Feb 09, 2012 - 6:29 PM - by Revast
When you think about Blade & Soul the first thing that comes to mind are the characters. The in-game graphics that take full advantage of Kim Hyung-Tae’s work is still a hot issue amongst many players and fans.
However, it is not just Kim Hyung-Tae that does all the work. In fact, the character that was popular with a lot of CBT1 testers, Nam So-Yoo, was created by Lee Wang-Soo, lead designer of the concept art team. He has been friends with Kim Hyung-Tae for ten years and has been working on Blade & Soul since 2006.
Lee Wang-Soo has been working on concept art for races, backgrounds and the world of Blade & Soul since the beginning. Right now he works on characters, items and outfits as a guide and mentor. He is the man who breathes life into Blade & Soul and we’ve had a little chat with him.
I made Nam So-Yoo, says NCSoft’s Character Artwork Leader, Lee Wang-Soo.
“I’ve made a unique character fitting the scenario.”
What are the special traits and design concepts behind Blade & Soul's character design?
The games that currently exist in an eastern fantasy setting all have similar lore. Blade & Soul tried to move away from the typical Chinese concept and attempted to incorporate Korean and other eastern cultures as well. It is why we’ve tried to make the characters match the scenario.
What was the hardest thing about designing the various characters for Blade & Soul?
The hardest thing about designing a character is meeting Kim Hyung-Tae’s standards. Creating a character that fits the story wasn’t too hard because the scenario already defined the character’s personality very well, so the real challenge came in designing outfits that were different from other games with an eastern fantasy setting.
For example, trying to make a character that would blend well in eastern fantasy while remaining unique. It was a difficult balance to maintain with all of the outfits, and we've had a hard time trying to produce things that players haven't seen in other games.
Original artwork for the Lyn race. It looks a lot different.
Many say the art style of Art Director(AD from now on) Kim Hyung-Tae is either like it or hate it. What is your favorite character that you’ve created?
It is true, his style is so distinct that there's definitely a divide between those who like it and those who don't. However, if you look at it from a commercial art perspective I have a lot to learn. The hardest part of designing a character for Blade & Soul was mimicking Kim Hyung-Tae's art style.
As of now we’ve created a little guide after analyzing the AD’s art style, and with this guide we can recruit new members and still have that new member work on the artwork. As for my favorite character, it is Nam So-Yoo.
Nam So-Yoo was a hot issue during CBT. Is there a deep meaning/some kind of real life episode that you’ve based this character on?
There were many complex things that went into designing Nam So-Yoo, and even though she doesn’t exist I’ve taken her personality from a popular Korean drama called Wife’s Seduction and its lead character Koo Eun-Jae. Nam So-Yoo will also be a big part of Blade & Soul’s scenario.
The character’s traits are as you can see from the name; (Nam means Other and So-Yoo means belonging) it means “Someone else’s”. When I first got the name and the character I designed her like a normal girl, but after having a talk with the AD we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t right and reworked it.
When I worked on it the second time I tried to make her look confined; the design didn’t show her inner wickedness, simply making her look like a rich girl instead. The current incarnation of Nam So-Yoo came from when I worked on her for the third time. We wanted to show that undeniable charm, like a femme fatale and we tried to reflect that with her.
Blade & Soul’s popular NPC, Nam So-Yoo, and her original character artwork (left) compared to her in-game 3D model (right).
“Character design, we’ve approached it with designer label concept.”
When you work with the AD, how is the work divided?
As he is the art director, he came up with the original concept for the character. The artwork team creates characters, monsters and weapons. We receive scenarios from the development team and we have a conference with the AD and make rough concept sketches.
Each character will get about 3 ~ 8 sketches and we pick the design that best fits the personality or one that just has an awesome design and work on it from there. During this process if the character is someone that comes up in the main storyline, the AD personally picks them out. Rough estimate time of working on one character is about 8 ~ 10 days but characters like Nam So-Yoo can take up to a month.
We’ve heard Blade & Soul went for a Pan-Asiatic concept unlike other eastern fantasy games. How do you define this with the characters?
The one concept we’ve put great care into was the “Designer Label” concept. We try to create the outfits as a whole and since it is not divided into parts we have no normal specs for the outfits. We were able to create outfits that never existed in MMORPGs.
It was also hard to show the grade of the item without the stats. Instead of making a complex outfit a high grade one, we’ve tried to make a simple yet quality material the higher grade.
The one challenge we ran into while designing an Eastern outfit was “How do we make this look luxurious?”. Even though we tried to make the Ancient Full Dress Attire look cool, it didn’t come out looking good. As a result we tried to keep the original 90% and the new 10%.
