Blade & Soul NEO Classic Gets A New Site Page, But All Previous Blogs And Videos On Official Channels Have Vanished

It looks like Blade & Soul NEO Classic may still be a thing. While NCSoft hasn't dropped any new news on the MMORPG or its potential release in the west, the official Blade & Soul site has been updated with a full section dedicated to "NEO News." There isn't much there yet, but you can sign up to be kept in the loop on...well...NEO News.

I've actually been curious about the potential for a "Classic" version of the MMO. I loved its combat and a few other features, but the game quickly turned into a grind-fest and cash shop sink, so I bailed...as did many others. Now, I'm not saying that the "NEO" version with its gorgeous graphics updates and system updates wouldn't be just as money grubbing as the original version, but one can always hope.

A few months back I wrote a piece asking what happened to the game since we were hearing new bits of news consistently, then the game went silent besides a beta/soft launch in China and Korea which we never heard anything official about here in the west. The Korean version does still seem to get updates and the Korean YouTube channel does have some newer videos from just a few months back, so it seems to still be kicking there, at least. Again, we've never seen the plans for the global version yet.

Here's the REALLY weird part, though. While seeing the site publish a "NEO News" tab is great and means the project probably isn't totally dead, everything previously posted on the official site regarding NEO is gone. The visual comparisons video on the official YouTube channel is also private now. While you can still find that video on other sites, the official channel isn't showing it right now.

All the previous posts about the updated zones, the Cinderlands preview, and other blogs we covered on the site now direct to "Page Not Found" errors. Pulling up all news posts for the last two years on the English site reveals that the only posts with the NEO tag on them that are still visible are related to forum changes for the MMO as a whole, the launch of NCSoft's "Purple" tool, and the aforementioned Korean NEO launch announcement. That's it.

Hell, even the original small NA teaser site for the game is gone. (Previously linked in this post and where my leading image above was originally located.)

Now look, the team could just be gearing up to start their own new news "hype" train, but it's very bizarre to see the original communications scrubbed. I would expect that if the team decided to cancel the project or changed developers/publishers, but if that was the case, why would we now have a new "NEO News" link on the official site?

What do you think is going on behind the scenes? Hopefully we'll get word soon.