Ahh, MMOs. The bane of all video games for some, and the holy grail for others. I’d like to think I fall somewhere in between that spectrum of opinion, landing somewhere along the lines of “they’re alright.” There really has only been one MMO that I have put a decent amount of time into, and that’s Guild Wars 2. A game I put over 400 hours into over the course of three years, and enjoyed that time quite a bit.

So, what is Black Desert Online?

BDO is a sandbox MMO created by Korean developer Pearl Abyss. It has become well known for it’s incredible character creator, fun and satisfying combat, life-skill system, and it’s seamless open world containing no loading zones. It is also regarded as a prime example of Korean MMO design due to the gratuitous amount of grinding required to level up. Due to this design many people look down on BDO as just another Korean time-sink, and they’re not completely wrong to think so.

I can hear you asking the obvious question: “Why and how did you put in almost 500 hours into what quite a few people consider a not great game in such a short amount of time?!” Well, I aim to answer that question to the best of my ability in this blog post.

So how did this semi-addiction start? Well, it began when Black Desert Online showed up on Steam at the low, low price of $9.99, reminding me that the game had even existed. Of course I had seen the famous Monster Factory and the Giant Bomb quick look, but the game had never piqued my interest until it came out on Steam. After a few days, I decided to check out the game’s 7 day free trial...

First Impressions

The first thing you do is create your character, and we all know the glories that can come out this ridiculous thing so I won’t delve into it, other than to say that there are 11 unique classes to choose from now (compared to the 7 classes at launch). Also, the classes are gender locked with the exception of 3 classes that have male/female counterparts. After creating your character and sitting through (or skipping) a horribly rendered cutscene explaining the world, you are dumped into the game’s tutorial area. This is where most people will turn the game off and walk away.

You may have seen some screenshots of this game and thought, “Wow this game looks great!” And you’re right! The game looks fantastic...as a still image. In motion, however, the game begins to vomit convulsively all over the place. The render distance for objects, characters, and most noticeably grass and trees is abysmal. I would estimate pop in distances of about 30 meters, that’s right ladies and gentleman. 30 meters. You will constantly see trees, players, npcs, and enemies materialize right in front of you, and no amount of power in your PC build will make this any better. I run the game at the highest possible settings and still have ridiculous pop in. Not only is the render distance completely off the rails, the game is incredibly poorly optimized. The game will drop frames when entering cities, no matter what video card you are using and no matter how strong your CPU is. That being said, the game is very pretty when you are standing stock still and taking a stunning screenshot.

If, by force of pure will, get past the rendering issues you will be treated to what many say is the main draw of the game:

The Combat

This is where I fell in love with BDO. The combat is incredibly fluid and fun, and can require a lot of skill later on. This isn’t a traditional MMO wherein you target a creature, and hit number keys to cast abilities after their cooldowns. In BDO you have to aim, much like in a third person shooter, and you actively dodge and block enemy attacks. Later on when fighting high level enemies/bosses learning the enemy’s movements is key to dodging their attacks and surviving tough encounters. There is no such thing as single target abilities in this game, which allows you to plow directly into groups of enemies and easily land combos that hit every one of them. The combo system is a ton of fun, and each class has a different feel to them. Some classes are extremely mobile and can dodge and dash their way around enemies with ease. These are the classes that I am having the most fun with (granted I really have only played two classes.) Overall, the combat is fun and engaging, and feels like a real action game, not an MMO.

One other thing I should mention is that BDO is open PVP after level 50. Players can attack you even if you haven’t opted into PVP when you are in combat zones. I say this, but I have yet to see a single instance of players attacking each other in the wild, though I haven’t engaged in guild wars and stuff. There is a karma system that penalizes PKers, though I don’t know too much about it.

Of course, when one thinks combat in an MMO the next few thoughts are…

Gear, Loot, and Leveling

Allow me to start with the leveling system. First of all, there is no level cap. That’s right, no level cap, you can infinite gain experience and gain levels. Currently what is known as a soft cap is level 56, which can be achieved fairly easily. After 56, gaining levels is an extreme grind and very difficult, the amount of experience one would need to gain to go from level 60 to 61 is absurd and can take literal months. As of writing the current highest level is 62 or 63 I believe. That being said, the leveling process from 1-56 is incredible fun and I highly recommend just enjoying the combat.

