I've been waiting for some time for this game to release on PC and get a chance to give it a go, being starved for MMOs for quite some time. Having no prior Bless game related knowledge and didn't read about anything related to the game to keep it fresh when it launches. I played it until I realized I am not getting enjoyment in it's current state:

- General feel: It's an unfinished console port, the UI is a mess to navigate or use, terrible user experience browsing the menus. The game runs fine on my high end rig and looks nice, but the controls are attrocious

- Crafting: I quickly realized that simply gathering materials in order to craft is the most tedious thing in existence. It is impossible (read as a complete waste of time) to keep crafting in-line with leveling. Best to keep it for max level and simply ignore gathering nodes. The first items you can craft are easy to make, but they are objectively useless as well. You "quickly" unlock decent decent gear but it requires you to defeat world bosses or elite enemies for the materials. You need 1 material per craft, the item is not 100% drop chance (i had to defeat 6 elites to get a damn material from the grassland ogre), fights are long and sometimes the respawn timer iis attrocious. You can use Z to swap channels and find a zone that has it spawned, kill it, get 0 useful loot and repeat. All of this in my attempt to reach crafting level 5 to make some decent armors or weapons. Of course, you can craft the lowest tier item for xp which doesn't need boss items, but the gathering is also plagued by low drop chances. It's pretty clear it was made as an awful grind - just ignore it altogether, you get better rewards from following the main quest or grind the 2p/5p dungeons. The effort and time that is to be spent on crafting simply doesn't cover the leveling speed

- Gathering: plants, ores, trees are plentiful. Skins, cloths nope. They are drops, about 1/6 drop rate per mob on average. Same as boss materials. Rare materials are even rarer of course. Now I wouldn't mind working for my crafting skillups, but after 30 minutes of extensive gathering for skins and cloths I managed to create 3 items. Because you need 10+ per craft. That means either gather 10+ nodes (1 per node) or kill 50+ mobs. For just 1 item that is almost worthless, just to grind that skill up a bit.

- Economy: gold is plentiful and as useless as well. The real currency is Star Seeds, which you can buy from the shop, daily exchange gold -> star seed with a very low cap (but it gets higher for higher level characters). This currency is used at the auction house / market to buy from other players or for selling items you can get this one. So with a few hundred bucks you'll be able to fully deck a character later down the line, then complain there is no content.

- Combat: no animation cancelling, no ability queuing, very long animations in general. All 3 of them together combined (go captain planet) result in combat that looks good but feels clunky. I played Ranger, which is a very good overall class, but the amount of times dodging, pressing V to full charge attacks, trying to chug a potion or cast an AoE skill and not registering, even though it felt natural in the flow of combat to be able to do these actions, is high. Or the amount of times I fire 1-2 extra shots after the mob is already dead - same high. You have to wait between 1 or 2 seconds between attacks to properly play. Not reactive enough for my taste and it feels super slow.

- Inventory: easy to manage at first, but quickly becomes item-hell. You can loot treasure chests in the world, then redeem for +1 bag space. I love this mechanic, but the amount of items you get once you pass level 10 keeps exploding. Repeateble quest items for reputation, materials for all crafting, items for the blessings of all other classes, potions, 50 types of food, augment runes, and the list goes on. It looks like you won't be able to fully enjoy the game without buying some item slots of going multi account. The warehouse (bank) storage is abysmal. You can't craft or turn in quest items with said items in the bank. Just one word: hell to manage.

- Group content: took me a while to realize Matchmaking can be used for 2p or 5p dungeon runs. I enjoyed them. Combat is fun, encounters are engaging, loot at the end... so-so. If you want a weapon because it's an upgrade, prepare to do some runs.... many.. depending on your luck. For me it was easier to grind bosses and materials and craft myself the upgrades - and I didn't enjoy it. I felt tired after finally getting decent weapons, not excited...

- Quests: generic and simple. Rarely some more engaging / fun - the Bard one is my favorite as it's super cute. Make sure you do side quests, otherwise you are getting left out.

