Blade & Soul Heroes Interview: The Future Of Franchise Looks Promising

We’re incredibly excited to finally have Blade & Soul Heroes launch on a global scale. NC America is still a relatively young company (with a staff of less than 40), so this was a major milestone for our team. Going into launch, we had high expectations, but the response from players has been even more energizing than we anticipated. We’ve seen a lot of passion from long-time Blade & Soul fans as well as new players discovering the franchise for the first time. Of course, with any live service game, launch is only the beginning. We’re already listening closely to player feedback and working hard to keep improving and growing the experience.

A lot of players have really enjoyed putting together tier lists and sharing their favorite Heroes. What surprised me most is the amount of diversity in who players enjoy using and who they think is strongest. It’s been exciting to see that there isn’t just one clear path. Different players are finding success with different strategies, which is exactly the kind of creativity and variety we hoped the game would inspire.

We’ve already seen over a million downloads on the Play Store alone, and that number keeps climbing every day. It’s been amazing to watch the global community jump in so quickly after launch. For us, that’s just the beginning, we have a lot of exciting events planned, and we’re committed to listening closely to player feedback as we continue to grow Blade & Soul Heroes. Our hope is that this momentum only builds as more players discover the game.

We understand that some long-time fans came into Heroes with mixed feelings based on how earlier titles were managed. One of the advantages of Blade & Soul Heroes is that it had already launched in Korea as Hoyeon, which gave us a full year of player data and insights to build on. Our team at NC America spent a lot of time playing Hoyeon ourselves and working closely with the developers to make sure Heroes felt right for a global audience.

We held several focus group tests with both PC and mobile players in the US and Korea during that time. The developers were very open to making adjustments, and that collaboration has given us confidence that Heroes reflects both the lessons learned from the past and the improvements players have been asking for.

Blade & Soul Heroes is systemically unique from the other games in the Blade & Soul series, from its game design and its art direction to its financial model. While it’s difficult to compare Heroes with NEO or the original Blade & Soul, we are confident that Heroes brings something new and fresh to the series.

Blade & Soul Heroes takes place three years prior to the events of Blade & Soul. While the two games are uniquely different, we still wanted to make sure that players would enjoy the same characters and world that they’ve experienced before. Heroes shows an artistically different reimagining of many of the same regions players explored in Blade & Soul. Additionally, long-time fans of the series will notice several familiar faces while playing Heroes, and they’ll get the chance to see what some of their favorite characters were doing a few years prior to the start of the original game.

We’re thrilled to have launched Blade & Soul Heroes in more than 190 countries and supporting eight different languages, which is an exciting milestone for our team. We support the title on PURPLE, our proprietary platform, Steam – including Steam Deck – iOS and Android. It does come with its own unique challenges when you launch in that many countries, especially for a game that supports both PC and mobile.

We knew that there could potentially be issues that arose with a scope that big, so with work from our community and customer service teams, we are responding to any of those issues that arise on a daily, even hourly basis. Our live service team, LOC team, and publishing teams have spent endless hours during the week and the last few weekends ensuring this launch and the following days go well, and any issues we see or that players encounter, we aim to resolve ASAP.

With Heroes, our philosophy was to make sure players could experience all of the epic quests without feeling pressured to spend. Before launch, I personally played through the game multiple times as a free-to-play player, and while some battles were challenging, they were always beatable with the right strategy and smart gameplay. That was really important to us, ensuring the core content is fully accessible. Monetization in Heroes is designed to give players options for convenience or faster progression, but never as a requirement to enjoy or complete the main experience.

We know that launch is only the first step for a live-service game, and we’ve been preparing well in advance. We already have a full year of content and events planned for Heroes, including new regions, additional Heroes, expanded storylines, new systems, and seasonal celebrations. For instance, we launched the game on September 24, and a week later, we delivered a huge free content update called Scorching Sands.

That update includes an expanded new region, an extension of their max character level from 30 to 40, and a new PvE Field Boss, “Stalker Jiangshi” (from Blade & Soul lore). There will be more solo and party boss fights, new turn-based challenges, more story-based gameplay, and Instanced Dungeons. Our goal is to keep the experience fresh and exciting while responding to player feedback along the way, so the game continues to grow together with the community! I can’t reveal the date, but I look forward to another major update very soon!!

While we can’t share exact numbers, Blade & Soul Heroes was built by a dedicated development team in Korea working closely with us at NC America. One of the more ambitious aspects of the game is how it blends two very different styles of gameplay with real-time action combat and strategic turn-based battles. Players can seamlessly move between the two, whether they’re auto-completing daily requests in the real-time world or focusing on a challenging turn-based fight. That balance of depth and accessibility is something the team worked hard to achieve, and it’s a feature we’re especially proud of.