We tried not to obsess with the Eastern concept and say instead, let's put the Eastern in the 10% of the modern and the results are the characters you see today.
Hong-Moon School Dobok looks more modern than Eastern Fantasy.
The original artwork and the in-game 3D models are almost identical, how much do you keep the 3D models in mind when designing your characters?
We’ve had many talks about the artwork when we saw how they implemented the AD’s design in-game in the early stages of development. Since they were able to bring out the full potential of the artwork in 3D models we had to really up the quality of the artwork to have a quality 3D model.
As a result we now give our full attention to the texture and the edges, as well as colors and little things in the artwork. From this we somehow managed to make the artwork look like an illustration, and the in-game models are a better quality as a result.
What are some of the characters you personally designed? Also, what are some things you wish people would look at the most in the characters?
There aren’t too many NPCs I’ve designed myself. Some are Kan Myo-Woul one of the Eight Grand Masters, Poison Herb Master and Hong Suk-Geun... the big version. Of the outfits, I’ve also designed the Infernal Dobok, and with females we’ve tried to make the outfits show the natural curves of women. The polygon counts are higher around those parts as well (laugh).
With the Infernal Lord boss monster we designed the monster first and then tried to make the outfit around the per-existing boss. There were some things that were changed but we are happy people and proud of the outcome.
Kan Myo-Woul of the Eight Grand Masters’ and her detailed original artwork (left) was perfectly modeled in 3D (right).
Since the females are so well defined the males play an awkward role in this game.
Right now 90% of the main characters are female (laugh). Internally we are trying to work on more male characters and truthfully we are slowly raising the numbers on male NPC’s to try to fit the ratio of male and female. Our next 3rd CBT will be a lot better regarding this problem.
We’ll see how many unique male characters make an appearance during the upcoming CBT3.
“Nam So-Yoo’s story will carry on until the end.”
Was there ever a case where the concept changed from the artwork?
Actually Nam So-Yoo was supposed to be Do Chun-Poong’s son’s wife and only make a brief appearance.
As I said before, after the third artwork was finished and shown to the team, we had a talk with the scenario writer and the project director and decided to carry her all the way to the end to Blade & Soul’s story. Almost every scenario will have Nam So-Yoo appear sooner or later.
Have you ever based your characters on a famous celebrity or taken note of Buddhism or Taoism?
We have a few character based on celebrities, as well as NPC’s based on developers. (First Interview) When you look at the credit roll you can see the relationships between the characters and the developers. We try to make the faces look similar, and the game will have many parodies regarding Korean programs and comedians.
We're currently avoiding any religious approach. In the beginning we tried a divided faction based on the concept of Yin and Yang, but from the concept of 건곤감리 (Kun-Gon-Gam-Lee: which is what the Korean National Flag’s based on. Kun means Sky while Gon means Ground) we only kept Kun and Gon.
Each race is a different size and concept, what was the easiest and the hardest character to create?
The concepts of the races were already made with Bae Jae-Hyung & Kim Hyung-Tae before I even joined on this project. Early development had each race with something unique like the Lyn’s ears and tail. Jins had wings, Gons had horns coming out of their skin and Kuns had a flower stalk.
Many of them disappeared during the development process but there are still things like Destroyer’s Iron Wall, which is formed from the horns coming out of the Destroyer to defend.
The easiest race to design was the Jins, as they were most like humans. The hardest was the Kun, because in the early stages of development the Kun were an intersex race, meaning they had no gender. So that gave us a lot of trouble, not knowing if we should draw them like females or males.
Later many artwork team members decided to make them into a slender female race and made them look Eastern European. I think they are the most attractive race.
There are many sexy outfits like the see-through outfits.
We try to avoid anything too suggestive or obvious. Of course we leave it to the designers, but we try to avoid outfits that would bring us bad press. We try to keep the sexy things part of the undergarments.
The see-through outfit shown during the Art Conference last year won’t be implemented in live servers.
Lastly, would you like to say anything to those dreaming of getting in the artwork industry?
Back in my days when you were drawing it was a fight with yourself, but now there are many tools and systems there to help you. Drawing is making your imagination come true and you should be able to show what you imagine in full detail.
I say read and draw a lot to get the experience, and later have a vision of what you want to draw and do it. For example if you have a vision of yourself wanting to draw better than the person in front of you, I think it will help you become a better artist. Right now, I personally think of Kim Hyung-Tae as my rival and I'm constantly trying to be better than he is.
This is probably something that everyone says but the best way to become better is to constantly try and put effort into your art. Look back and see if what you drew today is better than what you drew yesterday and if so, in what way it is better? Go back and try to fix the errors.
Source: ThisIsGame. Article translated by Yuan and Nayami.
