It was raining the other Sunday so for lack of any other indoor activity that I felt compelled to partake in, I purchased Black Desert Online on a whim. I have been hearing about this title on-and-off of the past month or so. Aside from screenshots, I didn’t actually know that much about it. Ultimately, it was both curiosity as well as the fact that it was only $30 with no monthly fee that pushed it over the edge of temptation.
BDO’s character creation is probably the most robust system out of any that I have seen in any recent MMO. That said, I really wish someone would make a character creator that is similar to Create-a-Sim from The Sims 4. I find that being able to click and drag on various facial features to move them, make them longer, etc is way easier than using slidebars.
As a sidenote, there is a distinct aesthetic that all Korean and Japanese MMO’s seem to have. I think it is that the characters look like 3Dified anime characters maybe? That is not to say that it is a bad thing, just something that I have noticed.
Combat is very fluid and action RPGish with a sufficient amount of ability combos. Though technically you could fight in a typical MMO keyboard binding manner, it is more fun to treat it like a 3rd party action game.
New game + fairly automatable (autopath to everything) = my new half watch Hulu and half play a game activity. That said, the fact that a number of things can be automated and minimized to the tray and that questing can be reduced to hitting ‘T’ to autorun to a giant glowing circle on the map makes me frown a bit and wonder if we are all not better off just ‘playing’ Progress Quest or something.
I don’t think that I am going to stick with BDO (or really any MMO) in the long run, but it is sufficiently interesting to hold my attention until Overwatch is released.