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    Default Black Desert Online



    So the last two months of my time has been consumed by this.

    It has given me all the things from MMORPGs that I like, which no single MMORPG offering has given me since, well, since the WoW benchmark.

    I played quite a lot of Guild Wars 2, but the bland combat eventually drove me away.
    Tera had excellent combat, but the rest fell a little short.
    Elder Scrolls online and FFXIV I dabbled with, but both were lacking in some key area or other, and neither involved me.
    Wildstar was ok for a while but again it was the combat which was its downfall.
    Other recent MMORPGs have been too-instance oriented, and don't provide the cohesive sense of being in a world.

    Black Desert Online absolutely hits my sweetspot. It is more on the RPG side than the MMO side, more of an enormous sandbox than other MMOs.

    There are no raids, no instances, none of the traditional hardcore MMO elements. What there is instead is a huge world to explore and exploit. There isn't even any fast-travel option, meaning you have to travel to get anywhere, by foot, or donkey, or horseback or wagon. Or make yourself a boat and travel by water. Fish while you're at it. It's this aspect that I like the most; you have to take your time to get to the places you need to get to in order to do the next thing you need to do. And while you're travelling to one thing, you have the time to attend to other things that need attending to.

    Set up farms and go farming. Connect villages, towns and cities through exploration, then build a wagon and make some money by trading from town to town. Rent out houses in the towns and villages to build facilities for crafting. Crafting anything. Hire workers to do some of the crafting for you. Or send them off to farm, or mine, or log wood. Turn one of the houses into a residence, where you can cook stuff, or get into alchemy if that's your thang. Make wood, refine it, make furniture. Hire a maid to go collect things for you. Pets. Discover wild horses. Tame them. Train them. Breed them even. Build your empire. Expand and diversify.

    It's these so-called life-skills which make the game so involving. And the sense of progress is slow but steady, and really drives you onward.

    PC Gamer has a recent review which sums up this main element of the game nicely:
    It took me about 30 minutes to realize merely walking across Black Desert Online’s beautiful, sprawling world takes too damn long. There’s no fast travel, so I needed a mount. I hit up the local stable master and he gave me a donkey. It took me another 30 seconds to realize that, astoundingly, riding a donkey is even slower than walking. I had shit to do, so I needed a horse. But instead of giving the stable master another chance to disappoint me, I shook him down for carrots and rope and set out to tame my own steed.

    The next thing I knew, four hours had passed, I’d mapped out half the starting continent, and I had tamed more horses than my then-mediocre stable could even hold.

    This is what happens when you play Black Desert Online. You start out with a simple goal: “I want that thing,” you quite reasonably decide. It’s a great thing; who wouldn’t want it? You ask global chat and Google how to get that thing and the two inform you that you need to do this and that. Then before you even get to that, you wind up knee-deep in this, which could be any one of the game’s dozens of involved and interwoven skills and systems.

    Remember those carrots I got? They sucked too; the stringy things barely recovered any of my horse’s stamina. So I started farming my own special carrots. I also cooked up some sugar cubes so that I could better entice wild horses. To keep my rope supplies up, I knocked out a few quests for pocket change. I did all this just to get a horse. It’s a small example, but the thrill of learning and connecting mechanics and economies underscores what makes Black Desert such a compelling RPG.

    _____________


    The combat is also superb. Hits are meaty and feel like they do damage. The keyboard sequences are intuitive, the combos fluid, the results are satisfying. The mobs and bosses are challenging. It's also unusual in that there are no combat numbers. No 1k hits, or 10k crits. No 400 exp from quest completion or mob kills. You rely more on intuition and trial and error than number crunching, finding out what sequence of moves works, what doesn't. Wasn't sure at first but I've come to appreciate this approach. It's well-balanced.

    PvP is there but I've yet to experience it. There is PK which can occur, otherwise there are battlegrounds and Node Wars, which are primarily guilds fighting for territory from what I can gather.

    This is a Korean creation, so some of the character classes have an Oriental bent, such as the Musa, Maewha, Koinichi, Ninja, along with your more traditional MMO classes like Warrior, Ranger, Wizard etc.

    Each class brings great variety to combat, with no overlap between the types. Different specialties are there, like the tanks, damage dealers, crowd-controllers and AoE providers.

    ~

    I've not been so hooked on a game in a long-ass time.














    Last edited by Timbuk2; 08-30-2017 at 02:15 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
    It's actually the original French billion, which is bi-million, which is a million to the power of 2. We adopted the word, and then they changed it, presumably as revenge for Crecy and Agincourt, and then the treasonous Americans adopted the new French usage and spread it all over the world. And now we have to use it.

    And that's Why I'm Voting Leave.

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