I bought Black Desert Online at the time when they were doing a sale on steam like they always do nowadays for the standard edition, at this time I didn't have the money to keep up with the WOW subscription and I tried to play GW2 Many times but I failed to enjoy it outside of the two expansions that I played later and the art style wasn't appealing to me, so I saw BDO with dirt-cheap price and mixed reviews so I gave it a chance and by chance I mean my life for 2 months.
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| BDO UI |
the game has a great first impression, it is cheap and let you have a great character creation tool to customize your character how you like, but the problem is that classes are not gender-free, you see some classes have a male or female equivalent to them with some different set of skills, and some others don't have two variations at all like Dark knight for example, also the character creation tool is limited to some presets, for example the berserker look more of an humanoid orc than a human and there isn't many options to make him look dandy, and you can't choose whatever name to represent you as some MMORPGs, as when someone picks up a name it is no longer available to others, a game like overwatch for example doesn't have this problem because Blizzard add invisible numbering system to differentiate people with the same name from each other.
when you log in to the game you get introduced with a basic tutorial that teaches how to fight, do some combos and interact and do some quests with NPCs, and that is another good selling point to the game as combat is action-based, not tab-targeting system, it is fluid and easy to learn, you can still use tab-targeting but the damage will be decreased and you can also allow click to move feature from settings, but they are not efficient for such game.
the graphics in the game are gorgeous, and the devs released a new update that increased the details and effects you can customize how you want and the game has a wealth of customization options for almost everything in it, but that came with a sacrifice as you will see a lot of pop-in why you are riding your horse to new places, and depending on your gear this will be more or less of a problem, but still kinda annoying.
the real problem with BDO starts with reaching level 56, it is the level where you get your new weapon and set of skills that you can learn and level up, grinding mobs at this level become harder and with each level it gets way more harder than the past one, and you start to see the glaring issues of this game.
the game always praise that it is a sandbox MMORPG but when you try the different activities in it you see how much tedious and repetitive it is, devs really missed the point why people play video games for (it is to have fun BTW), and to top it off they are so time-consuming, people who do those activities efficiently keep their pcs open so their characters keep automatically doing those activities, so you are losing money every month on electricity bills if you are doing it correctly.
want to travel to place far from where you are, guess what ?!, you can't fast travel, you will have to go to the stable and get your horse and ride it to that place, you can auto path but that is still time you are not spending playing the game, also horses in this game like armor and weapons have tiers so if you have a poor tier 1 horse you are going to spend along time riding that horse.
after you reach level 56 it became like a marathon to enhance your gear, there aren't many gear pieces in the game, but each piece can be upgraded many times to become stronger, and as you guessed the upgrades rely in higher enhancements on low chances of success and if the enhancement failed your degrade and it becomes slightly harder for you to enhance it, it is a complicated process and it is not worth your time at all.
as any annoying MMORPG out there Black desert online sell convenience for real money, they give you limited amount of character slots, do you want to try all classes ?. well pay us money, do you want more inventory slots ?. pay us money, do you want more weight so you can carry decent amount of items while farming ?. pay us money, do you want auto-loot pet ?, pay us money, it is an endless cycle of frustration and cash grabbing, on top of that this the game has "optional" subscription that gives you exp bonus, a bunch of inventory slots, weights, and some other features.
MMORPGs in my opinion are less of video games and more of drugs, and Black Desert Oline is one of the worst drugs I have been addicted to, I uninstalled the game recently and I'm having more fun nowdays with single-player games like yakuza zero, dragon's dogma and some arcade multiplayer games that actually respect my free time.
