Bandai Namco has a new free-to-play game in the works, and no, this isn’t for your smartphone — it’s for your Xbox One.
The Japanese publisher announced Bless Unleashed today. It’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game from South Korea company Neowiz’s Round 8 Studio. Bandai Namco says it’ll have both cooperative and competitive multiplayer and combo-driven gameplay in an “open persistent world where mythical beasts roam the land.”
This isn’t Bandai Namco’s only MMO that’s on consoles, but it’s the first made specifically for this audience. It has a series of Sword Art Online games, for instance, which are themselves adaptations of a Japanese anime series about a world where people plug in to play virtual MMOs. But it will be appearing on Xbox One first, and that’s new for the publisher in a game market that research firm Newzoo projects could hit $137.9 billion in 2018.
And MMORPGs can succeed on consoles. We’ve seen both The Elder Scrolls: Online and the Dungeons & Dragons game Neverwinter do well on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Bless Unleashed will have five classes, and the publisher says that you’ll be able to explore a world with a deep backstory in an effort to thwart an evil goddess … and have your own brush with divinity.