@beardalaxy I already see them around salivating out the mouth hoping the game is censored... when one of the most prominent characters in this game is a loli. She's plastered everywhere and is literally one of the first characters you encounter. It's peak retardation with these people. Why play the game knowing it's going to have lolis? These people exist only to make others as miserable as they are tbh.

And I think both games can co-exist and hopefully give each other good competition so they keep improving as long as the developers actually give a shit to retain their players. The games also look vastly different. Some of my friends have complained that BP looks too "weeb" for them.

@veru i actually know nothing about blue protocol tbh. can you give me an elevator sales pitch?

@beardalaxy Sure thing! I have known about it since 2019 but I stopped paying much attention because I've just been playing Blade & Soul all these years (since even before the Western server launch). BnS has hit its lowest point, so my frens and I hope that BP delivers. The main draws for me is that BP has action based dynamic combat and that it offers cute characters. These were my also my two main draws for BnS and there hasn't been a MMO that fits this criteria in all these years. I just really don't care for realistic/gritty style or ugly Western MMOs.

BP was way different back then and tbh, most of the stuff known about the game is from years ago like their 20 man open world raids and they have just been refining the original concepts. I believe it didn't even have character customization back in 2019 and behaved more like classes with predefined appearance. Now it has a really nice character creator. (although basic compared to most MMOs from KR) Definitely more customization than FF14 (comparing since they're both JP) but it's missing the fine tuning that NG and the original PSO2 had.

The reason people are comparing NG and BP is because they share a similar futuristic theme and are both anime MMORPGs from Japan. From what I know, BP will be farm heavy with only craftable weapons and enhancements for it and many creature summons you can hunt for (think Pokemon). It doesn't have a traditional MMO gear system, such as helmets, shoulders, etc. Another similarity is that BP wishes to rely heavily on cosmetics for its monetization. I know NG and even the original PSO2 have many cosmetics. The devs say they want to stay clear from "P2W", though I always take this with a grain of salt coming from MMORPGs nowadays. If the game is F2P, it would honestly be a miracle for it to not have any P2W in it. I have been abused many years already by shitty F2P MMOs; all are P2W but nobody wants to do a sub based MMO either.

BP may also do anime collabs. Since it's from a big JP publisher like Bandai Namco, we can expect collabs.

BP is joining the very few action based combat MMORPGs such as Dragon's Nest, BnS, PSO2, and the now dead Tera. The combat doesn't seem to be extremely reliant on ping either. I watched a streamer from Dominican Republic play on the JP server beta test. His attacks were still very fast and comboing properly despite the ping and him streaming to YT and Twitch at the same time. Game is also optimized well for the many players on screen at once. The same guy also didn't have the best PC (around 6-7 years old in terms of hardware) and he was still getting a solid 30 or so FPS with 20+ players hitting the same mob. Really looking forward to those 20+ players open world bosses.

The game is expected to have a strong emphasis on the story (think JRPG) and it already has anime cutscenes, with the main opening theme being composed by L'Arc En Ciel. The budget for the game seems very high.

Antis shitting on NG and coming to BP will be disappointed since one of the main and reoccuring characters is a loli named Feste. She is the stereotypical "helpful" loli character you can expect and one of the main faces of the game, so I really can't comprehend why antis would even pick up this game. It's like the retards who play Genshin despite it having many loli characters and throw a fit when lewd art of these characters is drawn. The games are clearly not for tourists or catering to them. These games are made for an Asian audience primarily and this character type is very popular. Us Westerners are second thought to these developers. The latest developer stream had a poll that I posted, which shows the loli body type is the most popular by a pretty overwhelming amount. 50% of players who pick female are playing lolis.

I don't see why people who don't like anime or lolis are trying to play BP, as I see a lot of these type of people bitching on Reddit hoping the game is censored, too. I hope Bandai understands its audience and doesn't feel the need to alter its game too much for Western crybabies. Though I think sometimes due to the draconian laws in some European countries (explicit loli is illegal there), they may be actually forced to cover up characters with smaller body types "to be safe" but mostly for the sake of profit since suits have taken over the gaming industry.

Having said that. what Sega did to the height is retarded. I played PSO2 on the JP server (not NG though) and I tried to make a small cast. It just didn't look much like a shota I was hoping to get. It looked like a small adult. I think PSO2 has a more mature style to it while still being anime. Just my opinion on it and this sets it apart from BP a lot; I haven't seen blatant lolis in PSO2 like the way you can create them in BP or even in BnS. I don't know how someone can look at PSO2 characters and think they are underaged. What PSO2 does good is cute pettanko and petite characters. If antis find lolis offensive, picking up BP is definite downgrade to them from NG. But these people watch and play shit that's not for them and then bitch about it and harass those that the media is meant for.

Sorry for so much text but this is mostly everything I know about BP. To me, this game doesn't seem like it will be another MMO failure like all the recent ones. The issue with MMORPGs is that Korea has a monopoly on the genre and has clogged it with shitty and addictive slot machine gameplay. If you play any Korean MMO, you have played them all, basically. It's the same shit with different paint. It's always the same P2W rng trash. KR has been extremely damaging to the genre and it's no wonder that the JP MMOs such as FF14 and PSO2 have very loyal playerbases. What JP lacks in quantity they do make up in quality when it comes to the MMORPG genre. Imo, it's not worth to leave these MMOs for ANY Korean trash game. All the KR MMOs pull the rug under the players with P2W and RNG within the first 3-6 months and are full of SEA/South Americans bots selling gold to other lazy or wallet warrior players because the game becomes unreasonable for a human to gear up in without swiping.

