Greetings, Warriors of the Earthen Realm!

Following the release of our recent Empyrean Shadows update, we wanted to take a moment to give you some insight from the team and what the future holds for Blade & Soul.

For those of you who haven’t played the game in a while, now is a great time to return. We’ve just released a new chapter of the Epic Story, Act 10: The Gathering Dark, which will have you reunite with old friends and foes alike as well as learn more about the young Jinsoyun’s fate. We also just added a new Fishing system for a leisurely change of pace from doing Dailies—or, if you’re in need of a boost to get to the latest content, you can participate in the current Fortune’s Bounty event, which was designed to help you catch up. We’re also currently running the Tropical Treasure Trove where you have a chance to acquire some shiny items and new exclusive cosmetics, including Lightstealer’s items which have been added for the first time!

And that was just last week! Over the past few months, we’ve completely revamped the game’s skill system and started introducing the third Talent specializations for each class, with Blade Master and Kung Fu Master being the first available (additional classes will be released later this year). We’ve added a bunch of new Dungeons and Raids, a new Battle Royale PvP mode, and much more! We continuously read your feedback on the game and use the community input to make appropriate changes, such as the increased drop rate for Evolved Stones and reduced cost for Soul upgrades just to cite a few. If you follow our livestreams (and you really should! Follow us on Twitch), you’ll already have been introduced to our new hosts: Brett, Justin, and Linda. We hope that you are enjoying the new faces (though they’ve been involved with Blade & Soul for a long time), and we look forward to reading your continued feedback on the game’s forums.

But if that’s what’s been done this year, what does the future hold for Blade & Soul? Well, I’m glad you asked. We have a very busy rest of the year ahead of us: You may have heard about a new class coming this September. This highly anticipated class has been in the works for a while and we hope that it will satisfy all the ranger-loving players out there – and we can’t wait to see how people will use the hybrid ranged/melee class. As I mentioned above, we have plans to release the new third Talent specialization for the Destroyer and Assassin classes by the end of this year. New Dungeons, Raids, and equipment will naturally be part of the mix as well, and you can look forward to some other quality of life improvements for the game: an easy dungeon mode for new players to learn the mechanics of some of the more challenging bosses, introducing Team-based combat for Shackled Isles PvP, revamping the weekly challenge system, expanding the Unity system, and implementing a new system to separate PvE and PvP Attack Power in order to offer a more balanced gameplay experience for everyone.

We know that the Unreal Engine 4 upgrade to Blade & Soul has been on everyone’s mind, and while we don’t anticipate the game upgrade to happen this year, rest assured that development is progressing and we hope to be able to share some more news about it in the coming months. Check out this video to get a sneak peek at the current progress.

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We have one last bit of Blade & Soul news from a company perspective. Please join me in welcoming the new Blade & Soul Producer, Sage Loya. She is an industry veteran and experienced Producer who has worked on multiple MMOs in the past and will be instrumental in working with our product teams here and in Korea to ensure we can implement your feedback in-game. And for those of you who are curious, she mains Force Master. We are very excited to have her join our team. Welcome Sage!

Finally, a special thanks to our community for their on-going feedback and suggestions. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to a great summer of amazing Blade & Soul content.

Sincerely,

Nico Coutant

Blade & Soul Senior Producer