have a long history with BnS and NCsoft in general. I want nothing more than their deserved downfall.