Hello Blade & Soul community,

What a year it’s been! Since we’ve launched Blade & Soul in North America and Europe, over 4 million players have joined the Hongmoon Clan to pursue revenge through 13 major game updates.

Today I want to take a brief look back at how we’ve gotten here, the state of the game today, and provide a glimpse of what’s coming in the near future.

Blade & Soul has gone through a lot of changes over the past year. Some of the most important changes we’ve made to the game were a direct result of your (the community’s) feedback: reduced cost for Hongmoon Skills, PvP Spectator Mode, converting more items to be account-bound, streamlining weapon Evolution, and making Legendary accessories available through tokens, just to name a few.

As we look at where we are and some of the releases we’re working on right now, one of our top priorities is to fix the remaining issues with the Character Profile (F2) window displaying incorrect (or no) information. We know this function is heavily used by the community and is an important part of your gameplay experience, so we’re focusing on resolving this right now.

We’ve also been working behind the scenes over the past few months, and have been able to greatly reduce the number of bots in the game, and ensure fair play in Arena PvP. The situation has improved dramatically, and we’re fully committed to putting our resources toward continued action against cheaters.

We recently released the 64-bit client version of Blade & Soul which greatly improved game performance for most players. We’re pleased with the results thus far, and are continuously working on making improvements to ensure players can get the most benefit from the 64-bit client. And while we’re talking about technology, we’ve also received a lot of community feedback regarding GameGuard, and we’ve been investigating alternate solutions. We don’t have concrete details we can share just yet, but want you to know it’s a high priority for us.

We’re also looking at our content release cadence and what we can do to ensure the updates are more impactful. Our goal over the past year has been to catch up to the other regions while maintaining a good balance between accessible and challenging content. Having more impactful and feature-rich updates will mean they’re less frequent than they were when we were playing catchup, but will generally have more grand content and features packed into each one. Our next major update in April, “Secrets of the Stratus”, will be our first example at this new direction. To give you an idea of what we mean by “impactful”, here are just some of the new features we’ll be including:

Act 7: Find out if you have the courage and strength to stand up to the dastardly Zulia, who kidnapped Jinsoyun for her own nefarious purposes!

Find out if you have the courage and strength to stand up to the dastardly Zulia, who kidnapped Jinsoyun for her own nefarious purposes! Gunwon City: Explore an expansive new land, including the grand Gunwon City itself.

Explore an expansive new land, including the grand Gunwon City itself. Skill Point Revamp: A complete revamp of the skill point allocation system will streamline how you specialize your character’s skills, while keeping the same level of customization depth.

A complete revamp of the skill point allocation system will streamline how you specialize your character’s skills, while keeping the same level of customization depth. Three New PvE Areas: Naryu Sanctum – Our hardest 6-member Heroic Dungeon released to date. Great rewards such as the new Legendary Bracelet await, but only the adventurous will claim them! Celestial Basin – A new open-world area well-suited for solo and casual players. Among other rewards, the new Mystic Badges can be acquired in this area. Mushin’s Tower F16-20 – Challenge yourself against Yunsang, and compete for the fastest kill on the new Mushin’s Tower leaderboards.



The Hongmoon Training Room: A new solo instance that will allow you to practice skill combos and boss attack patterns. This is a must for new and returning players, but existing players will also find it useful to practice their skill rotation.

A new solo instance that will allow you to practice skill combos and boss attack patterns. This is a must for new and returning players, but existing players will also find it useful to practice their skill rotation. New Hongmoon Levels: Continue progressing your character up to Hongmoon Level 20.

Continue progressing your character up to Hongmoon Level 20. Insta-Level 50 Voucher : A new account service that allows you to create a new character at max level and jump right in the fray!

: A new account service that allows you to create a new character at max level and jump right in the fray! Skill balance changes, Legendary items, new pets, cosmetics, quality of life improvements and much, much more!

The best part? This is only the beginning. Looking past April, we have a lot more content in store for you in 2017; Act 8 of the story, a new class, level cap increase, new ultimate skills, new dungeons and raids, and new Legendary items are just some of the things slated for this year. Of course we will also continue to have a steady flow of in-game events and community activities.

We recently held our first Loading Screen Art Contest, and the winners will be able to see their creation in the game starting tomorrow!

The Blade & Soul Team would like to sincerely thank you for your continued support and passion for the game, and if you have yet to try the game out it’s always easy to download, play, and have access to all of the game’s content—all for free.

Thank you again.

Nico Coutant

Producer, Blade & Soul