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Black Desert Online was accused heavily of being overly microtransaction-heavy and leaning almost headfirst into pay-to-win territory when it first launched in the West eight years ago. However, over those years, I noticed the pay-to-win elements here in the West were slowly reduced, with BnS NEO Divine Gems those microtransactions often being cosmetic or simply convenience items. It’s hard to say it’s completely gone, and the amount of microtransactions available in Black Desert has certainly not gone down over the years. Still, one thing JJ’s team at Pearl Abyss America did, in my view, was help headquarters better understand what the audience here wanted out of its in-game store.
She has the same task ahead of her here at NC America, especially as more titles are being published in Korea first. While NCSOFT’s most recent MMORPG, Throne and Liberty, is being published by Amazon here in the West, with that team taking the lead at formulating the microtransactions to be more akin to what we’d expect out here, JJ’s team had to do this with Blade and Soul Neo. For gameplay, JJ says there isn’t much being changed in Neo from its Korean version. However, she does tell me that her team is paying close attention to the business model, especially whether it’ll be accepted here in the West.
We are not changing a lot of things for Blade and Soul Neo. When we played Blade and Soul Neo here in the office, I think the dev team really wanted to make it work well for the global audience. So I think those were the learnings from our past experience. Unfortunately, some of our titles - or most of our titles - had a pay-to-win reputation. So there’s a big awareness now about that internally. I think even for the business models, the devs wanted to make sure this is better, this is going to be well accepted in the West. So we’re learning from our live service experience.
As a result of those internal playtests, JJ says her team didn’t think a lot of changes needed to be made, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be changes made in the future as it heads towards launch. NC America doesn’t currently have a launch date set, but there are certainly some interesting features to look forward to, especially if you’ve played buy BnS Classic Divine Gems the original.