This is coming from someone playing BnS almost 7 years now; there is no reason to play these shitty ass games aimed to abuse you. Instead of fixing the fundamental issues and resource starvation that leads players to P2W or swipe gold, the devs double down on making everything worse and more P2W as they hemorrhage players and keep sucking dry the addicted whales who won't quit. The norm now for most F2P MMOs is to PAY to not play the game.

If you are going to try a new MMO, BP is the best bet.

@veru thanks! this was insightful.

tbh MMOs don't usually appeal to me. at all. i played a shit ton of runescape as a kid because it was free and i could play with my friends after school without actually going through the trouble of asking our parents to hang out and all that. other than RS though every MMO i tried to get into just did absolutely nothing for me, and that's still the case. they're often super heavy on the UI elements and have a shit ton of mechanics and using all of your number keys (and sometimes even more than that) is totally necessary. they're just all so bogged down. then you add on top of that all that typical F2P stuff and it's just blehhh.

PSO2/NGS, in my opinion, actually has one of, if not the best, monetization models. it's crazy how people still complain about it, like they've never played another F2P game in their life. the fact that 99% of the stuff paying players have access to are things that free players can also obtain with in-game currency is amazing. people complain that you have to pay for the best gear but you really don't, and even then the best gear is only going to be marginally better than whatever the stuff that you get literally for free in-game is. meanwhile you have a game like FFXIV that has outfits locked to classes and plenty of stuff you can only get by paying money, including the expansions, which have always been totally free in PSO2. the amount of free stuff you're given just for logging on and playing a little bit is astonishing when compared with literally any other F2P game i've ever played. so i hope that Blue Protocol takes notes from that and manages to do something similar, hopefully without some critical errors that NGS made in the beginning that made it a little rough for a while (mainly stuff related to RMT).

PSO2 has done some anime collabs, unfortunately NGS hasn't really had many collabs in general yet but they've had Hololive, Nijisanji, and Overlord collabs. PSO2 classic had Evangelion (not on Global though REEEEE), Sword Art Online, Konosuba, and definitely some other ones but I can't think of all of them off the top of my head.

while i like MMOs with action combat more, the other ones i have played that have it always end up feeling way more clunky. NGS is prime in that regard, and it seems like PSO in general has always been the best of its kind at the time before being bested only by itself. at least, IMO.

i am not worried about bandai namco as much as i am about amazon, who seems to be publishing it overseas. idk what their track record is with censoring stuff but i hear >big corporation< and immediately get worried that they'll do some shit to try and appease as many retards as possible.

you can make decent lolis even in global, but it's definitely a lot harder and they're not explicitly meant to be lolis from the devs themselves. SEGA has been kinda gaying it up recently though and they even changed some stuff in the localization because it sounded bad, like changing the Slave weapon series to "Raven" and changing a character named "Diggah" to some other shit for sounding too close to nigga, and then like 8 months after Global's release they changed your little helper robots to say "Handler" instead of "Master" because of slave connotations or some weird bullshit like that. i wanna say all of this might be because of Microsoft because the game is obviously unchanged in Japan, but i honestly don't know.

i know a lot of people had like, goblin, dwarf, and fairy characters though that were really small and certainly not lolis. i think that was actually mainly the types of small characters i typically saw, that and shortstacks. didn't see many lolis at all on JP tbh, but maybe that was because i was on the unofficial "english server."

PSO2 having a loyal player base is... i don't know if i would call it that. it seems like most of the people who play it over in the west actually just fucking hate it and complain about it 24/7. seriously can't look at anything related to the game anywhere without several people saying "this game sucks, it needs more content and i want more free stuff by doing nothing." when the game didn't have a whole lot going for it initially, a shit ton of people just jumped ship to go play FFXIV instead. i think a lot of people who play PSO2 are unfortunately being held hostage by their own FOMO and that's 100% their fault. i would much prefer a tighter community that actually enjoyed the game than one that just shits on it all the time.

on another note, i heard someone say that NGS is pay to lose and i have kept saying that ever since. i feel like a lot of players might just pay their way to the BiS stuff, blitz their way through the new content that comes out in 6 hours, and then they complain because they've got nothing left to do. i think this could be somewhat alleviated if NGS brought back those insanely rare drops that can't be sold on the player market, but people would probably complain about that shit too because the current PSO2 community is just full of serial complainers.

i'll have to try out BP when it releases. don't think i'll end up playing it very much because i actually am pretty loyal to NGS despite its flaws and i only have so much time to devote to games, gotta pick and choose wisely. i'll give it a shot though!

@beardalaxy One last thing to add to this about BnS. I have to mention that we don't really have "antis". The Lyn race is the most popular in Korea and I would say even in the West. Most whales are Lyns. So while the game is trash and ded, you can see why some of us stick around lol. Even those who aren't lolicon/shotacon play Lyns because they are just cute. I'm positive this race is keeping this game afloat, the same way it was with Tera and Elins. BnS came out before antis really became so annoying, so most of us remaining in BnS are old school and even those that play the tall races don't care or are even horny for Lyns too.

You can see daily cunny talk in chat sometimes. Nobody really gets super upset or anything. I've gotten some mild insults (compliments) but there is no witch hunts.

@veru i fuckin love that squidward picture lmao