Diving into the immersive world of Blue Protocol can be thrilling, but navigating its recently launched Japanese servers may present a unique challenge for Western players. This article equips you with five indispensable tips to help smooth out your gaming experience, bridging the gaps to make Blue Protocol more easily playable. If you haven't had the chance to download the game yet, follow our handy guide here. Now, with that out of the way, from overcoming language barriers to optimizing gameplay tactics, here's a short list of tips for this exciting MMORPG.
1. Blue Protocol Has Controller Support, Here’s How to Turn it On
Blue Protocol plays very well with a mouse and keyboard, but in my humble opinion, it plays even better with a controller. While you can plug in your controller and essentially use it from the jump, you may have a hard time understanding what the buttons are, and unless you swap the layout from M&K to Gamepad, you probably will end up fiddling around with the controls more than actually playing the game. Luckily you can get to a controller layout by hitting the escape key, then the options menu on the bottom right. Then simply select the Gamepad option as shown in the screenshot below.
You can also choose which controller you are using, whether it’s an XBOX controller, a Dualshock controller, or a Dualsense controller, which you can select in the drop down box.
There’s also an option right under it, that allows you to select windowed full screen mode instead of virtual full-screen, if you’re so inclined, as many of us gamers enjoy the performance and convenience of running our games in windowed full screen. To select Windowed Full Screen underneath the controller selection, simply swap the radial button from virtual full screen to windowed full screen. A prompt will pop up, and you’ll select the button on the left to apply the settings.
2. Change The Entire Control Layout for Each Class
Maybe swapping to a controller isn’t enough for you. Maybe you find that when you’re swapping classes, some button schemes just don’t feel right. Maybe you want to change out your dodge for a different ability on a heavy class, or make the dodge more prominent on something like the Blast Archer so you stay more mobile? Either way, you can change your control scheme based on the class you choose in the Options settings.
Simply click the second tab at the top of the Options settings, and then you can select the class from thr drop down menu, or you can change the control scheme for all classes at once. Either way, you can build a control scheme that works for you, because Blue Protocol’s initial scheme doesn’t feel very cohesive at first.
3. Use the Map Effectively
When you don’t speak the language, simple things that you normally do In every game start to feel a little difficult. One of those might be, how are you supposed to find your way around on the map? Blue Protocol luckily provides a big shiny waypoint for you when you’re out adventuring that will navigate you from quest to quest. However, there will be times you may need to teleport back to the city, or create a pin on the map to get to a previously unexplored area. Here’s how to do it.
As with most games, you can access the map by using the Mouse and Keyboard by pressing M. This quickly pulls the map up in your command menu. On the controller, however, you’ll need to pull up the command menu by pressing the Start Button, and then navigating to the fourth tab, which is your map. You may notice that Maps look different when you’re in down, or out in the world. To select the map you want to view, you will need to swap your map up at the top. Simply click the Map List button, and select the map you want to view where the picture shows above. If you’re selecting an area with a fast-travel point, you can then click on it, and fast travel there, saving you the difficulty of running all the way back.
You’ll notice to the Right of the Map List, you’ll have several Pins, and an Eraser. You can grab any of those pins using the cursor, and place it on the map. You can then name the Pin, so that when you mouse over it, it will pop up a tooltip with the name. This will come in handy if you want to drop pins for English names of the areas, so you get more familiar with them. You can have multiples of a single color pin, so you can choose how you want to color code the names of the places you travel, so it’s easier to see at a glance without having to mouse over every single pin type.
4. Use the Questing Guides
There will undoubtedly come a time where you’re trying to find your way to a quest, but your handy little guiding map marker is nowhere to be found. Maybe the quest is missing from your screen entirely! If that’s the case, here’s how you get your guiding light back, and add quests to your Heads Up Display (HUD). Go into your command Menu, and select the third tab down from the top. Here you’ll see your quest list. You’ll also see a checkbox and a radial button. The radial button will turn your guiding light on and off, while the HUD, well, that’s somewhat self-explanatory. Once you turn your guiding light on, you can easily follow it to your questing objectives, without having to constantly translate everything word for word.
While you’re in the questing menu, it might also be helpful to know that there’s additional tabs at the top. Here you’ll find your daily quests, weekly quests, and seasonal progression. You’ll want to come back here every so often and obtain rewards as you complete these daily and weekly quests.
5. How Do You Know What Anyone Is Saying?
If you haven’t realized by now, I don’t speak Japanese, and it’s highly likely that if you’re here, reading this article, you probably don’t either. That certainly provides some difficult challenges if you want to get a head start on understanding the mechanics of Blue Protocol ahead of the Global Launch next year. It can be incredibly difficult to understand what’s going on, but there is a simple, yet highly active way that you’ll need to employ if you want to jump in now without an English translation mod (which is not available at the time of this article).
Blue Protocol automatically has subtitles enabled by default, so really all you’ll need to do is translate the text you see on the fly, as if you’re watching a subtitled Anime. This can be done easily with both Google Translate and MORT (Monkeyhead’s OCR Realtime Translator, though the use of Google Translate at this time will require that you hold your phone up to the text and read it as it happens, while MORT will require some initial setup to get working properly. While this is clearly not the most precise and comfortable options, they are both options that work quite well.
Blue Protocol DB has an in depth guide on how to setup MORT to their recommended specifications, but In my opinion, I would recommend using the overlay feature instead, simply because you can toggle it much faster, and it’s still generally as accurate as utilizing Google Translate. It also gives you the ability to translate text on the fly at the touch of a button, and toggle it off when the screen gets crowded because the flashing text will get annoying quickly. Both options are not for the faint of heart, but if you are really excited to jump into Blue Protocol before western audiences get their shot, these will work exceptionally well while an English patch is in creation.
To setup the Overlay in MORT, you’ll need to follow several steps, which will include installing the Japanese Language Pack for Windows, and then downloading MORT. Version 1.255 is the latest version, and you will only need to download and extract the zip file. From there, you’ll want to run the MORT.exe executable.
From here, the setup is actually quite simple. Open Blue Protocol and then swap back to MORT. Click on the General Tab, and select WINOCR. Then underneath that, where it says Language, select Japanese.
Next, under the Additional tab, click Capture in the Active Window, and make sure it is checked. Next, click on “Specify the Window to Bring the Screen” and select Blue Protocol which should be running at this point. Once you’ve selected the game, apply the settings and head back to MORT.
Here, you will select Translation. At the top you want to select the Overlay Radial. Then you want to make sure each translation setting is set from Japanese to English.
Next, you can check out the hotkeys. Changing these are completely optional, but it's important to at least familiarize yourself with these keys. Feel free to change these to something you prefer, but the only two you’ll probably want to make use of are the Snapshot and Translate ON/OFF options. Translate ON/OFF will turn the overlay on and off in the game. Snapshot will allow you to select specific text and then overlay text over that selection.
Finally, you just need to select the text area. You should have a window called RTT. It has three buttons, Search, Snap Shot, and Translate. You need to hit Search, and then use the selection box to select your entire screen.
Make sure you apply the setting you set in MORT, and then click the orange Translate Button, and then swap back to the game. Use the shortcut to turn Translate ON/OFF (Ctrl+Shift+Z) to turn the translations off and on as a test. You should see the text overlayed on top of the Japanese text at this point.
Keep in mind that this is not perfect by any means, and there may be some things that it does not translate very well, or at all, but it’s the simplest way to translate content. If you ever have issues with certain text, you can always open up Google Translate directly on your phone, and translate the information that way.
