Okay, it's been three days since I bought Black Desert Online and I've logged 72 hours, so... uh, you can probably guess that I'm recommending it.
Were I to try to summarize the whole, it would be this: I bought it for the PvP, but the life skills and commerce sold me on it.
I'll preface this by noting that I'm one of those people who abhors trading and crafting in MMOs, and in most SP RPGs. I think it's fucking awful, and is usually a massive money-sink doubling as a huge barrier between players and endgame content. The way most MMOs go, you have the choice between crafting everything yourself so that the grandchild who inherits your account will be able to gear up, or dumping massive amounts of currency into modestly reducing the time and tedium (usually by buying mats in bulk and following optimized leveling guides). Early crafting isn't worthwhile, lategame crafting requires massive amounts of time to be more than marginally profitable, usually.
I love how BDO completely does an end-run around that. It costs pocket change to level, tedium has been minimized (usually by designing boring activities so that they can be easily AFKed), and you make damn good profit from beginning to endgame. You can literally set up a wheat farm and start churning out beer for massive gains in your first couple hours, or make millions AFK fishing with the starter rod. And the same applies to everything, it's trivial to make money, and the places you'd expect to see money-sinks don't have them (restoring horses, buying consumables, &c.).
I feel much better about the RNG upgrade system now that I know that that is basically the money-sink and a very gentle, sloping barrier between midgame and endgame. Which can be circumvented as well, provided someone sells what you want.
Now, I also usually hate crafting and trading because they're dull and repetitive. But this single time, the way BDO's commercial empire-building, life skills, and side-quests/exploration with meaningful rewards that you want at any level, they've beaten that. For some reason I'm finding myself absolutely loving that side of stuff. Right now I'm planning on traveling west to set up a shipyard and supply chain for it so that I can get fishing boats going before I hit 45. Got my Balenos to +3, my Silver-Embroidered fishy clothes to +1 (and burned god knows how many shooting for +2). Got my Yuria Crimson Flame to +9, my Steel Dagger to +7, a full set of Bares PRI accessories 'cause I'm poor, a set of Grunil's from +10 on the chest to +5 on the gloves/feet, all with blue bonus stats. I've got most of the gems I want for it in storage, waiting until I'm past the early PvP vulnerability hump. I'm just shy of level 42 and carefully avoiding combat. In maybe 15-20 hours of active play and a bunch more AFKing, I made enough to totally set myself up with the gear I plan to carry until I can start replacing bits with boss loot &c., and I was literally just wandering around doing random shit, not hardcore farming.
I did that in three days (admittedly on Steam double-exp channels), it felt fucking fantastic, and not once did I ever start to get bored. They've done a marvelous job of incentivizing variation and avoidance of active grinding, it's legitimately more efficient to do rotations for an hour, go do some energy-intensive skilling or exploring, AFK fish/grind for an hour or two with a browser window open, then pop back over and do something else entirely. The little things, like being able to browse and use all the menus while AFK crafting, the lack of fast travel, needing to go to nodes to open them and hire workers, but not to remove your CP or deploy workers you already have. The team that designed this game are spot fucking on for knowing how to keep people involved and interested. PvP sounds like it has a few problems (mostly relating to assholes running into your rotation, shouting "my farm", and trying to kill you without even asking to group), but still seems better implemented than most MMOs, particularly with the nature of risk--enough to make you wary about getting killed, not enough to make you hide in safe zones forever. Not flawless, there are periodic autopath SNAFUs and stuff, but the core gameplay is big, fun, and I haven't even touched PvP, post-55, or guild play yet.
If you have any affection for MMOs, fucking try it. It's five bucks.
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Topic: SALES Thread (Read 1480765 times)