Our YouTuber Refaser explains to you how to increase friendship with various NPCs in Black Desert.
Friends cost a lot of energy
In Black Desert, there are numerous mechanics and systems that are not explained to players in detail. One of them is the friendship system with NPCs, with which you can unlock many additional contents that would otherwise be denied to you. But how exactly does friendship work? The YouTuber Refaser explains in his video what you need to pay attention to in order to become the favorite in every village soon.
To increase friendship with an NPC, you need to talk to them. That sounds quite simple at first, but you also need to be able to spark the interest of the respective person, meaning: You need to be knowledgeable about certain topics. Often, these are just other NPCs in the area that you must have spoken to once, but also other topics, such as certain monsters.
Once you have gathered enough knowledge, you can start the conversation mini-game (which costs you energy), where you arrange the topics in the desired position. Each topic has a certain chance to “spark interest”. Some also have combo effects that are only triggered if conditions are met, which are detailed in each case.
A conversation costs energy. Once you have completed a round of conversation, you can either end the conversation and collect the accumulated “friendship” or you can attempt another round to gather more friendship. You can start up to 2 additional rounds, so you can reach up to 3 rounds “in one conversation”.
This is how you should behave in conversations in Black Desert
It is important that you primarily try to fulfill the “goal” of the conversation! If you fail, the conversation has failed and you have wasted energy.
The goal of the conversation varies greatly. Sometimes you have to spark interest particularly often, while at other times, that should not happen, and the attempt should fail. Or you need to score a point, for example, to spark interest exactly twice. This is particularly tricky. Occasionally, there are no specific requirements, and you can simply gather friendship “freestyle”.
If you need to spark a lot of interest, you need many conversation topics with a high chance of “sparking interest.” Additionally, place the topics that your conversation partner is highly interested in before those that interest them less, as successes (the blue smileys) increase the chances. If you are supposed to fail in sparking interest (as many gray faces as possible), use topics overall with lower percentages.
In principle, the following applies:
- The percentage in sparking interest determines whether the topic interests your conversation partner and leads to a “favor gain” (smiley).
- The amount of favor gain then depends on the interest score of the topic. So it may be better to choose a topic with an 80% chance of sparking interest that gives 10-20 interest, than a 100% chance with 0 interest if you want more favor.
- For more details on what sparking knowledge and the favor level is about, check out the video above.
- If you spark interest with one topic, the chance of doing so with the next topic also increases, as your conversation partner is deeper into the conversation, so you should place “safe chances” at the beginning of the conversation.
In many cases, you can unlock new quests or special offers from merchants through friendship once you have reached a certain value.
You can find more news and articles about the game on our Black Desert topic page. For newcomers, our 10 beginner tips for Black Desert are also worth a look.
