In the past year I've played: Star Wars The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and am currently playing Black Desert Online. No surprise, today's post is going to focus on BDO!
To start off, BDO is free to play. You aren't penalized that greatly for not having their version of a subscription (which can be bought for real money by players, then sold on the broker/auction house system to other players for in-game currency. It means that those on a budget can play for free with a subscription, and those who have extra cash on hand can earn in-game money and help someone else out at the same time!), and the game itself is only $9.99 (on sale on Steam for $4.99 right now!). Most MMOs retail for anywhere between $20 and $60, and penalize you heavily (or don't allow you to play at all) if you don't have a subscription. Subscriptions typically run $15. Not bad if you consider the cost of an average movie theater visit is in the realm of $18 these days, and that's for 2 hours of entertainment, not 30 days of entertainment. Still, it's nice to not have that $15 a month charge.
So that was a pro. Let's go with a con next.
BDO was produced in South Korea. That isn't the con. Nor is the con the fact that everything had to be translated to English for the English version of the game (duh!). No, the con is that a) there's a ton of Engrish in the game thanks to poor editing on the part of the English-speaking staff, and b) it feels like they plugged the Korean into Google Translate, then dumped it directly into the game. I'm sure they did edit the translated text, but it sure doesn't feel like it. That wouldn't be more than giggleworthy for the voiceovers, but the problem is that they did this with quests, too. So when you're trying to follow the story of the game, it feels like the story is fine. However, the method of telling it is abysmal. I've taken to completely skipping reading the quest text because it's so painful.
Pro time!
The combat system is one I've only seen in a few other games, where you use button combinations to fire off moves, instead of using the traditional "hotbutton" system where you hit a number on your keyboard and a move goes off. It lends to combat that feels more fluid to me. Your hands dance over your keyboard, instead of the repetitive 1-3-2-4-1-6-9-3 of other games. It does mean there's a bit of a learning curve, but the game makes it relatively easy and painless.
Another pro in my mind is that the game is very much a sandbox. You pick what you want to do, and then you do it. There's combat, of course. You can earn money via killing. Or trading! Not on the broker/auction house like you may be thinking (though that's an option). There is literally a "trading" skill in the game, where you transport goods from one town to another. The further you transport them from your starting destination, the higher your money bonus. Additionally, you can pick random things to transport, or you can transport exactly what a city is looking for (which of course gives a better payout as well).
With that said, I wasn't entirely right when I said that you can earn money via the broker/auction house. There is no player-to-player trading in this game, to prevent gold selling. In that sense, it's very much a single player game. Items you find, you can put up on the broker/auction house (the Marketplace, in BDO). But you can't save the awesome item you have, and give it to your friend. Your friend will have to save up enough money to buy it off the Marketplace themselves.
Still, you can play the market and make good money off of that, right? Buy low, sell high? Nope. In BDO, the game itself controls market fluctuation. I'm not certain how the algorithm works, but the end result is that you lose a little money on every market transaction if you buy/sell the same item. Items are given a max and min that they can be posted at, and then you are allowed to choose where within those limits you'd like to post your item. The max and min do change based on the number of items up and the current price range that players have assigned the items, but the change is relatively slow compared to what it would be if the economy were entirely player driven.
It leads to a very stable economy without much inflation (from what I've seen), but it does mean that you have to actively do things in order to make money.
Well... sort of. Koreans don't have a problem with AFK (away from keyboard) gaming like most Western countries seem to. Unattended gaming doesn't seem to have the stigma it does in the US. Or it could be just BDO, I don't know. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing. Either way, you can do several activities without being at your keyboard. All of them take some sort of preparation, and have ways that prevent you from doing it indefinitely, but unattended activities for periods of time is actively encouraged by how the game is set up. Combat is definitely an at-keyboard part of the game. But auto-pathing combined with auto-running is a thing (yay for being able to grab a drink while running to the next quest!). Auto fishing is a thing--though fishing poles have durability that goes down with every fish you catch, so you only have a set number of fish you can catch before you stop. And there's no way to auto-switch a pole. Plus you can only catch as many fish as you have inventory slots for! Auto horse leveling--YES you have horses that you can breed and level!--is a thing. So is auto-traveling for trading (but not the trading itself. You have to actively be involved to converse with NPCs).
I can't cover all of the game in a single post, because there's so very much to the game. House decorating, exploring, questing, PvPing (that's a big thing. Once you're past a certain level, you're auto-flagged and can be killed by other people), horse taming/breeding, crafting empires (you don't really do much crafting yourself. You hire NPCs to do it for you), trading empires... the list goes on. I'm debating going through and breaking up the game into bits, talking about what I've learned in my month (almost!) of playing, but that's for a later date. Right now, the next post will be on the massive adventure Gil and I took today! On a ship!
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