She has the same task ahead of her here at NC America, especially as more titles are being published in Korea first. While NCSOFT’s most recent MMORPG, Throne and Liberty, is being published by Amazon here in the West, with Blade and Soul NEO Classic Divine Gems that team taking the lead at formulating the microtransactions to be more akin to what we’d expect out here, JJ’s team had to do this with Blade and Soul Neo. For gameplay, JJ says there isn’t much being changed in Neo from its Korean version. However, she does tell me that her team is paying close attention to the business model, especially whether it’ll be accepted here in the West. 

We are not changing a lot of things for Blade and Soul Neo. When we played Blade and Soul Neo here in the office, I think the dev team really wanted to make it work well for the global audience. So I think those were the learnings from our past experience. Unfortunately, some of our titles - or most of our titles - had a pay-to-win reputation. So there’s a big awareness now about that internally. I think even for the business models, the devs wanted to make sure this is better, this is going to be well accepted in the West. So we’re learning from our live service experience.

As a result of those internal playtests, JJ says her team didn’t think a lot of changes needed to be made, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be changes made in the future as it heads towards launch. NC America doesn’t currently have a launch date set, but there are certainly some interesting features to look forward to, especially if you’ve played the original. 

Blade and Soul Neo will feature remastered animations and graphics, boosting the visual quality thanks to a shift to Unreal Engine 4, while combat customization looks to be expanded versus the original. However, for many fans like myself who long for that fluid motion and gravity-defying traversal that helps to define the Wuxia experience, Infinite Windwalk will be available from the start. It’s exciting to think about, and hopefully, we won’t have too much longer to wait to get hands-on with the MMO when it comes to the West this year. 

Despite it’s regional-sounding name, NC America isn’t handling just the Americas. The publishing arm will be responsible for regions such as Europe, both North and South America, as well as the Oceania, Australia and New Zealand markets. While the team might be based out of Irvine, California, that’s a tall task - again, something JJ seems uniquely equipped to help lead, having been in charge of much the same scope at Pearl Abyss America (though, it should be noted, PA has a European division that cheap BnS NEO Divine Gems took care of things over there as well).