Feb 03, 2012 - 4:20 PM - by Revast
We will continue to update this thread with new interviews as they are released.
Update (2/9) - Added interview with lead concept artist,
Lee Wang-Soo.
Developer Interview Relay Has Begun
On January 19th, we posted
an interview with Blade & Soul's lead programmer, Hong Suk-Geun. Many of us found out that a lot of the important NPCs in the game are named after real people in the Blade & Soul development team. When we first heard the back-story, we were amazed by the witty yet sentimental feel of it. I'm sure many of you thought the lead programmer would look similar to the master in his small form, but after seeing Hong Suk-Geun's image and smiling eyes, he looked similar to both the hulking transformed version and the regular version.
The Developer Interview Relay will cover various topics from never-before-seen amusing episodes in Blade & Soul to stories of hardship and difficulties that arose in the conceptual and development processes. I really hope these refreshing interviews will quench the thirst that many of you have been suffering from over the past few months due to the lack of news and updates.
So, when does this interview relay begin? The subsequent interviews containing interesting stories of Blade & Soul will arrive in early February. Below is a schedule of the coming interviews. We're also going to be answering a lot of the Korean communities questions in between the second and third interview articles.
This interview schedule is subject to change.
Yeon, Blade & Soul's Korean community manager, proceeds to leave instructions for the Korean community on how to submit questions for the development team. Since we're not part of the Korean community it would be rather difficult for us to submit our questions. However, ask anyway! Go ahead and (neatly) leave your questions in a reply to this article. Our translating team may pick a few questions, translate them and submit them to the official Blade & Soul Korean site for us, if they are up to the task of course.
Source: Official Korean site. Article translated by futilepath.
Jan 21, 2012 - 1:47 AM - by Revast
"The 3rd CBT will allow for even lower spec’d computers to enjoy B&S than the listed minimum requirements."
Those were the words spoken from the Lead Programmer Hong Suk-Geun. NCSoft held an interview with its Lead Programmer with the media on the 19th of January and talked about the problems and the talks after the 2nd CBT. Even though he’s put a lot of work into Blade & Soul he is more widely known as the "Master Hong", Master to Tens of Thousands of players.
Team Bloodlust’s Lead Programmer Hong Suk-Geun
First, introduce yourself and the work you do.
I am the lead programmer for Team Bloodlust. My role within the team is to try and connect the server, client and the graphics to work perfectly together. I try and make things run smoothly without compromising one for another.
How did you end up becoming the Master Hong within the game? Also any plans for a reappearance?
It was because the Producer wanted me to. Other than Master Hong, many of our staff make an appearance; we see it as our own little credits. I am glad he’s dead in the beginning and other than him making a slight appearance during the Grand Desert he won’t make another appearance.
Modeled after the Developer Hong Suk-Geun.
What difficulties did you guys run into during the development of this Eastern Fantasy game?
The biggest hurdle for us was the action, it was hard to keep its diverse action and also keep a clean functioning server especially for a large MMORPG. It was difficult to capture both action and keep the server stable.
As an engineer I like to have a set number of things expected to implement into the game. Deciding to implement 100 or 1000 takes a whole different schematic from the start. However, since Blade & Soul took a different turn with other MMORPGs we were not sure how things would turn out. This was one of the greatest challenges developing this game.
Since this game is such an action oriented game we are worried about the "hit boxes", how did you solve this?
Non-targeting games have the ‘all abilities are AOE’ system and because of this hit boxes & syncing became a problem. However, Blade & Soul did not have any of those problems because Blade & Soul is not a non-targeting game. In fact, B&S just displays the targeting differently. We actually are more worried about how to make the action sequences look more fluid.
I’ve heard Blade & Soul uses a different type of system of hit and damage in combat, care to elaborate?
We call it the ‘After Judge’ system which started from a small concept. Unlike other games once you shoot a projectile it does not judge whether or not the projectile hit right from the start. Instead, it judges once the projectile reaches the target. The same system is also implemented for melee combat. Because of this, the players will feel the action while playing the game.
Since the skills and the actions were so fancy and elaborate the combat felt a bit slow. Will this change as your level gets higher?
If you look at it statistically B&S’s combat is faster than most other games but since the game was developed so that you would have to react like an action game it could feel slow. The combat won’t be getting any faster than this and we feel this is the right speed for the game.
You’ve somehow managed to put in many skills with a limited set of hotkeys, were there any difficulties?
The skill interface that changes depending on the situation was implemented to make the action & the auto targeting easier to play on. The concept of “works when certain conditions are met” is easy but actually implementing it to the game was hard. It wasn’t difficult technologically but since it required the perfect harmony from the skill placement & the skill’s actual effect and combat scenario it was pretty hard to pull off. We’ve tried to take a heuristic approach but still testing & remaking the system.
