Bless Online: Western website is down, what is going on?

Do you remember the time when Aeria Games announced the acquisition of the western publishing rights for Bless Online? Happy days, right? But since then, things haven't been that smooth, with the German publisher failing to communicate properly with its players and pretty much leaving them with a feeling of doubt about what once seemed certain. To add insult to injury, the official Bless Online website (it's probably best if we call it a teaser) is down at the moment, with a “503 Service Unavailable” error that isn't consistent with what players expect from a studio such as Aeria Games.

This lack of communication isn't just a problem with Bless Online; other publishers, if not most of them, are also at fault, including Gameforge with the SoulWorker western release (we don't know a thing since the official announcement in April 2016) and we're pretty sure you still haven't forgotten the years of radio silence with NCSoft's Blade & Soul, and let's not even talk about Phantasy Star Online 2 and Kingdom Under Fire 2, two MMOs that had a western release planned but disappeared from the radar.

Anyway, back to Bless Online. All we had so far was a couple of updates telling us about how the game was being delayed for improvement, mostly in the combat department, which is a nice thing in our opinion. However, the communication wasn't made in any Aeria Games' website or social media, but on Bless-Source, a Bless fansite ran by 2P.com. It's far from what Bless Online deserved – heck, even a rushed Facebook page (is there one at all?) for releasing these updates firsthand would give a more professional take on this communication. Aeria Games' Facebook page would do just fine, but there's not a single update since October 2016…

Bless just entered open beta in Russia and as usual with these anticipated games, it's getting a lot of players. North American and European players, on the other hand, are getting a bit nervous – Aeria Games is quick to release MMO from Taiwan studio X-Legend Entertainment (Aura Kingdom, Dragomon Hunter, Twin Saga) but when it comes to a big MMORPG such as Bless Online, things are looking a bit more difficult.

Let's just hope that the publisher Aeria Games and developer Neowiz are both hard at work on Bless Online, but players need to know more – they need to know if they should genuinely expect this game with confidence, and while the lack of news and the unavailable website are a bit worrying, it could mean nothing at all.

Or could it? What do you think about this?