- Open World: this is a bit in-between, let me segregate it into 2 parts
- Open World PvE: anything but end-game zones, pure PvE. Lots of activities, resetting quests, elites, raid bosses. The map is constantly overflowing with activity. I felt like in RIFT, where every zone had something for me to do 24/7 and I love it. However, you don't scale down in terms of power or rewards, so level 5 world bosses quickly become worth 0 interest for you as a high level. RIFT solved that through scaling and everyone could get decent rewards for their current progression by using currenices, but here, nope. You can go back and help the newbies, but you won't be getting much in return, just fun, but after 10 kills, that dissipates as well.
- Open world PvP: end zones you are always killable by other players. You can purchase PvP immunity scrolls so you can PvE freely, but it gets expensive FAAAST. If you don't like getting ganked and are a PvE carebear, you won't have a great time. If you like PvPing and or being a jerk in general, you will have fun until everybody quits. Standard Open world PvP with mandatory flagging, with some fame/notoriety basic system that doesn't do that much.

- Real money shop: it has 10 tabs. I guess I shouldn't go further. Boosters on top of boosters, packs, limited deals, cosmetics which are out of the fantasy world and plenty of gacha that don't even give you stuff you are interested in. As a Ranger, I got blessing soul fragments for all other classes BUT ranger. I stopped after 5 draws. The store in general pollutes your inventory with % coupons. I feel like I am going to Wallmart with a deck of 70 coupons that don't stack. It's not even accessible. You won't get many places with casual spending. It's made for cash-grabs / whales targets and for people who are almost 24/7 online. Standard f2p mobile game mechanics, it has them all.

So, should you get it?

- Are you planning on casually doing the story without getting too involved? Are you planning on playing this as a singleplayer experience and maybe with some Matchmaking in between just to see how the game fares? Then YES - it's free, it has content, you can easily burn 20-60 hours until the points form above start to kick in your teeth (sooner or later, depends on your personality).

- Are you looking for a long term investment, expecting to have a good time at end-game and have fun along the way playing the multitude of game systems and classes? Then NO, taking into consideration the bullet points above, it will feel very painful.