All those different skills lay out within 4 keys.
Problem with a zone style of map is the load times, but Blade & Soul’s load times are very short, how did you accomplish this?
We did not want the player to feel taken out of the game while waiting for the loading screen; we’ve used the algorithm in the game to pre-load the content. Thanks to that the loading times were significantly shorter and we are continuing to work on the technology.
Does the algorithm work when you are standing still?
It doesn’t. The algorithm only works by collecting data from how the player moves around the world.
There were many new approaches with Blade & Soul, were you ever against or surprised by them as a developer?
The thing I hate the most as a developer are the abstract plans and most of the things I’ve thought that was ridiculous worked out great, so I can’t say much about that. I’ve said no to the ‘auto targeting’ the most but it currently works just fine.
You are using the Unreal 3 Engine, what are the pros and cons of the engine?
Whenever you choose an engine to build your game around, you look at the functions and the toolset. Unreal engine had a very solid foundation of this and was easy to take and edit. However, since this was made for FPS type of games it lacked a lot of MMORPG type UI features and we took a long time developing those for the game.
How much of the physics engine was implemented within Blade & Soul?
If you want to implement a physics engine you have to do it server side. However, currently there are no such physics engines that can run server side. Even if it exists we thought it wouldn’t match with our server. Also, hardware acceleration was different depending on the brand so it was hard to implement within the game but we are taking full advantage of the client side stuff such as the outfits.
What is the goal of optimization for Blade & Soul?
We’ve bickered a lot with the art team about the optimization and worked hard on it. We should never expect people to get better specs as the time passes; internally we’ve experimented on high end specs from 5 years ago and other various options. We just know that the 3rd CBT will require less power than the 2nd CBT to run.
How many people can you server take?
We can’t say the exact numbers but it will be the same amount as previous NCSoft games.
During the 2nd CBT people experienced a lot of PVP imbalances because they weren’t sync’d properly, were these issues fixed?
We do CBTs because our internal tests are never enough and we’ve received a lot of feedback during CBT. Truthfully we’ve received an overwhelming amount that exceeded our expectations and sync problems are almost solved now.
During the 3rd CBT the placement sync will be addressed, which made many Kung-Fu Masters angry.
Have you thought of ways to reduce player fatigue caused by playing the game so we can enjoy the game longer?
From the results of the 2nd CBT, we are pretty optimistic on this issue. Besides this is not really a developer’s problem it is more for content distribution.
Most AAA titles have some kind of means to connect with their mobile devices; will Blade & Soul follow this path?
We can’t say exactly but we will probably have more things to do on your mobile devices than other games.
What is the one thing that the development team is most focused on?
Preparing content & implementing it is a large work load, but ‘Will this content be stable and ready?’ is the biggest worry. Also there were many things we needed to prepare before launching the game fully. The development team members complain saying “We just want to program the game.”
What would you like to say to your fellow team members as a lead programmer?
First and foremost I would like to tell the Bae Jae-Hyun Producer to stop trying new things and make stale system and tell my team members to go home already. Most in this industry think working day & night is common but that is not very good for a long project like this one. Projects like this that take years and years to complete won’t depend on a few team members staying all night working, in fact what’s better is to go home and rest up so you are fresh and ready work the next day.
What would you like to say to those who want to become a developer / programmer?
It is a good thing that you love games and play them but most important thing is to finish school. Just because you play a lot of games don’t mean you’ll start becoming a genius at coding. In truth, when we interview employees we first look at their academic achievements.
Hong Suk-Geun smiling with the character modeled after him.
Source: GameMeca. Article translated by Yuan and Nayami. Special thanks to Seraphy for the find.
Jan 21, 2012 - 12:41 AM - by Revast
The Year of the Dragon has arrived! Team Bloodlust left the 2011 year with a warm message for its loyal community, thanking us for such a great year.
We at the Dojo would also like to thank you, Team Bloodlust, for creating such a masterpiece and giving us the chance to finally try it out with two fantastic closed beta test events in 2011! We look forward to CBT3 in 2012's first quarter and official Korean launch this year!
Originally Posted by Yeon
Greetings to the Blade and Soul Family,
Leap-Year 2012 has arrived!
We would like to thank you for your continuous support and love towards our game last year. 2011 was an unforgettable year. We formed a lot of bonds and made great memories. We also improved upon many areas that were lacking in Blade & Soul post-CBT2 thanks to you.
With the start of the Year of the Dragon, Team Bloodlust promises to work hard and strive to meet your expectations.
We would like to wish our community and their friends and family great happiness throughout the new year.
Happy New Year!
Source: Blade & Soul's Official Site. Translated by futilepath.
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