Blade & Soul Developer Talks about Combat and Optimization

NCsoft's Unreal 3 Engine action MMO Blade & Soul is on its way to CBT3 and recently Hong Suk-Geun, Lead Programmer from the developer team, talked in an interview about the combat, optimization, the game's engine and so on.

Hong Suk-Geun said that since Blade & Soul is not a non-targeting game but has a unique targeting system, "hit boxes" won't be the problem of the game's combat system. What they are worried about is how to make the action sequences look more fluid. There will be an "after judge" system which judges whether you hit or miss "once the projectile reaches the target".

Talking about optimization, Ncsoft revealed system specs for Blade & Soul CBT1 last year, and it required players to have a Geforce 8600GT at least and recommended 8800GT. Now according to Hong Suk-Geun, players can expect lower system specs for CBT3. The maps in the game aren't seamless because the developer wants to reduce the size of the game. Thanks to the algorithm which can pre-load the content, the loading time is very short in the game, even it's just in beta phase. Today many MMORPGs use Unreal 3 Engine but in Hong Suk-Geun's opinions, although this engine is easy to take and edit, it's made for FPS games since it lacks many UI features that a MMORPG needs. Thus, the team has spent a lot of time on the UI things.