Black Desert Online is popular this week
Just came out – or rather was released for the public outside of Korea.
In this post I intend to cover some of the Basic Info for Black Desert Online. But these are some starting points.
- Korean MMO
- Does have a pay store – but only for cosmetic items, no weapons or spiffy armor.
- No Subscription Fee – Buy the game, then play for free.
- Many (English) voiced NPC’s and Quest Givers, but the subtitles don’t always match up.
- You don’t need uber-leet computer hardware to run the game.
Black Desert Online – Getting started
Choose a class. So far the Black Desert Online devs have not released all of the character classes and choices that are going to be available “eventually”. Further limiting factor here is that your Class determines your character sex & age. The warrior is a 30-year-old Male, the Ranger is a 24-year-old Woman. Wizard is an old man but Witch is a young lady. All of these are human. So no Elfish Dwarf Troll things. Sorry guys, you have to be human. The Barbarian seems to be a minor exception. Still human but a bit tall. “Giant” is too strong a term, just big and beefy.
The NPC’s are full of racial variety up to a point. Every little girl in town has mouse ears, every single one. The goblins are the slave race. Sure you can fight them from time to time, but countless can be found in town eeking out a meager slave living. Oh please don’t beat me! There is also a weasel race, shrewd businessmen all. How many of these different species/races will become playable in the future has not been determined.
The Character Creator
Lets face it, it’s pretty! If you want you can spend several days sculpting just how your character looks down to some pretty exact detail.
Michael Jackson
Emma Watson?
Pretty Girl 1
Pretty Girl 2
And the FUGLY one…
When you finally finish crafting your masterpiece of a face, you start off the game with a cut scene that explains your back story somewhat. Then you wake up and there’s a black dot of a demon taunting and ordering you around. This is an “OK” game mechanic for introducing new players to Black Desert Online’s system of things like moving around and finding the first quest giver, but after a few levels and hours you’ll get tired of his insistent badgering.
After that, one of the first differences you’ll notice in BDO is that moving around has been given extra options. Instead of just WASD and you can also Parkour over rocks, fences and up onto roof tops. It’s really fun and can lead to some nifty pathing around the world
If you’re feeling lazy though you can just hit “T” and your character will mindlessly follow the quest arrow while you go afk for a drink. In fact that’s a normal part of Black Desert Online – they expect you to play in AFK (away from keyboard) mode often. The push seems to be to have you log out as infrequently as possible.
In other games such as WoW, you were encouraged and rewarded to Log Out, preferably in a town or Inn so you’d earn extra “Rested XP”. In Black Desert one of the first AFK things you can do is fish. Grab a fishing pole, hit the beach, start fishing, minimize the game and go watch a movie.
Overall, it’s been fun playing Black Desert Online and I look forward to continuing. I’ll be writing more about this but didn’t want to make this first post overlong.