I also had the chance to chat with producer David Jaloza about the game, so let’s hear directly from him about the game.Ĭharalampos (Harry) Papadimitriou, RPGamer: Can you tell me a little bit about your involvement in Bless, and give me a quick overview of the game?ĭavid Jaloza, Bandai Namco: I’m a producer at Bandai Namco. Hopefully those issues will be ironed out in the beta period.īut enough about my experience with the demo. I did notice that the AI could at times be a bit slow or unresponsive and that enemies, including bosses, occasionally paused their actions, making fights easy and - for a ranged character like the mage - potentially even exploitable. The boss wasn’t anything to write home about, but it did bring more to the table than a typical tutorial boss. I didn’t see any graphical indicators of attack damage areas as has become common in MMOs, but attacks were well-telegraphed.

The boss hit very hard, able to take me out with just a couple of hits, but was both slow and easy to dodge, leaving plenty of time to recover from mistakes. I played solo in the demo, fought my way through the starting area, and faced the boss. On the other hand, it didn’t feel quite as smooth as it should transitioning between my character’s different actions, so a bit of polish here could go a long way. Overall, I found the system fun and it managed to engage my attention as I often had to switch between using combos and my different abilities to play optimally. Mana is recovered by attacking enemies with combos, and can also be recovered by holding B when not in range of enemies. I was able to equip up to four abilities or ‘blessings’, each which cost mana and had a variety of effects including doing damage, applying debuffs such as slowing enemies, or allowing me to teleport. I could also equip and use healing potions by pressing ‘down’ on the D-pad, and in the demo I was loaded up with copious amounts of them.

As a mage, my combo attacks were ranged, though only medium range attacks are available to keep ranged classes balanced against melee classes. This system is more engaging than the typical auto-attack system of games, but not so complex that it distracts from dodging enemy attacks or using my magic abilities. Once a combo is started, an on-screen prompt shows options buttons to press to continue the combo in one of several ways. Combos can then progress down different branching paths. I was able to start one of two combos depending on the button I pressed. It is entirely action-based, with combos as standard attacks. Combat feels different from the World of Warcraft-style of MMO. I had a chance to play with a mage character. Instead, the game can largely be played solo, though you’ll want a group of five for some of the harder dungeons, and a few groups for larger raid encounters. With five announced classes - Crusader, Berserker, Ranger, Mage, and Priest - each designed to be unique but self-sufficient, combat in Bless Unleashed moves away from the holy trinity of tank, healer, and DPS as the core makeup of player groups. I had a chance to check out Bless Unleashed, a free-to-play MMO releasing on Xbox One.

Bless unleashed series