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Blade & Soul reaches over 1 million users in first week

The martial arts-based MMORPG from NCSoft is off to a huge start out west.

Ozzie Mejia

January 25, 2016 9:56 AM

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Blade & Soul first made a name for itself in Eastern regions, getting a tremendous following in countries like Korea and China since its original 2012 release. Last week, NCSoft's martial arts-themed MMORPG made its North American debut and it looks to be well on its way to the same kind of success out here. Today, NCSoft reported back that over 1 million users have logged into Blade & Soul in the very first week of its release.

A number of Blade & Soul users are likely continuing on from the game's beta, which launched back in October. However, the early success of the game can also be attributed to the fact that NCSoft essentially has four years' worth of content ready to roll out to an entirely new user base, promising plenty to all users, regardless of whether they're premium members or not.

Of course, the challenge of MMORPGs out west isn't so much getting a user base, it's retaining that user base, so it'll remain to be seen whether Blade & Soul can maintain this momentum. There's certainly content on the way, as the teaser below indicates. Blade & Soul is available now and is free-to-play on PC.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?