I've been waiting for some time for this game to release on PC and get a chance to give it a go, being starved for MMOs for quite some time. Having no prior Bless game related knowledge and didn't read about anything related to the game to keep it fresh when it launches. I played it until I realized I am not getting enjoyment in it's current state: - General feel: It's an unfinished console port, the UI is a mess to navigate or use, terrible user experience browsing the menus. The game runs fine on my high end rig and looks nice, but the controls are attrocious - Crafting: I quickly realized that simply gathering materials in order to craft is the most tedious thing in existence. It is impossible (read as a complete waste of time) to keep crafting in-line with leveling. Best to keep it for max level and simply ignore gathering nodes. The first items you can craft are easy to make, but they are objectively useless as well. You "quickly" unlock decent decent gear but it requires you to defeat world bosses or elite enemies for the materials. You need 1 material per craft, the item is not 100% drop chance (i had to defeat 6 elites to get a damn material from the grassland ogre), fights are long and sometimes the respawn timer iis attrocious. You can use Z to swap channels and find a zone that has it spawned, kill it, get 0 useful loot and repeat. All of this in my attempt to reach crafting level 5 to make some decent armors or weapons. Of course, you can craft the lowest tier item for xp which doesn't need boss items, but the gathering is also plagued by low drop chances. It's pretty clear it was made as an awful grind - just ignore it altogether, you get better rewards from following the main quest or grind the 2p/5p dungeons. The effort and time that is to be spent on crafting simply doesn't cover the leveling speed - Gathering: plants, ores, trees are plentiful. Skins, cloths nope. They are drops, about 1/6 drop rate per mob on average. Same as boss materials. Rare materials are even rarer of course. Now I wouldn't mind working for my crafting skillups, but after 30 minutes of extensive gathering for skins and cloths I managed to create 3 items. Because you need 10+ per craft. That means either gather 10+ nodes (1 per node) or kill 50+ mobs. For just 1 item that is almost worthless, just to grind that skill up a bit. - Economy: gold is plentiful and as useless as well. The real currency is Star Seeds, which you can buy from the shop, daily exchange gold -> star seed with a very low cap (but it gets higher for higher level characters). This currency is used at the auction house / market to buy from other players or for selling items you can get this one. So with a few hundred bucks you'll be able to fully deck a character later down the line, then complain there is no content. - Combat: no animation cancelling, no ability queuing, very long animations in general. All 3 of them together combined (go captain planet) result in combat that looks good but feels clunky. I played Ranger, which is a very good overall class, but the amount of times dodging, pressing V to full charge attacks, trying to chug a potion or cast an AoE skill and not registering, even though it felt natural in the flow of combat to be able to do these actions, is high. Or the amount of times I fire 1-2 extra shots after the mob is already dead - same high. You have to wait between 1 or 2 seconds between attacks to properly play. Not reactive enough for my taste and it feels super slow. - Inventory: easy to manage at first, but quickly becomes item-hell. You can loot treasure chests in the world, then redeem for +1 bag space. I love this mechanic, but the amount of items you get once you pass level 10 keeps exploding. Repeateble quest items for reputation, materials for all crafting, items for the blessings of all other classes, potions, 50 types of food, augment runes, and the list goes on. It looks like you won't be able to fully enjoy the game without buying some item slots of going multi account. The warehouse (bank) storage is abysmal. You can't craft or turn in quest items with said items in the bank. Just one word: hell to manage. - Group content: took me a while to realize Matchmaking can be used for 2p or 5p dungeon runs. I enjoyed them. Combat is fun, encounters are engaging, loot at the end... so-so. If you want a weapon because it's an upgrade, prepare to do some runs.... many.. depending on your luck. For me it was easier to grind bosses and materials and craft myself the upgrades - and I didn't enjoy it. I felt tired after finally getting decent weapons, not excited... - Quests: generic and simple. Rarely some more engaging / fun - the Bard one is my favorite as it's super cute. Make sure you do side quests, otherwise you are getting left out. - Open World: this is a bit in-between, let me segregate it into 2 parts - Open World PvE: anything but end-game zones, pure PvE. Lots of activities, resetting quests, elites, raid bosses. The map is constantly overflowing with activity. I felt like in RIFT, where every zone had something for me to do 24/7 and I love it. However, you don't scale down in terms of power or rewards, so level 5 world bosses quickly become worth 0 interest for you as a high level. RIFT solved that through scaling and everyone could get decent rewards for their current progression by using currenices, but here, nope. You can go back and help the newbies, but you won't be getting much in return, just fun, but after 10 kills, that dissipates as well. - Open world PvP: end zones you are always killable by other players. You can purchase PvP immunity scrolls so you can PvE freely, but it gets expensive FAAAST. If you don't like getting ganked and are a PvE carebear, you won't have a great time. If you like PvPing and or being a jerk in general, you will have fun until everybody quits. Standard Open world PvP with mandatory flagging, with some fame/notoriety basic system that doesn't do that much. - Real money shop: it has 10 tabs. I guess I shouldn't go further. Boosters on top of boosters, packs, limited deals, cosmetics which are out of the fantasy world and plenty of gacha that don't even give you stuff you are interested in. As a Ranger, I got blessing soul fragments for all other classes BUT ranger. I stopped after 5 draws. The store in general pollutes your inventory with % coupons. I feel like I am going to Wallmart with a deck of 70 coupons that don't stack. It's not even accessible. You won't get many places with casual spending. It's made for cash-grabs / whales targets and for people who are almost 24/7 online. Standard f2p mobile game mechanics, it has them all. So, should you get it? - Are you planning on casually doing the story without getting too involved? Are you planning on playing this as a singleplayer experience and maybe with some Matchmaking in between just to see how the game fares? Then YES - it's free, it has content, you can easily burn 20-60 hours until the points form above start to kick in your teeth (sooner or later, depends on your personality). - Are you looking for a long term investment, expecting to have a good time at end-game and have fun along the way playing the multitude of game systems and classes? Then NO, taking into consideration the bullet points above, it will feel very painful.