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The world in Black Desert Online is beautifully designed
2016-04-12 15:11:49
Black Desert is a sandbox-style MMORPG that offers a great deal for players to do. Explore a large world without ever seeing a loading screen. Engage in action packed combat, where skill is king. Become one of the lucky landowners in a world where housing is open, and limited. Fight others in epic sieges, and become a legend. If you are looking for a structured experience as you get in the upper levels and finish the main quests, you will be disappointed. If you are looking for a sandbox experience where you can choose whatever you want to do, you are in luck.
The game has an interesting mix of features that make it both more difficult and easier than some MMOs you may be familiar with. For example, the game allows you to select a quest and then have your character automatically run there. Even though you still have to watch your character jog to their quest, it lets you soak in more of the gorgeous scenery instead of worrying if you’re going in the right direction.
In recent Western RPGs, we’ve come sort of expect class-less characters that can be developed in any direction and with whatever combination of skills we want to use, whether or not those builds are ultimately effective. Black Desert Online sticks to a traditional class/gender/race character development model. Want to be a melee fighter with sword and shield? You will be a human male. Want to be a dual-wielding, fast attack ninja? You will need to be a female. Only six classes were available in the beta, but it may be that the final release includes more, with options for all classes to be open to both genders.
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Of course, it's an MMO trailer so exactly how much of this you will be doing - and after how many days of in-game time - is up for debate, but it's still cool. I want to actually investigate these things now, rather than being bored by them, and it looks beautiful to boot. Also: massive dragon. Always a bonus. Even more than characters, the world is beautifully designed. Not only it’s fully open and enormous, with graphics that create stunning vistas, but it also makes sense, especially in the distribution of elevation and in the design of cities.
Instead of standing in place and pressing the number keys as you wait for your enemy’s health to go down (a la Old Republic), the combat is fluid, skill based, and diverse in the way each fight plays out. The solutions I’ve found are twofold - either make fighting the enemies more dynamic and involved (such as Tera attempted to do, to the detriment of everything else), or give a lot of other things to do (Guild Wars 2, where you have a wide variety of actions you can perform as well as combat). Black Desert Online seems to do both, but takes it to an extreme that we haven’t seen since the earliest days of MMOs.
But all of this leaves out the most compelling aspect of BDO: the depth of the sandbox aspect. As I wrote at the start, this caught me off guard, since I walked into the game expecting it to be a very pretty but ultimately ‘samey’ MMO experience. In reality, there’s a lot going on here - and one almost gets the impression that the devs are going for a kind of ‘EVE-Online but in a fantasy setting’ experience. “Like Archeage, but with even more to it:” also comes to mind. BDO allows players to purchase and furnish houses, hire workers to gather resources, engage in resource trade, and more.
Black Desert Online is certainly one of the most unique fantasy-themed MMOs out there right now, and it offers a beautiful world that's also generally believable and enjoyable. Even with shortcomings like grindy combat and a weak endgame, it still manages to deliver many dozens of hours of fun.
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