The Korean MMORPG Black Desert is in a first Closed Beta here in the West. How is the first impression?
Black Desert and I started off on the wrong foot. Right when the beta went live, I thought: Let me play for half an hour, I’ve waited long enough.
The best cheap game of all time?
The character creation was pretty much as I had imagined: do I really want purple sideburns or an disproportionately thick right thigh? But in the first minutes, I was already struggling with Black Desert. I stumbled across two major “Urk” points in just 3 minutes.
On one hand, the quest giver that accompanies me is a black cloud with red eyes, who speaks to me in a Korean sing-song child voice, making my teeth hurt … and on the other hand, there is an “autoplay to the next quest” feature in Black Desert. My previous experience has conditioned me to associate this automatically with “cheap, lousy Asian MMOs”.
However, the graphics and sound in the game seemed high quality and really good from the start. So do I have the best cheap Asian MMO of all time in front of me?
The first half hour of Black Desert was deleted later
Well, with autoplay and my long-standing MMO routine of switching off my brain and slaughtering, I quickly completed the first quests and decimated the typical crap: I worked my way up from a beetle to a weasel, fox, and wolf!
I found the combat system pleasantly intuitive and fast. My first half hour of Black Desert ended with me waiting in a field with 400 other players to finally catch imps I needed for a quest: a typical bottleneck quest that was totally over-farmed.
So I logged out, preferring to serve the fans of a certain MMO shooter the first news of the day … they always shake when they don’t get their shot.
When I logged back in that evening, I was met with a surprise. My giant, my hero, had simply disappeared and could not be found even through intense calling and repeated “looking in the same place”: so I had to start all over again and have since had a little panic attack every time I log out.
Black Desert – A game to take your time
Over the weekend, I logged into Black Desert more often and encountered no problems, instead, the game showed itself from a very interesting side. In contrast to “Blade and Soul”, which you can immediately dive into, Black Desert requires you to play it “slower” and “more attentively” due to some peculiarities in gameplay mechanics. While in “Skyforge” I felt like I was in a place I know and understand after 20 minutes, in Black Desert, after 8 or 9 hours, I still don’t feel that way. It remains a foreign world that can surprise me with new gameplay mechanics and ideas.
It is a game that I currently trust a lot. Interesting experience again – the last time I felt this way was a year and a half ago with ArcheAge .
By “talking” with NPCs through a kind of mini-game, you can unlock new quests. It’s all about “Knowledge” of recipes, locations, enemies, secrets – you accumulate this knowledge by going somewhere, talking to people, or crafting something. The crafting system, which I could only glimpse, seems really interesting. And the fights so far are really “satisfying” as you feel the power of your character.
I particularly appreciate the “login screen” that provides you with information about NPCs you have met. Additionally, it gives a great and clear view of the area you are currently in. Plus, there’s great music – it really has something! And as I said … the combat system, especially against multiple opponents.
Overall, Black Desert seems foreign, interesting, and absolutely high-quality to me in the first days. So it’s not a “cheap game”, despite quest autoplay, but feels like a wholesome meal from the Far East. I’m already looking forward to spending significantly more time with the game at launch and exploring the gameplay mechanics.
How was your first encounter with Black Desert?
In this preview, we provided a detailed introduction to Black Desert – it is among our most promising MMORPGs for 2015 and 2016 – and is likely to be the third of the five that will actually appear here in the West.