Once you hit 56 you will begin to realize that you need really good gear to stand a chance against at-level and higher enemies. If I were to divide up how important certain aspects of your character are in terms of end game combat viability it would be like this: 70% gear, 20% skill, 10% abilities. And that’s a huge bummer. The reason it’s a bummer is because if you can’t get your hands on what are considered must have pieces of gear and upgrade them enough to raise your stats, then you won’t be able to handle end game enemies. There isn’t a lot of loot variety, and this leads to certain pieces of gear being the must-haves that you need to get in order to stand a chance at the end game. If you want these items then you need to prepare to do a lot of grinding in the hopes of getting a drop, or making enough money to buy them off of the player marketplace at exorbitant prices. Once you get the gear, you then need to upgrade the gear. I won’t go into this process, but suffice it to say that it is incredibly difficult and just means more grind. That’s not to say it isn’t rewarding however, I sure have enjoyed getting my gear up to snuff.

But what else is there to do outside of combat? Plenty.

The Node System and Life Skills

Along your adventures in BDO you will come across towns and cities. These towns and cities have what are called nodes on the map, which you can invest a resource called contribution points into to gain certain benefits. You can connect nodes on the map to connect trade routes between cities and send workers to gather materials for you. The node system is complex and I won’t go deep into it here, but I will say that it is a unique system and fun to manage, it is like a mini management sim. You can see in the map to here golden lines extending from node to node. Those are the nodes that I have connected together and can trade between.

You’ve seen me reference life skills, a silly term the game uses to define the gathering and fishing type activities you can do when playing. There are 10 life skills to level up in, each of which can produce many different materials to use in crafting, and can also make you a good amount of money. I’ll give a list here with a quick explanation of each skill:

• Gathering: cut down trees, gather herbs etc. for crafting/alchemy
• Processing: combing materials together for crafting/alchemy
• Cooking: cooking food that give buffs for a variety of things
• Alchemy: create potions/items that give more buffs
• Training: riding a horse will raise this and allow you to train your horses more effectively
• Fishing: catch fish to either trade/process/cook
• Hunting: can hunt certain creatures for materials
• Trading: uses trade routes to trade items between cities to gain a profit
• Farming: I haven’t messed with this one, but it seems self explanatory
• Sailing: ~50% of the map is open ocean, and can be sailed across to reach islands and fish for more lucrative fish

Each skill can be leveled up a lot, and is an extreme grind at high levels. I have put a lot of time into fishing, and am nowhere near the highest level. Another interesting feature here is the concept of auto-fishing. A player can begin fishing and walk away from the computer and the game will automatically do the fishing mini-game for you while you are AFK. If you have enough durability on your fishing rod(s) you can feasibly fish for hours at a time. I personally have let the game run overnight many many times to fish for me, and when I come back I will have a bunch of fish to sell to a town far away for a distance bonus. I would almost liken the life skill system here to the skills in Runescape, which is a strange thing to say, but I think pretty accurate.

A Fun Grind Fest

After 450 hours of Black Desert Online, I feel confident in saying that I will keep playing for a while to come, and I would recommend those that are curious to check out the free trial, if only just for the combat. I’ve had a great time with this game, and I hope more people from the GB community jump in. If you do decide to get into it, be sure to check out some guides or ask me some questions, because the game is very bad about explaining it’s mechanics.

Thanks for reading, and be sure to turn off the RP chat channel.

P.S. shoot me a message if you are playing, I would love to set up a clan for duders, and would even set up a discord for us if there is a desire.

Family Name: Evil_Meats

Character Name: BadJimmy

Sounds pretty neat! What sort of subscription fee are we talking about? Also, this might sound weird, but how unified is the world? Is a lot of stuff phased out, or do all players generally coexist on each server? Early WoW didn't use phasing at all, so any two players on the same server were bound to see each other, but as it progressed they used phasing more and more to the point where it didn't really feel like you were in the same world as all the people you met. Where does BDO land on that spectrum?

