Last week, the new Warlock class made its first appearance in a teaser trailer by NCsoft Korea. Over the weekend, the extended trailer was revealed over at Tencent Games Carnival 2014, and the Taiwanese media got to chat with the NCsoft development team about the mysterious class. Read on!
Q: The new Warlock class feels different from the other classes. Why is this so?
A: With the new Warlock class, we are targeting the younger users as well as trying out new things which will break the mould in Blade & Soul, hence there is a new look compared to the other classes.
Q: The art direction for Blade & Soul is rather inspiring. What techniques do the development team have?
A: Blade & Soul was developed with a purely China-inspired design in mind. When development first started, it was early days for Unreal Engine 3. The team thought that we could do some experiments, and hence brought the art to the digital world using Unreal Engine 3.
Now, Unreal Engine 3 has matured in terms of its capabilities and functions, hence there are more choices. For the future of Blade & Soul, we will utilize these improved features on various levels. The new Warlock class is considered as the starting point.
Q: The Warlock class is able to summon creatures. What is so special about them?
A: The Warlock class actually started off as the Summoner class which is able to summon creatures from the dark side. But due to some development changes, we changed the summoned creature to a cat. We still wanted to bring the original summoner idea to the game, and the Warlock was born.
The summoned creatures, as mentioned, is from the dark side, and can be considered as a magical being. We will be working on the summoned creatures even after the Warlock class is released, as we are testing many designs internally. However, we are still unsure if they will eventually make it into the game. The current roadmap is to allow more powerful creatures to be summoned down the road.
Q: Is there a new weapon for the Warlock class?
A: The Warlock class now uses the Assassin class’ dagger to rip through space to summon the creatures from the underworld. There are active skills which will have the talisman effects. We are working on possible summons using the talisman, and making sure there are more weapon choices for the Warlock.
The new class is able to buff party members’ damage other than summoning and attacking skills. The development team is making experimental changes to how the Warlock attacks. For other classes, it was about using weapons to attack and cast spells. The Warlock does not require utilizing a weapon directly to attack (no explanation here), and we hope to let players enjoy a new style of combat.
According to other reports, the summoned creatures will attack together with the character, unlike the Summoner’s cat. And mentioned above, there will be buff skills, and apparently debuff skills as well. The Warlock class will be able to steal other classes’ skills during PvP to use.
