BLUE PROTOCOL Episode 3: Crafting Gear, PvP & PvE, Upgrading, World & Exploration

For those of you watching this without having watched the first or second Episodes in our Blue Protocol series, I highly recommend going back and watching them before going any further.
I covered quite a bit in them: An introduction to the classes found within the game, the character customization, class skills, the action combat system, the unique Imajinn summon system, dungeons, and the importance of the story.
Honestly you’ll be missing quite a bit of useful information if you skip them!
For everyone else, welcome to Episode 3. Today, we’re going to go over the gearing system, PvP and PvE, upgrading, the world and exploration.

Let’s jump right into the crafting system first since a lot of you have been asking me how you go about acquiring new gear in-game.
I played the game for over 10 hours, and never received any additional gear from quests apart of the introductory gear. Each quest I completed would reward me with varying levels of XP, in-game currency, and either an Imajinn or materials.
These materials, which you receive as a reward for completing quests and killing monsters outside of the town, even picking up out in the wilderness are vital to progressing your character.
I found out after exploring that there is a Weapon refining and upgrading NPC within the town that allows you to not only utilize those materials to upgrade your gear, increasing the overall stats, but you can also go as far as crafting new weapons all together.
This is important as it’s one of the only ways you can change class, since each class requires you have the corresponding classes weapon in your inventory to equip.
One interesting thing worth noting is that at least from what I could gather, there is no armor system present in-game. It seems to function like Blade and Soul: There is no armor, but there are costume slots that provide aesthetic and cosmetic alterations to your character.

There is no Player vs. Player content found within the game. Not in the Closed Beta, and not in the final version of the game. There is PvP, but it’s an acronym for Party vs. Party and functions as a competitive PvE mode between players.
While there’s no PvP planned, Bandai Namco have stated that it’s something they might add if demand is high enough to warrant the time and investment.
With regards to PvE though, I had the opportunity to play through several different dungeons while leveling. Each of them were very different visually, had different monsters, and had a final boss monster with different mechanics and different rewards.
There are raids planned, with Bandai Namco actually held a large raid event every day of the Beta test that unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to participate in because I wasn’t no-lifing the game, I had to sleep ahd work on other videos.
PvE is a very prevalent part of most games, and that statement holds very true with Blue Protocol. I spent most my time out participating in missions requiring I kill 10, 15, 20 of a single monster and competing with tons of other players to complete my task.
Thankfully the game allows you to obtain credit for kills merely by tagging a monster so it made it easy to work together with other players to finish missions quicker.
Outside of running missions and dungeons, I learned that there were actually field-bosses in each area of the game.
These bosses were not killable solo, not even close. I saw multiple people almost dead repeatedly when we’d engage them but this provides opportunities to work together with large groups of other players while out within the world.
The bosses were powerful, they had mechanics you had to pay attention to and most importantly: They were deadly. There was a level of certainty when engaging them of your defeat if you didn’t have enough players come join.

Speaking of bosses in different areas, with regards to the world and exploration, as you’ve no doubt seen if you’ve watched either of my livestreams, or the first 2 episodes of this Blue Protocol series, the world utilizes segregated zones.
The world functions primarily like Blade and Soul, Guild Wars 2 or Final Fantasy XIV as opposed to World of Warcraft or Black Desert Online.
There are short loading screens between various zones found throughout the world, and there’s a cap of 20-30 players per channel per zone, depending on what number Bandai Namco settle on.
There are items you can find out within the world, materials with which to go about not only leveling your Imajinn but also your gear. There are also unique “points” you can find that upon locating them all, provide you with unique rewards.
This promotes world-exploration.

Blue Protocol is an ambitious MMO. It’s beautiful, its combat is fast and fluid and seeing areas as populated as I did was refreshing.
But that’s the end of our third episode on Blue Protocol. Make sure you tune into the next final episode where I plan on giving my final official opinion, impressions, review and even post the highlights from the stream!