Blade and Soul: Wanna play? How’s your Korean?

 

Have you anxiously been visiting the Blade and Soul website every day or so, hoping for some sort of news about when the game was going to be released in the West or even when it’s going to beta?

Tough noogies. At least that seems to be the response from NCSoft. After starting to tease the gaming public with more or less regular updates, towards the end of last year, the Blade and Soul site has been frustratingly quiet.

But you do have options.

Do you really, really want to play Blade and Soul? Did you know you actually don’t have to wait for it to come to the West? Nope. You see, there’s this wonderful thing called the Internet. It’s like all over the world. If you can’t wait for NCSoft to finish the port for the West, you can always hop on the ‘Net and go play on the Korean servers. They’ve been playing there for over a year, now.

Of course, this begs the question  – How’s your Korean?

If you want to give it a try, simply follow the directions, below. These were posted by Roberto Tomas over at Blade and Soul Dojo. I’ve copied them exactly as they were posted. I’m not taking any responsibility for them, though I did walk almost all the way through them and they seem to work.

If you need more help, be sure to visit Blade and Soul Dojo. They have a lot of people there who have been playing on the Korean servers for a while and their community is very helpful. They even have a lot of the quests translated, so you won’t be totally lost if you don’t know Korean.

Good luck.

• go to http://bns.plaync.com
• under the login form on the right side of the page is a line of links for register / username / password. Click the leftmost one, “회원가입” (register).
• check both checkboxes agreeing that you recognize ncsoft is handling this account details and that they are going to collect personal identification information. and hit the submit button, which is the left of the two buttons and is highlighted in yellow.
• now fill out the new user form. the fields are 1. email account to associate with this plaync.com account, 2. your desired username in hangul, 3. your password (can be in latin characters), and 4. repeat the password.
• you will get an email with one big, unshortened link in it in a table, click this link to verify the email.
• now return to the front page and download. The link “클라이언트 다운로드” says “client download”. From there there are a row of buttons with numbers, these are download mirrors. Click one to download. Before this will work, you will have to download the identification software they use which integrates a plugin in the browser as well as installs a watchguard program from ncsoft. You cant download without it. It will warn you that you are not running the software, redirect you to a new download screen that says “plaync” and has a row of icons for all the major browsers, and instructions for installing the software. the big yellow highlighted button downloads the software. Download it and install it.
• restart the browser, and ensure that you’ve enabled the plugin as necessary (this is browser specific).
• go to bns.plaync.com, and this time log in at the login form, using your email account and password (it will not accept your hangul name you provided). You should visibly see you are logged in when you return to bns.plaync.com: your hangul account name should appear at the top.
• Click client download again, and select a mirror with its download button. This will download a file like GSDN1_BN…. which is the downloader app and is signed by KaMuse, Inc
• after the download completes, run this app. This will download the actual ~8.5GB game. it will take forever fi you are not physically in korea. 😛