Optimistic scenario: NC are concentrating the limited resources of their Western operation on Wildstar & will drag the western version of B&S out of development Hell when Wildstar is either (a) established or (b) crashes and burns within 6 months of launch (pick one depending on your views on that game, I have no opinion either way).
Pessimistic scenario: After what happened to the Western releases of Lineage (currently I believe NC's top earner in Korea -- US servers shut down a few years back), L2 (European operation sold off, NA switched to cash shop model after multiple server merges), Aion (similar scenario to L2 but in a shorter time frame), NC have concluded that porting AAA Korean games to a Western market is not a viable commercial proposition, cut their losses and abandoned the project.
Main point of the animation in any case is promotional for the upcoming Japanese launch of the game. Based on info at the Blade & Soul Dojo fansite & the NCSoft Japan website, the character creation part of the client is already available for download (along with a promotional character design contest), & the game goes live 2014-05-20 with a 4-day "open trial" (or head start -- not sure) immediately prior. (Bear in mind that my knowledge of Japanese is only slightly better than my knowledge of Korean, which is nil: I'm assuming here that "seishiki saabisu START" can be loosely translated "launch").
EDITED: Corrected error re: duration of "open trial."
Comments
Optimistic scenario: NC are concentrating the limited resources of their Western operation on Wildstar & will drag the western version of B&S out of development Hell when Wildstar is either (a) established or (b) crashes and burns within 6 months of launch (pick one depending on your views on that game, I have no opinion either way).
Pessimistic scenario: After what happened to the Western releases of Lineage (currently I believe NC's top earner in Korea -- US servers shut down a few years back), L2 (European operation sold off, NA switched to cash shop model after multiple server merges), Aion (similar scenario to L2 but in a shorter time frame), NC have concluded that porting AAA Korean games to a Western market is not a viable commercial proposition, cut their losses and abandoned the project.
Main point of the animation in any case is promotional for the upcoming Japanese launch of the game. Based on info at the Blade & Soul Dojo fansite & the NCSoft Japan website, the character creation part of the client is already available for download (along with a promotional character design contest), & the game goes live 2014-05-20 with a 4-day "open trial" (or head start -- not sure) immediately prior. (Bear in mind that my knowledge of Japanese is only slightly better than my knowledge of Korean, which is nil: I'm assuming here that "seishiki saabisu START" can be loosely translated "launch").
EDITED: Corrected error re: duration of "open trial."