After the announcement of NEO Classic releasing, I’ve been interested to see how will it differ to the former Blade and Soul.
I’ve played the game since the Chinese OBT in 2014, which was the time I was most active in the game (that is, during 2014-2018). The game has wildly changed over the years:
- Classic: at first we had much less content, but much more extensive gameplay: blue upgradeable accessories and weapons, various crafting recipes without which you couldn’t advance further without spending a fortune on the materials, more sophisticated combat.
- Simplified: over the years, blue accessories were no longer upgradeable, eventually the same followed with purple accessories as well (unless you have kept them in your inventory), combat was simplified with the addition of various soul badges, 3rd specs for each class, removal of various quests, simplification of existing quests and questline.
What is different/new in NEO?
As far as I am aware, these are the main differences at the moment:
- No more upgradable accessories/weapons/etc. – they are dropped within instances with random stats.
- Rune system for enhancing specific traits/stats.
- New UI, different dungeon queueing.
- Enhanced / new animations for certain actions like windstriding.
- Some kind of card collection system, which improves stats presumably.
- Improved graphics.
- The skill tree is simplified, but there is still a lot of skill options to pick from, just like before where you could spec each skill to have a different effect. However, it seems that the requirements for certain skill effects are no longer there, as we used to have to complete certain achievements in order to get skill books for certain skill tree selections for skills.
- Dungeon runs are given marks like in some other games, where for clearing a dungeon you get A/B/C etc. ranks for that run.
Expectations
Not much to say. NCSoft has been going under restructurizations, we have seen the establishment of NC America last year, but due to how the game has been going for all the years, it wouldn’t be wise to assume that there’s hope. However, it is great to see the company trying to improve their costs, directing investments to try new things, explore new ideas, etc.
Since its formation, NC America has been attempting to restructure and enhance the services for NCSoft’s games in the Western markets. NC America appears to have been a strategic move to unify operations and improve game services like Blade & Soul, Lineage II, and Aion under a new entity.
Concerns regarding NCSoft sales YoY/QoQ
We have yet to see whether the changes will improve the company and their games or will it not. As with a lot of game companies, many focus on their mobile games as they bring in the most revenue. If we look at the 2023-2024 earnings reports, we will see that MOST of the mobile counterparts of the pc games earn more than their pc counterparts:
Naturally, they might pay more attention to the development and management of the mobile games. However, there is another issue that can be observed in the following chart:
As you can see, Blade and Soul games in general seem to bring in the least in terms of sales. Even in total, with Blade and Soul and Blade and Soul 2 together, they provide the least in sales.
However, if we go into Q4 earnings report, we see even more grave news:
As you can see, despite the sales going down by 31% YoY, the decrease in income and operating profit is massive. What we see here is that overall, NCsoft is increasingly starting to bring in less profit.
If we went further down, we would see that their mobile sales have decreased more than PC sales – 31% decrease in mobile sales and 6% decrease in PC game sales (comparing 2022 and 2023 YoY). That is important since mobile game sales make up 67% of their total sales. A good thing is that perhaps PC game sales have been rather stable considering that the decrease is as low as 6%.
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