So you've been playing an average of 18+ hours a day for almost a month? Damn.

@boniti: There is no subscription fee, they do have a real money shop to buy a bunch of quality of life things. I forgot to mention the real money shop in my post unfortunately, it deserves mentioning because it's pretty bad in terms of pricing and the things that you can buy that should just be free. That's an interesting question, and there isn't any phasing, mostly because the quests are so lack-luster and don't change the world in any way. In other words, you get to see a lot of players running around all the time. Also, I was just attacked by another player for the first time not 30 minutes ago. So it does actually happen.

This game has an AFK system where it will run minimized in your system tray while your character auto-fishes and things like that.

Ah ok, I see now where he says he left the game running overnight many times.

If I remember correctly from the Monster Factory video, the UI seemed very cluttered. Can you edit the layout of your UI, did they make it more organized or is it still the same?

@whatshisface: You can edit the UI, move it around or disable certain UI elements and stuff. Here's what the default UI looks like, of course cooldowns and such appear near the middle of the screen in combat.

I tried the seven day trial and liked it enough to buy it. But I'll need help to figure stuff like the node system out for sure.

I've always wanted to get into this game. Have you tried playing it with a controller?

I might actually be down for this. I was pretty hyped about Tera Online since it was more than the usual 'just stand there and queue up commands' type of MMO, but this brings things a bit closer to a character action game, and I'm sure that there are some people in the game cosplaying as Dante and Bayonetta.

-Edit-
Holy shit! Social Links! Not what I was expecting in an MMO!

The combat sounds a bit like Wildstar which I loved for a while. Then it became punishingly difficult, at least for me, and still is plagued by some of the things that I really dislike about MMOs. FF XIV is one of the only MMOs to really fix a lot of those issues which I think is why I still find it fun. It also helps that they actually have a better story than some of the more recent FF games.

Anyway, not trying to turn this into a FF XIV platform...

@sarnecki: Shoot me a friend request in game and I'll be happy to help you out!

@dafdiego777 I have tried to use a controller, but I quickly dropped it. The game does support it, and I think you could get used to it.

That was a good read, like you (and many others I suspect) I bought it cheap on Steam and tried it for an hour or two. The combat seemed neat but boy it's one hell of a rough looking game in motion, I found some of that difficult to get over especially coming from FFXIV which as such strong art design and visuals.

I was attracted by the structure of BDO, I wish games were more open to how you live and interact in the world. For example my first MMO was Star Wars Galaxies and I don't think I ever actually really leveled up my character and instead lived in a player run city, harvesting and earning cash... had a blast doing that.

Maybe I should give it another blast and be a little more forgiving for its odd technical faults.

This was an entertaining and informative read. Yet another game I wish I had a (competent) PC to play on. I need SOMETHING to grind on while I watch The Mentalist.

@poobumbutt: I'm waiting for the PS4 port they announced recently. I do really wanna try it out, but I do not have the pc for it either.

@redhotchilimist: See now this is why I shouldn't do what I did and not check the BDO site page. I just assumed that like most games that "seem like" they're PC games, there would be no console version, now or ever. Thanks for the heads up.

Always be vigilant, people!

Great post duder! I've been meaning to check this out...

I would have passed by this game if I hadn't seen this post. Thanks a lot for the write up.

Yeah my roommate has put a bunch of hours into, I myself have dumped about 80 or so hours into as well after seeing him play some of it. The economy stuff is way more engrossing than I originally thought and as your write up clearly details, the combat is simply fun. It can be challenging but more often than not just mixing and matching a characters abilities (I'm playing a Musa) is fun to do. And with such a variety of tasks to do at all times it's a very easy game to play and grind out while you have a show on the other monitor or something to that effect.

there was just too much going on in this game for me, maybe i will try it again down the road but the only thing i liked was the combat.

Can a person solo the game without any help from others if they grind a bit more? Or, is there content the simply MUST be played with others?

