I approached Black Desert Online like any well-seasoned gamer after three decades of playing games – being cynical as f**k. The first thing I heard about Black Desert Online (I'll abbreviate it to BDO from now on) was that the game is pay-to-win to the extreme for an MMORPG. I was told that certain systems hinder you from having a good experience, and players who flash their wallets would be well ahead of everyone else.
Recently, there have been many videos discussing how the new user experience and the general experience of BDO have improved significantly. Curious, I decided to try the game out, and this is how I got to this point.
I downloaded the game, checked the official page, watched a video on which classes are interesting, and then sat on the game for a week. Why?
Because the amount of information was overwhelming, and even just looking at all the features was exhausting. When I finally started the game, it was in Bahasa Indonesia for some reason. It took me about 10 minutes of Googling Reddit to figure out how to switch to English for South East Asia.
I threw myself into the tutorial, went through it, and then entered the actual game world, immediately getting bombarded by non-stop notifications about player upgrades, guild activities, events, and more. The upper part of my screen was constantly filled with notifications every 10-20 seconds. It took me about 40 hours into the game to discover that I could turn them off – imagine how jarring that was. Not only were the notifications huge, but they were also loud and actually drowned out the voice acting when I was doing the starting quest areas and the main quest NPCs were talking.From there, I proceeded to do the main quest until I somehow reached level 55 (I cannot remember how) before I had to refer to a leveling guide and an upgrading guide. It was a surprise how I got to level 55 without any guides – just following most quests and what the game suggests – before the mobs handed my ass to me.
Clearly, I didn't know where to level up once my experience gain started slowing down and my gear wasn't good enough. The wall I hit was when enemies became too hard to kill and were hitting me very hard. This is because the game has no boundaries for harder content, but again, I don't have much experience with sandbox-style MMOs, so I was completely lost.
As for the questing itself, it was mostly run-of-the-mill "kill things" and "bring things to NPC." The magus quest was interesting, feeling like small mini-games, but many of the games/puzzles were not clearly explained. Again, I had to look up a guide for the ones I didn't understand.
I think the worst offender for poor quest design is what the players call "Valencia 2" of the main quest. The quest has parts where you need to go to the titular Black Desert and find things. To find these things in the sand, you need to dig. One of them requires digging in a very specific spot, and the other randomly drops. The game doesn't tell you that. Also, why doesn't the game have a separate inventory for quest items? You can easily have 10 quest items in your inventory just taking up space. Those parts are easily the worst parts of questing in BDO.
To be honest, the story of the game is interesting, but even for me, it is kind of wordy. It took me about 2 hours before I started skipping most of the text, paying attention only if I felt the NPC was giving important details.
As for the combat, it is probably one of the few MMORPGs that have good action combat. There are things like armor for your moves, moves that automatically block any frontal attacks, cancels into movement into attacks, etc. It's sort of like fighting games, where you are constantly moving in to attack and canceling out of moves to evade enemy strikes. Though any mobs with crowd control skills that stun you will quickly lead to your death, as in dungeons/enemy territory, they come in huge numbers and deal massive damage quickly.
As much as I find the combat extremely fun, this same combat can be difficult for MMORPG players coming from tab-targeting or slower-paced action combat to learn (just like fighting games!). Though I would still prefer the PSO2/NGS style of action combat.
I like the fact that most bosses are solo encounters, testing your knowledge, but probably because I am on a seasonal character, the campaign bosses die quickly. Though I believe you can fight the campaign bosses at higher levels for more challenge.
The world itself is massive and takes a while to travel from one end to the other, even on a mount. If you do not rely on the map, you will quickly find yourself lost, and that's actually the fun part for me.
Now, coming to the parts of the game I do not have any context or interaction with. I like to first note that I play my MMORPGs solo-style, meaning I usually do not interact with other players outside of the market. With that perspective in mind, these are the parts I am unable to talk about:
1. Community and Support
2. Player interaction
3. PVP
I have explained points 1 and 2 earlier, why I am unable to talk about them, but for PVP, the reason is simple. I do not play any PVP in any MMORPGs because I play fighting games on the side. No MMORPG PVP can be as good as fighting games, especially once gear comes into play. I do not even want to think about class balances for PVP because even in fighting games, there are never clear answers, and MMORPGs tend to change things very quickly. A fighting game can be nearly 30 years old, and you would think the meta would have stayed the same due to no patches/updates, but actually, it gets changed because of better player understanding of the characters, matchups, and the game engine itself.
I hope you find this useful, or at least entertaining to read.
