What, I wondered, is an adult MMO? Are we talking some sort of Sims style game with the sex uncensored? Does it feature a lot of colourful language and an epic amount of blood and guts? Cigarettes? I did some poking around and it sounds like, for the most part, a pretty standard MMO with a sci-fi setting. You have quests to go kill 10 monsters. You level up. You can group for dungeons. There are two factions with massively scaled PvP battles. (80v80, apparently? 40 per side in Alterac Valley was bad enough, though I guess computers have gotten a lot better since then!) There's a tank class, a healer class, and 4 DPS classes. It's also running under a 'free to play' model, with an item shop. The item shop seems to have gone in a good direction in that it doesn't seem to be 'pay to win' at all. There are things to increase your backpack size temporarily, or to give an experience buff, or non-combat pets, or new outfits for your character to wear. A lot like the League of Legends item shop, actually. Or the World of Warcraft one. Nothing at all like the one in Ultima Online where you had to pay real money to prevent people from stealing your stuff.
There is one item I've never, ever seen before, and which is the reason they're advertising it as being adult. It's the 'lingerie unsealer'. Which apparently does what it creepily sounds like. All MMOs pretty much have a base level of clothing your character has to wear. Take off all your armour in World of Warcraft and you've still got your underwear on. Pay $20 in Scarlet Blade and your character doesn't have to wear underwear anymore...
I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about this. On the one hand I was brought up to be quite prudish and the idea of nipples everywhere just seems wrong. But on the other hand there's actually nothing wrong with nipples. The game is going to get an appropriate rating to keep little kids from playing it if you think they need to be kept away. And really, you're on the internet. If you just want to see nipples, you can find them. Or you could just watch the Super Bowl or the Oscars...
Oh, and one other twist to the game... You cannot play a male character. Everyone has to play a girl. I'd say woman, but apparently one of the classes looks 12. Apparently there's quite the controversy since the publisher is changing the way that class looks, especially when naked, for the US version. Some people think it's sick that she exists in any version. Some people think it's appalling that it's getting censored. People on the internet... Angry about anything!
I read one blog that made the claim that this game is actually less sexist than other MMOs. The idea was that while sure, it's full of naked women, they're actually all awesomely powerful naked women. It's a game celebrating women, unlike most games which seek to set women up as worse than men. Pretty much every other game has sexist design choices. FFXI wouldn't let you play a sexy cat man. Mithran were exclusively female. FFXI wouldn't let you play an optimal female tank. Galkans were exclusively male, and they were the toughest by far. In WoW there were pieces of armour that looked to offer real protection on men, but had bare midriffs and exposed cleavage on women. Having it seem like plate armour is fully covering some of the time implies armour does something and makes it ludicrous when the female characters are all exposed. In Scarlet Blade everyone is exposed, so clearly something else is coming into play to protect people from grievous injury. League of Legends keeps coming out with cool skins for their male characters and revealing skins for their female characters. Doing some of both for each gender would seem to be more fair, but male gaze pretty much keeps that from happening. Did random blog have a point? I certainly think things would be a lot worse if Scarlet Blade just had the mage and healer classes be naked women while the tanks and melee attackers were clothed men, so maybe they were right and this, somehow, is a step in the right direction? I don't know, and I don't know how to find out. Anyone have any opinions one way or the other?
Apparently there's a real sci-fi plot going on that explains why all the player characters are female. I read a fair number of comments from people saying things along the lines of 'I only logged on to check out the boobs, but it was actually a pretty good MMO'. Part of me really wants to check it out. It's in beta which is normally a deal breaker for me, but I think there's an exception to my buying new games rant from last week. No, not the boobs. It's localization. This game has apparently been out in Korea for more than a year. I'm sure there will be bugs and translation issues with a localization, but the game shouldn't be an unpolished mess. It's not like the game isn't tested, or doesn't have all the features coded, or they haven't bought enough servers. All of these things presumably were solved in the Korean release. I recall that FFXI's US launch was a lot smoother than the WoW launch that happened later that year for these reasons. The FFXIV launch that was global? Complete disaster. Just like pretty much every other launch I've seen. Except Blizzard expansions.
Also it would seem that you can get an ultimate ability which transforms you into a mech... But for some reason instead of having your character inside a cockpit or something you're actually attached to the outside of the mech, exposed skin and all. This just seems really, really weird...
