UTPlus Interactive explains why you should be playing Shadowblood

Shadowblood is a hack-and-slash ARPG straight out of South Korea, blending Western and Eastern influences into an addictive, customisable MMO. Destroy waves of monsters, upgrade your skills and equipment, take on or fight alongside players online – all that good stuff. But what makes Shadowblood stand out from the crowd? Producer Park Chang-Gyu of UTPlus Interactive explains all.

What separates Shadowblood from other ARPGs on the market?

A (Park Chang-Gyu) – What we emphasize first about Shadowblood is its action aspects. Action is, of course, the core of all ARPGs, but in Shadowblood you can compose your own skills and use them like generic ones.

Controls were designed to avoid the boredom of auto-battles and actually have a strategic impact on battle outcomes. For example, when Stella (Magician) creates a black hole, it will ‘return’ to her. By moving around while it does, she can cause greater damage to nearby enemies compared to an auto-battle spell use. Kai (Berserker) can target his powerful smash attacks on different foes to spread out his stuns and attacks manually, which is much more efficient than the auto-battle skill attacks.

These manual controls are boosted further with Soulstones, which can customise each character’s skills to suit your tastes. Players can set their Soulstone skills so that, for example, his or her character can cast 10 fireballs at once instead of the standard 4 fireballs, or execute 10 whirlwind attacks rather than 5. We plan to delve deeper into the customization of Soulstones along with additional skills and actions to create even more in-depth tactical customisations.

What challenges did you face during development, and how did you overcome them?

All our development team members are native Koreans, familiar with the Korean culture and style of gameplay. So the biggest obstacle for us was to understand the play style and goals of players worldwide when preparing for our global launch. We finally realised that, just as Koreans do not limit themselves to playing only Korean games, if we can provide fundamental fun factors, then we will be able to communicate with players from around the world. If an action game is true to its core and firmly based on hero growth, action and challenges, then we can always improve other factors when necessary.

What were your inspirations for making the game?

Many classic action games were inspirational for us, such as the Diablo series. Personally, my greatest source of inspiration comes from the comics of my childhood. I often used to imagine heroes gathering companions to defeat evil overlords through trials and battles, so these aspects show in Shadowblood.

Can you give us any details about what updates will be coming to Shadowblood in the near future?

With the recent updates for Guild Raid, we are hoping that co-operation within guilds and competitions between guilds will become active, and we also have an item encyclopedia and level cap expansion in preparation.

After that, we will reveal a new Guardian class (who will be the full tank and protector), and strategic party play will become more essential as Epic Raids will become available.

We are also developing defence-oriented content The Temple of Stars, a tag match dungeon where players can utilise their beloved characters, and a scrimmage-type PvP with multiple characters. Finally, we are preparing a pet system for hunting and guild wars for more guild contents.

If you'd like to find out more then be sure to check out the official Facebook page, or if you'd prefer to skip the details and jump straight into the action you can download the game now on iOS and Android.

This article is sponsored as part of Steel Media Preferred Partners.