Thanks for the write-up. For some reason, I've just been itching for an MMORPG recently… so the success this game is currently seeing on Steam hasn’t escaped me. I mean, it’s a buy to play MMORPG that’s in the top 30 games currently. That kind of blows my mind.

I tried the two other heavy hitters, FF14 and Elder Scrolls, but they did nothing for me. I'm currently messing around with TERA, which I'm having fun with. The main problem I’m having with TERA, however, is that the combat roll (I play as a Slayer) is a cooldown skill.

I’m kind of looking for something more… Dark Souls-y? If that makes sense. And from what you said, it sounds like BDO is at least a bit more active in that sense. Which class would you recommend out of the two you tried? I’m looking for something with a lot of mobility, fluid movement, and something that requires a lot of dodging and dashing.

I mainly solo and do PVE stuff, so I’m a bit worried about the PVP focus this game seems to have, but the life skill stuff sounds kind of interesting. I tend to enjoy the ambiance of just having people around, and prefer social activities that don’t involve raiding/dungeons. Also, does the translation seem fine? I always feel like I'm the only one who reads quest text.

@monkeyking1969: I've played 528 hours now and I haven't experienced any content that REQUIRED a party. I haven't gotten past level 56, and as I understand it there is content at level 58+ that would require a party. Consider that getting to level 58 would take a VERY long time.

@xymox In terms of a mobile class choice I understand that the Musa/Maehwa and Ninja/Kunoichi classes are the most mobile. My main is a Dark Knight, and I have really enjoyed the mobility of that class. It has plenty of dashing and dodging. As I mentioned in the post I never saw people actively pvp/attack me so you can definitely just solo pve and have a good time. The devs also put out a patch recently that more heavily penalized player killers, so that has been preventing more pvping in the open world. The translation seems okay, but the quest text itself is bad and not worth reading from what I did read, I eventually just skipped past all the text. There was one instance of a quest objective literally called "untranslated" and it made it nigh on impossible to find out what to do, so take that for what it's worth.

Sorry I know this may seem like an odd question, but stay with me it's just how I operate with MMO.

I kinda play these games to levle up, put on better gear and be like "huh sick pauldrons". When I tried BDO around the NA launch, the gear went into separate slots and the appearance of your character was based on an "outfit". Has this changed to a more standard MMO where your gear is represented on your body or has it stayed the same? It might seem vain, but that was a huge aspect of MMO to me.

I'd love to hop in and play the game, but with a lack of bandwidth throttling with the BDO launcher I have to be pretty strategic with when I download it. If they haven't changed the outfit thing, I won't bother going through the trouble of downloading it again

@themaniacsgnome: So gear is represented on your character with unique appearances, but there is still the option to equip the "outfit" appearance items which can be purchased for real monies. I will say though that the appearance of regular gear/loot isn't necessarily worth seeking out specific sets of equipment. The loot variety is so slim that you will never be able to describe your gear as "sick" in any form. If you're not going to purchase the cosmetic outfit options and want to look radical then BDO isn't going to be worth your time.

@meatsofevil: I don't mind if the gear isn't like WoW or Lineage 2, you don't need to have volcanoes on your shoulders to be "sick". I'll definitely browse some boards and watch some youtube videos to see the extent of it.

I appreciate your response and time. Thank you.

Lin-Manuel Miranda on Twitter responded, "Tip to toe, this is a Bart."

I'm 46 hours into this game and really liking it, what i don't like however is how every single system is convoluted and completely unexplained by the game, i can't count how many times i've typed "Black Desert Online" into Google followed by a question.
Currently i'm trying to add a Waterway to my farming fence, which requires a material obtained from a Refinery, i've obtained a Refinery but have no idea what to do next, i've got a Worker but i have no idea if i'm using him and where he's working, i know once i have the materials i'll need a Crafting Workshop or something to create the Waterway... i think... i have no idea where or what that is... it's such a mess. I also have a food processing building or something, i can't currently check what it's called because i'm suffering from the Error Code 5 issue, no idea how that building works either, haven't done anything with nodes... i have however milked a cow.
It's a great podcast or video watching game, there's a good amount of travelling and the auto run system is great, just wish i knew what the f*** i was doing.